Imagination and the Meaningful Brain

eBook by Modell, Arnold H.

Publication: Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2003

Metaphor is the great human revolution, at least on a par with the invention of the wheel. . . . Metaphor is a weapon in the hand-to-hand struggle with reality.

Yehuda Amichai

The ultimate goal of neurobiology is to discover how the mind works. When meaning is constructed, a transformation takes place in the brain that is experienced by the mind. A crucial problem for neuroscience is to explain how “matter becomes imagination.”1 The development of a biology of meaning is therefore intrinsically multidisciplined and requires,
as I shall try demonstrate throughout this book, an epistemic pluralism. The investigation of meaning requires an interdisciplinary effort that includes the philosophy of language, linguistics, cognitive science, neurobiology, and psychoanalysis. All of these studies differ in their observational methods, and every specialist, like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, approach the problem from their own perspective. I will claim that the third-person perspective of neuroscience, in its attempt to find the neural correlates of....

 点击浏览该文件