CANR
WORK TITLE: IMAGINATION
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jimdavies.org/
CITY: Ottawa
STATE:
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 366
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Glens Falls, NY.
EDUCATION:State University of New York College at Oswego, B.A., 1993; Georgia Institute of Technology, M.S., 1997, Ph.D., 2004.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Cognitive scientist, educator, writer, poet, playwright, theater director, and visual artist. Queen’s University, postdoctoral fellow, 2004-06; Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, assistant professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science, 2006-10, then associate professor and current full professor. Also Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, MA, research intern, 2000; Z2Live, Seattle, WA, consultant, 2011. Cofounder of the VisionQuest theater company, Atlanta, GA. Three-time TEDx speaker.
MEMBER:American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science Society, Canadian Network for Innovation in Education, American Psychological Association, International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, Canadian Science Writers’ Association, International Association for Empirical Aesthetics, Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Canadian Network for Innovation in Education, Virtual World Society, speculative fiction writing group Lyngarde, Calligraphy Society of Ottawa, Independent Game Developer’s Network.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Knowledge in the New Technologies, edited by G. Kouzelis and others, Peter Lang, 2005; and E-Learning Systems, Environments, and Approaches: Theory and Implementation, edited by P. Isaias and others, Springer, 2014. Minding the Brain podcast, cohost.
SIDELIGHTS
Jim Davies is a cognitive scientist and writer who not only contributes to professional journals but is also the author of short stories, plays, and poetry. In addition, he is a visual artist whose work focuses on nonorthodox calligraphy and Pac-Man art, and he is a swing dancer. His academic research focuses on visual reasoning, analogy, and imagination. Davies uses computer simulations of visual imagination to explore how people imagine visual scenes to ponder situations and solve problems.
In his first book, Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe, Davies explores the evolutionary foundations of what makes things compelling to people, from art and religion to gossip, sports, and superstition. “Davies proposes that compellingness rests on six (sometimes overlapping) foundations: people, things we hope for or fear, patterns, incongruity, things related to the body, and various psychological tendencies,” wrote Wall Street Journal Online contributor Matthew Hutson. Commenting on the author’s discussion of why many are drawn to watch athletics, Hutson noted that “athletic performance acts as a demonstration of broader qualities such as the strength and character of a nation’s people, and we like to know where everyone stands.” For example, athletes demonstrate skills that can be useful in the real world, especially in the world of our ancient ancestors, where physical skills such as running and dodging often meant the difference between life and death.
Davies explains the differences between what he calls a person’s “old brain” and “new brain.” In the process, he points out that the old brain influences behavior on a subconscious level and often overrides the new brain that tries to control the impulses of the old brain. According to Davies, the new brain is located in the front of the brain and includes the cerebral cortex. This brain developed primarily as a way for humans to learn. In contrast, the old brain developed to see things as they are at the moment and provides the basic survival mechanisms that all animals possess. “Because the old and new brains think with different rules, care about different things, and might even use different stores of knowledge, they often come up with different evaluations of the same situations,” Davies writes in the book’s introduction. Davies goes on to point out: “When the new brain pulls in the opposite direction from the old, you can literally be of two minds about something.”
Davies writes that people often find things compelling because they address an aspect of our psyches or stimulate our senses in some way. For example, he notes that rhyming idioms are compelling because they are easily processed by the mind. Furthermore, people are attracted to the patterns created by the rhyme’s repetitive nature. Davies points out that some people find comedy compelling because laughing helps to ease their fears and worries. In addressing fiction, Davies comments that the attraction partly lies in the human brain’s need to discover new information in a story. In addition, people have an inclination to imagine that the story really happened and the characters exist despite the conscious knowledge that the story is fiction.
Similarly, Davies believes that part of human attraction to religion is also based on peoples’ love of patterns. However, he notes that religion is compelling for other reasons as well, including a predisposition to believe in God that came about via the evolutionary need for people to forego selfish interests in order to support community life. “Packed with cutting-edge research findings and written with clarity and brio, this book accomplishes its goal of delivering riveting content,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Calling Riveted “quite absorbing,” Library Journal contributor Jill Morningstar recommended the book “for all readers who seek answers as to what we find compelling and why.”
In his 2019 work, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power, Davies offers a look at the science of imagination, in part developed from a 2010 TEDx Talk. Davies acknowledges in the book that the study of the imagination poses real challenges as one cannot always know or even control what is going on in people’s heads. The author goes over recent advances in the study, such as threat simulation therapy, which looks at nightmares and other situations that might cause anxiety as practice runs for the brain to handle pressure. Such dreams, the theory contends, could actually be ancient in origin, stemming from the Pleistocene. Davies also examines how perception and memory coalesce in imagination and gives tips for using imagination in positive ways. For example, Davies notes that if people picture themselves in an activity that demands physicality, this can actually improve that ability. Davies also looks at topics including hallucinations and imaginary friends.
