The Agile Mind
This text proposes a new integrative framework for understanding and promoting creatively adaptive thinking. The mind is not only cognition, narrowly construed, but is deeply intermeshed with action, perception, and emotion. This means that optimal mental agility is realized at the dynamic intersection of environment, brain, and mind.
Building on empirical research from the behavioral and brain sciences, from developmental and social psychology, and from neuropsychology, psychopathology, and allied disciplines, this book argues that understanding our agile minds requires that we go beyond dichotomous classifications of cognition as intuitive versus deliberate. When we are optimally creatively adaptive, we are able to adroitly move across not only a wide range of levels of cognitive control, but also across multiple levels of detail. Neither abstraction nor specificity, neither controlled nor automatic processes alone are what is needed. Contextually sensitive variation is essential, including rapidly intermixed modes of cognitive control, if we are to realize our fullest capacities for insightful innovation, fluent improvisation, and flexible thinking.
Written for an interdisciplinary audience, empirical findings are enriched with insights from the arts and literature. Mastering the many factors that can help to promote mental agility is important to each of us, both individually and collectively, as shapers and makers of our selves and our societies.
1104348990
The Agile Mind
This text proposes a new integrative framework for understanding and promoting creatively adaptive thinking. The mind is not only cognition, narrowly construed, but is deeply intermeshed with action, perception, and emotion. This means that optimal mental agility is realized at the dynamic intersection of environment, brain, and mind.
Building on empirical research from the behavioral and brain sciences, from developmental and social psychology, and from neuropsychology, psychopathology, and allied disciplines, this book argues that understanding our agile minds requires that we go beyond dichotomous classifications of cognition as intuitive versus deliberate. When we are optimally creatively adaptive, we are able to adroitly move across not only a wide range of levels of cognitive control, but also across multiple levels of detail. Neither abstraction nor specificity, neither controlled nor automatic processes alone are what is needed. Contextually sensitive variation is essential, including rapidly intermixed modes of cognitive control, if we are to realize our fullest capacities for insightful innovation, fluent improvisation, and flexible thinking.
Written for an interdisciplinary audience, empirical findings are enriched with insights from the arts and literature. Mastering the many factors that can help to promote mental agility is important to each of us, both individually and collectively, as shapers and makers of our selves and our societies.
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The Agile Mind

The Agile Mind

by Wilma Koutstaal
The Agile Mind

The Agile Mind

by Wilma Koutstaal

Paperback(Reprint)

$83.00 
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Overview

This text proposes a new integrative framework for understanding and promoting creatively adaptive thinking. The mind is not only cognition, narrowly construed, but is deeply intermeshed with action, perception, and emotion. This means that optimal mental agility is realized at the dynamic intersection of environment, brain, and mind.
Building on empirical research from the behavioral and brain sciences, from developmental and social psychology, and from neuropsychology, psychopathology, and allied disciplines, this book argues that understanding our agile minds requires that we go beyond dichotomous classifications of cognition as intuitive versus deliberate. When we are optimally creatively adaptive, we are able to adroitly move across not only a wide range of levels of cognitive control, but also across multiple levels of detail. Neither abstraction nor specificity, neither controlled nor automatic processes alone are what is needed. Contextually sensitive variation is essential, including rapidly intermixed modes of cognitive control, if we are to realize our fullest capacities for insightful innovation, fluent improvisation, and flexible thinking.
Written for an interdisciplinary audience, empirical findings are enriched with insights from the arts and literature. Mastering the many factors that can help to promote mental agility is important to each of us, both individually and collectively, as shapers and makers of our selves and our societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780199355815
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 10/15/2013
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 784
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Wilma Koutstaal is a cognitive neuroscientist whose interdisciplinary research and teaching bridge thinking and memory. She received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University and has taught in Canada, England, and the United States. Currently she is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Agility of Mind and the Integrated Controlled-Automatic, Specific-Abstract (iCASA) Framework

PART I: Memory, Categorization, and Concepts

Chapter 2 - Levels of Representational Specificity and Thinking

Chapter 3 - Levels of Control, Representational Specificity, and Thinking Flexibly Using Memory and Categorical Knowledge

Chapter 4 - Thinking with Our Senses

PART II: Motivation and Emotion

Chapter 5 - Action and Motivation: The Impetus for, and Enactment of, Agile Thinking

Chapter 6 - Emotion, Self, Personality: Thought Personified

Chapter 7 - Thoughts about Thoughts: The Control versus Non-control of Thinking

Part III: Brain and Environment

Chapter 8 - The Frontal Cortex, and Beyond:Brain Bases of Levels of Specificity and Levels of Control, Part I

Chapter 9 - Concepts and Intuition, Resilience, Novelty and Exploration: Brain Bases of Levels of Specificity and Levels of Control, Part 2

Chapter 10 - Making Brain Paths to Agile Thinking, Part 1: Correlational and Longitudinal Evidence

Chapter 11 - Making Brain Paths to Agile Thinking, Part 2: Direct Experimental Evidence

Chapter 12 - Implications and Applications of the iCASA Framework for Fostering Agile Thinking
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