Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images

About this book

Barbara Maria Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brains material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn she contends brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerationsparticularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. As a result Echo Objects is a stunningly broad exploration of how complex imagesor patterns that compress space and timemake visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates for example how the compound formats of emblems symbols collage and electronic media reveal the brains grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. In contrast she shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums such as the human urge to imitate and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. Ultimately she makes an impassioned plea for a common purposefor the acknowledgement that at the most basic level these separate projects belong to a single investigation. Heroic. . . . The larger message of Staffords intense propulsive prose is unassailable. If we are to get much further in the great puzzle of bindinghow the perception of an image the will to act on intention or the forging of consciousness is assembled from the tens of thousands of neurons firing at any one moment in timethen there needs to be action on all fronts.Science