Echo Objects

“Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, is a spectacular effort of thinking outside discipline boundaries, a sort of interdenominational bible of arts and neuroscience. It is all the more remarkable since the book appears to have required no effort at all, so smoothly and seamlessly it flows from Barbara Stafford’s well-informed mind and dizzying pen.”

“Inspiring and rewarding, Echo Objects displays great learning and an uncommon ability to straddle genres and disciplines, often to kaleidoscopic effect. At the center of all that colorful flux lies Barbara Stafford’s acute critical intelligence, snuggled like a sniper in a jungle. Cognitive scientists, as well as those working in the arts and humanities, have much to learn from this unique and thought-provoking work.”

“Echo Objects is an erudite, sophisticated, pioneering exploration of the ways in which modern neuroscience illuminates the world of images, and of the insights that careful, critical analysis of images can provide to neuroscience. It makes many compelling observations, and opens up numerous questions for further investigation and debate.”

“Echo Objects argues vigorously for a new understanding of images: one that regards them not simply as products of mental operations but as constitutive of such operations and cognitive processes. This book bristles with ideas and innovative connections that draw together cultural, material, and biological analyses of thought and cognition to prod the reader into rethinking the uses and significance of images. Echo Objects is a book to wrestle and argue with. It will draw each reader into a conversation that will prove important, and for many transformative—a conversation that goes to the heart of the importance of the arts and humanities and to the role they play in understanding science, cognition, and images themselves.”<James J. Bono, author of The Word of God and the Languages of Man>

“The wealth of ideas in this book, which sometimes seem disconnected, turns out to be a beautiful chain of up-to-date-cum-ancient jewelry. . . . Echo Objects proves to be a creative, innovative, very interesting, and rewarding work.”