PSYC 81.04 Neural Basis of Human Imagination
The capacities that set humans apart in kind, not just in degree, from all other known animals include, in part, capacities and propensities for art, music, analogical reasoning, abstract thought, creativity, the spontaneous generation and use of symbols, the ability to reason abstractly about others and about events, as well as the ability to manipulate symbols recursively and syntactically. This course will explore the hypothesis that all these modes of human behavior and cognition share a common root cause in our brains. We will focus in particular on the human capacity to imagine. We can, for example, construct a representation of a thing, say an airplane, or an event, say a planned party, and then go about making real that which we imagined. How is this capacity to imagine and creatively plan realized in the brain? Where did it first appear in the human lineage? What is the relationship of imagining to other important capacities, such as attention, volition, consciousness, planning and executive control? The goal of this course is to try to answer such questions by reading empirical and theoretical papers and chapters that try to account for what it is that makes the human mind human, by looking at distinctive aspects of processing in the human brain.
Instructor
Tse
Prerequisite
One of the following:
PSYC 6,
PSYC 21,
PSYC 28; and instructor permission through the department website.