Reviewing Imagination, a Publishers Weekly contributor noted: “Davies’s knack for translating the abstract into the tangible–while also doing justice to the original ideas–will make this scientific take on imagination appealing to generalists and specialists alike.” A Kirkus Reviews critic also had praise, calling this a “worthy companion to books by Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, and other students of the always puzzling human mind.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2014, review of Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe; September 15, 2019, review of Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power.
Library Journal, June 15, 2014, Jill Morningstar, review of Riveted, p. 110.
Publishers Weekly, May 5, 2014, review of Riveted, p. 50; September 9, 2019, review of Imagination, p. 57.
ONLINE
Carleton University, Institute of Cognitive Science website, http://carleton.ca/ics/ (November 9, 2014), author faculty profile.
Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/ (August 10, 2014), Nicola Davis, “ Riveted Review—the Science of Why We Find Things Compelling.”
Hub, http://www.hubmagazine.com/ (August 8, 2014), Tim Manners, review of Riveted.
Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, https://carleton.ca/ (October 20, 2019), “Jim Davies.”
Jim Davies, http://www.jimdavies.org (October 20, 2019), includes author curriculum vitae.
Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/ (November 9, 2014), brief author profile.
Wall Street Journal Online, http://online.wsj.com/ (August 1, 2014), Matthew Hutson, review of Riveted.
Jim Davies is a cognitive scientist and author of Imagination: The Science of Our Mind's Greatest Power, and Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One With the Universe. He co-hosts, with Dr. Kim Hellemans, the Minding the Brain podcast, which explores cognitive and brain sciences.
He is a full professor at Carleton University at the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the School of Computer Science. He is director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory, and has won awards for his teaching and research.
Dr. Davies is a three-time TEDx speaker. If you would like to invite him to give a talk, please see the list of talks.
If you are interested in working with Jim Davies, please see his note to potential collaborators.
The CV has hyperlinks to publications.
He writes a serialized fiction fantasy story for Altered Reality magazine, and is a game designer. Jim's sister JD Spero is also a novelist.
Dr. Davies is a member of the Cognitive Science Society, the American Psychological Association, The Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, The International Association for Empirical Aesthetics, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education, the Virtual World Society, the speculative fiction writing group Lyngarde, The Calligraphy Society of Ottawa, the Independent Game Developer's Network, and is honored to be a lifetime member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Jim Davies is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. He is the director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory and the co-author on two editions of The GNU Scientific Library Reference Manual. He is the author of Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.
Jim Davies (cognitive scientist)
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For other people with the same name, see Jim Davies.
Jim Davies
Residence
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Nationality
American
Citizenship
United States
Alma mater
SUNY Oswego, Georgia Tech
Scientific career
Fields
Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence
Institutions
Carleton University
Doctoral advisor
Ashok K. Goel, Nancy J. Nersessian
Jim Davies is an American/Canadian cognitive scientist, playwright, artist, and author.[1] He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from the State University of New York at Oswego, his masters in psychology and his Ph.D. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a full professor of Cognitive Science at the Institute of Cognitive Science and the School of Computer Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario where he is the director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory.[2][3] His research focuses on visual reasoning, analogy, and imagination.
Contents
1
Biography
2
Research
3
Art
4
Publications
5
References
Biography[edit]
Jim Davies was born in Glens Falls, New York. He attended Lake George High School and then majored in philosophy at the State University of New York at Oswego, during which he was an exchange student in Beijing, graduating in 1993.[4] He worked in automated text retrieval at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Thomas before attending graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received his M.S. in psychology in 1997 under the advisement of Dr. Dorrit Billman. He also received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 2004, under the advisement of philosopher of science Nancy J. Nersessian and artificial intelligence researcher Ashok K. Goel.[4][5] He worked in bioinformatics as a postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University with Dr. Janice Glasgow and is currently a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University.
Research[edit]
Davies studies imagination through the use of computer simulations of visual imagination, which attempt to model the results of studies of how humans typically imagine visual scenes.[6] In addition to his work at the Science of Imagination Laboratory, Davies is editor of the Cognitive Science Summary website[7] and is on the editorial board of The Open Artificial Intelligence Journal.[8] He presented a TEDxCarletonU talk on his research at Carleton on March 30, 2010[9] and another at Google on August 8, 2010.[10] In 2014 he published Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe.[1]
Art[edit]
Davies is also a comic improvisor, playwright and theater director. He helped found the VisionQuest theater company,[11] cited as one of the best new theater troupes in Atlanta,[12] and for whom he directed The Devil and Ben Jones.[13] As a playwright, his plays include Medea: The Fury[14] and Read It Twice... It's Real, concerning falling in love with robots, was produced by the Sock 'n' Buskin Theatre Company.[15] He was also involved in improv in Atlanta[16] and Kingston[17] and was in a troupe in Ottawa.[18] His serialized fiction, Eve Pixiedrowner and the Micean Council, appears monthly in Altered Reality Magazine.
