i just want back into your head

From: “NEW: The Magazine of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston” Fall 2007

Geoffrey Miller quote:

“Studying conceptual art at Columbia University in the 1980’s sparked my interest in cognitive psychology- the study of concepts, categories, memories and decisions. Other creative genres and media- contemporary realism, psychadelia, graphic novels, music (not least Talking Heads)- convinced me that cognitive psychology was missing all the sex, violence, emotionality, and absurdity of being human. I realized that behavioral sciences must address at least as much of human nature as artists have depicted.
Art has also shown me the limits of scientific language in depicting human experience. Nineteenth century evolutionary psychologists like Nietzsche, Darwin, William James, and indeed Henry James used language playfully and evocatively, but since then, psychologists have become afraid of the mind’s complexity and its dark protean web-work of emotion. Read a modern psychology journal paper, and you’ll rarely recognize anything resembling lived human experience. Contemporary artists, however, communicate provocative insights about the human condition by using rich, metaphorical and symbolic language. I take artists and writers as role models for how to talk about human experiences.”