Mindvaults - 9780262019118

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 Bogdanexamines the roots of this uniquely human ability, which he terms "mindvaulting." Hefocuses particularly on the capacities of pretending and imagining, which he identifies as the firstforms of mindvaulting to develop in childhood. Pretending and imagining, Bogdan argues, are crucialsteps on the ontogenetic staircase to the intellect. Bogdan finds that pretending and then imaginingdevelop from a variety of sources for reasons that are specific and unique to human childhood. Heargues that these capacities arise as responses to sociocultural and sociopolitical pressures thatemerge at different stages of childhood. Bogdan argues that some of the properties of mindvaulting-- including domain versatility and nonmodularity -- resist standard evolutionary explanations. Toresolve this puzzle, Bogdan reorients the evolutionary analysis toward human ontogeny, construed asa genuine space of evolution with specific pressures and adaptive responses. Bogdan finds thatpretending is an ontogenetic response to sociocultural challenges in early childhood, apre-adaptation for imagining; after age four, the adaptive response to cooperative and competitivesociopolitical pressures is a competence for mental strategizing that morphs intoimagining.