Theatre And Consciousness The Nature Of Bioevolutionary Complexity In The Arts Armstrong Gordon Scott by Armstrong Gordon Scott 9780820457734, 0820457736 instant download after payment.

Human beings have speech, we have consciousness, but 130,000 years ago we had nothing: why? Theatre and Consciousness argues that the functioning of human consciousness in interpreting and staging a theatrical performance is among the most highly selective and adaptive operations known to science. The emergence of the human mind out of discontinuous, pulsing, neuronal brain patterns is a study in complexity theory, possibly as complicated as the organization of the universe. According to this book, the theatre as a substrate of consciousness is one element that defines modern man as a reflective species, having evolved over 190,000,000 years. The emergence of Homo Sapiens is unique and fundamentally unpredictable; our developed speech is closer to birdsong than to any other species' communication on earth, we have survived five galactic "beam-splitters" from space, and our evolutionary, discontinuous cortex has found a pattern to existence that may include up to twenty-six folded dimensions of "string-theory" space. This book asserts that the story of theatre is the story of the evolution of our second generation star.