Davies is also a visual artist focusing on non-orthodox calligraphy[19] and Pac-Man art.[20]
Publications[edit]
Davies, J. (2014). Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-1372-7901-9[21][1]
Davies, J., Goel, A. K., & Nersessian, N. J. (2009). "A Computational Model of Visual Analogies in Design". Cognitive Systems Research: Special Issue on Analogies, 10, 204—215.
Davies, J., & Goel, A. K. (2001). "Visual analogy in problem solving". Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 377-382. Morgan Kaufmann publishers.
Jim Davies
Professor
Degrees:
Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Phone:
613-520-2600 x 1109
Email:
jim.davies@carleton.ca
Office:
2208 Dunton Tower
Website:
Browse
Jim Davies is a full professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. Director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory, he explores computational modeling and artificial intelligence applied to human visual imagination. His work has shown how people use visual thinking to solve problems, and how they visualize imagined situations and worlds.
He is a frequent contributor to Nautilus magazine and is author of Riveted: The Science of How Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe
He is also a co-host of the podcast Minding the Brain http://www.mindingthebrainpodcast.com/
QUOTE:
worthy companion to books by Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, and other students of the always puzzling human mind.
Davies, Jim IMAGINATION Pegasus (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 11, 5 ISBN: 978-1-64313-203-7
When asked to imagine a brown cow, what takes place inside your head? This pleasantly winding survey offers some clues.
Per John Lennon, can we really imagine that there's no heaven? Perhaps, writes Davies (Cognitive Science/Carleton Univ.; Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One With the Universe, 2014), but given that imagination seems to be strongly tied to memory, it may be that we can't really know what we haven't experienced--or perhaps we can. Either way, it shouldn't keep us from trying: Imagination is, after all, a component of creativity and of problem-solving. As the author reveals, imagination is strongly linked as well to the related word "imagery," which opens onto a universe of symbols with its own grammar, declarative and otherwise. Memory recall is a work of imagination "because memories are reconstructed every time they are retrieved"--and therein lies the possibility of negative consequences, since reconstructed memories can be unhappy ones. Good or bad, Davies examines how thinking works, always in a complicated way, since, as he notes, "there's a saying in neuroscience: if the brain can do things five different ways, it does all ten." His discussion covers such matters as hallucinations, which defy description, and imaginary friends: Some readers may take comfort in knowing that there's no requirement that one abandon them at an early age. "When the child perceives that the parent starts to disapprove," writes Davies, "the imaginary companions go dark: the children stop sharing information about companions, and only play with them when parents aren't around." At the close of his ever engaging book, Davies notes that the visual and spatial components of the brain and the contents it holds are often "bewildering."
A worthy companion to books by Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, and other students of the always puzzling human mind.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Davies, Jim: IMAGINATION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964440/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=53fdaaea. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964440
QUOTE:
Davies s knack for translating the abstract into the tangible--while also doing justice to the original ideas--will make this scientific take on imagination appealing to generalists and specialists alike
Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power
Jim Davies. Pegasus, $28.95 (400p) ISBN 978-1-64313-203-7
Davies (Riveted), a professor at Carleton University's Institute of Cognitive Science, explains what imagination is and how it works in this spirited overview of one of neuroscience's most complex topics. The imagination is challenging to study, Davies explains, because "you can't always know (let alone control) what people are or are not doing in their heads." To acquaint readers with the field, he introduces various recent concepts, such as "threat simulation theory"--that nightmares and other anxiety-inducing dreams allow the brain to practice dealing with pressure. Provocatively, the theory holds that dreams can involve, in addition to recent stresses, "ancestral" memories from the evolutionarily pivotal Pleistocene epoch. Explaining that the imagination is dependent on the brain's systems for perception and memory, Davies devotes a good deal of text to laying out how both systems operate. He also suggests that simply picturing oneself doing a physically demanding activity can improve one's actual ability, as "much of the mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined"; for the same reason, computer-generared simulations can also help. Davies s knack for translating the abstract into the tangible--while also doing justice to the original ideas--will make this scientific take on imagination appealing to generalists and specialists alike. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group. (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power." Publishers Weekly, 9 Sept. 2019, p. 57+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600790143/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0360dbd7. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A600790143