Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520331075)

"A stimulating history of how the imagination interacted with its sibling psychological faculties--emotion, perception and reason--to shape the history of human mental life."--The Wall Street Journal

To imagine--to see what is not there--is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds.

Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Felipe Fern疣dez-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps--from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fern疣dez-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Unearthing historical evidence, he begins by reconstructing the thoughts of our Paleolithic ancestors to reveal the subtlety and profundity of the thinking of early humans. A masterful paean to the human imagination from a wonderfully elegant thinker, Out of Our Minds shows that bad ideas are often more influential than good ones; that the oldest recoverable thoughts include some of the best; that ideas of Western origin often issued from exchanges with the wider world; and that the pace of innovative thinking is under threat.

Author: Felipe Fern疣dez-Armesto
ISBN-10: 0520331079
ISBN-13: 9780520331075
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 07/02/2019
Pages: 480
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.80lbs
Size: 9.60h x 6.50w x 1.40d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2019