Week 7 HEART: Jesse Prinz: Wonder.

For the Can*Innovate thing, I made a new playlist of videos about creativity, and for that I was pulling videos from across the different playlists I have now. I watch some of them again while I was making the list, and I wanted to write up a post about this one: Jesse Prinz: Wonder.

I honestly don't even think of wonder as an emotion, but of course it is: things are wonder-ful after all! In this video, Jesse Prinz talks about how wonder is an emotion that has been neglected in psychology, which is weird because it is a fundamental human emotion, perhaps the most fundamental human emotion (as opposed to emotions we share with animals). It is also an emotion that runs across three human endeavors that are often presented as opposed to one another: art, science, and religion (art and religion obviously go hand in hand, but they are often seen in opposition to science).

So, Prinz has written books on emotions, culture, morality, etc. His most recent book is on the nature-culture debate which doesn't really interest me per se (and reading it would probably make me angry, just having to listen to people debating about the meaning of IQ tests, ugh), but he has one on consciousness which I will try. I find books on philosophy of consciousness pretty intimidating, but based on this video, I think I want to give this a try! And hey, it's got one of my H.E.A.R.T. words -- attention -- in the subtitle. :-)

book cover at Amazon