Mindvaults: Sociocultural Grounds for Pretending and Imagining(Mindvaults)

The human mind has the capacity to vault over the realm of current perception, motivation, emotion, and action, to leap -- consciously and deliberately -- to past or future, possible or impossible, abstract or concrete scenarios and situations. In this book, Radu Bogdan examines the roots of this uniquely human ability, which he terms "mindvaulting." He focuses particularly on the capacities of pretending and imagining, which he identifies as the first forms of mindvaulting to develop in childhood. Pretending and imagining, Bogdan argues, are crucial steps on the ontogenetic staircase to the intellect. Bogdan finds that pretending and then imagining develop from a variety of sources for reasons that are specific and unique to human childhood. He argues that these capacities arise as responses to sociocultural and sociopolitical pressures that emerge at different stages of childhood. Bogdan argues that some of the properties of mindvaulting -- including domain versatility and nonmodularity -- resist standard evolutionary explanations. To resolve this puzzle, Bogdan reorients the evolutionary analysis toward human ontogeny, construed as a genuine space of evolution with specific pressures and adaptive responses. Bogdan finds that pretending is an ontogenetic response to sociocultural challenges in early childhood, a pre-adaptation for imagining; after age four, the adaptive response to cooperative and competitive sociopolitical pressures is a competence for mental strategizing that morphs into imagining.

About the Author :
Radu J. Bogdan is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science and Director of the Cognitive Studies Program at Tulane University and Regular Guest Professor and Director of the OPEN MIND master program in cognitive science, University of Bucharest, Romania. He is the author of Our Own Minds: Sociocultural Grounds for Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 2010) and other books.

Review :
Mindvaults is an engaging exercise in armchair philosophizing about the nature of the human intellect. Bodgan's scope of scholarship is broad, and his thinking is in line with the latest trends in evolutionary psychology and cognitive development. His arguments are cogent and refreshingly different clearly the product of a rich imagination. This little book is packed full of new ideas for research, and it should definitely be on the summer reading listfor all developmental scientists. An important contribution to modern psychology in its emphasis on imagination as central to human cognition....Bogdan's detailed consideration of the topic is a welcome addition to the literature.... Mindvaults presents a host of ideas and hypotheses about the development of imagination that provide ample fodder for scholars. Bogdan presents his well-developed theory of "mindvaulting" in this concise, compact volume....A thought-provoking read and a suitable companion volume to the author's other works and collections in developmental psychology....Recommended.