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Arts and Neurosciences Review
www.arts-neurosciences.org
Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France

IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY

1rst Call for papers
Deadline: February 15, 2007

ARTS and NEUROSCIENCES REVIEW

Established in the Institut Jean Nicod, an interdisciplinary lab
interface between the humanities and the cognitive sciences, ARTS and
NEUROSCIENCES REVIEW presents articles, discussions, news, forums and
reviews inspired by current research from cognitive neuroscience,
psychology, artificial intelligence, social cognition and philosophy
of mind. It provides an essential overview of contemporary debates and
theories about art - its practice, its products and the experiences it
brings about.

Editor in chief: Emmanuelle Glon

CALL for PAPERS:
Imagination and Creativity

Creativity, as it is currently admitted, refers to the process of
generating new ideas, beyond the mere application of previous or older
established schemata. It is sometimes called â_Eureka!â_ experience, as
the quintessential attribute of profane illumination and intuitive
insight, resulting from an environmental and methodological â_tabula
rasa.â_ In a weaker sense, creativity is the faculty of recombining
ideas by moving away from the direct constraints of the environment â
physical, social, cultural, etc. Scientific literature currently
mentions it under the term of â_divergent thoughtâ_, namely the thought
capable of associating in a unusual way a corpus of ideas, methods and
perspectives involved in problem- solving. In this respect, a creative
thought is not just part of the artistâ__s properties even though
creativity seems to have been attained more fully with artists who are
widely accepted as geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso,
Shakespeare or Mozart. There are probably degrees of
creativity. However polyphonic the concept of creativity may appear,
it seems that creative thought involves, as its basic unit, our
capacity to extract ourselves from factual regularity, immediate
contexts, environmental stimuli or social normativity. On this view,
imagination appears as an active component, if not the very
implementation of the creative thought. If imagination is indeed the
key capacity to consider situations, concepts and actions in the
hypothetical mode, as it were, that is, elements which are not being
currently sensed or physically enacted, how being creative if not
imaginatively
Creative thinking then amounts to bringing into
existence through imagination something new and innovative.

After a long period of excommunication from the part of scientific
community, imagination is now poised to benefit from an ingenious and
fruitful combinations of theories and methodes stemming various
disciplines, such as scientific psychology, neurology, ethology,
biology and philosophy, generating new ideas and concepts outside the
current disciplinary boundaries. With this theoretical and
methodological exchange between research fields, imagination and
creativity gain both a scientific anchoring and stimulus for the
implementation of empirical research models to evaluate the
effectiveness of these concepts in informational and neurological
substract. The development in the field of cognitive neuroscience of
techniques such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to
visualize changes in the chemical composition of brain areas during
thought processes, provides powerful source of insights into the
neural correlate of the imaginative abilities.

In this context, the development of experimental approaches and the
dynamics of theoretical reflexion about mental consciousness and mind
development may contribute to radically changing the potential role
currently attributed to imagination as proper to artistic activity.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submission Deadline: The deadline for receipt of submissions is 15
Februar 2007

Papers should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding bibliographical
references, including footnotes) and should be submitted together with
a short abstract of approximately 200 words

Accepted papers will appear on the website and will be published also
as a special Issue about Arts and Neurosciences.

Electronic submissions should be sent as attachments to BOTH of the
following addresses:

emma2006arts-neurosciences.org
landart05yahoo.fr

Institut Jean Nicod,
Arts and Neurosciences Review
1 bis avenue Lowendal,
75007 Paris
France
<http://www.arts-neurosciences.org>

Further information, including the Online Submission Details, can be
found on the following pages:

<http://www.arts-neurosciences.org/Call-for-papers.html>
<http://www.arts-neurosciences.org/Guide-for-authors.html>