Behavioral Art

Making art has always been 'costly' (money, time, political threats, survival fitness, ...). So why do we bother? It's all part of what prevents human brains (as opposed to those of animals and computers) from being terribly maladaptive.

The key lies in (Piaget's) constructivism. While we might intuit that meaning is conveyed via a medium/media, how then is art (e.g., the Mona Lisa) distinguished from artifact (e.g., a light bulb)? The book reconsiders the notions of 'intelligence' and 'communication' from a multidisciplinary array of discourses, ultimately proposing a essential role for art, within human cognition.

In contrast to orthodox perspectives culled from any privileged, isolated field, the discussion herein is the result of multidisciplinary research into genetics (Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins), cognitive science (Daniel Dennett, Annette Karmiloff-Smith), child development (Jean Piaget, Howard Gardner), computers (Alan Turing, Zenon Pylyshyn), sociology (Stanley Milgram, Joseph Campbell), ethology (Niko Tinbergen, Sara Shettleworth), neurology (Vernon Mountcastle, Joseph LeDoux), psycholinguistics (George Lakoff, Terrence Deacon), and innovative ideas about the function of language (Noam Chomsky, William Burroughs).

Note: no particular expertise by readers is assumed for any given field.