Boston Book Festival 2018

This session explores the mind and how it relates to art and reading. Boston College professor Ellen Winner, in How Art Works, called “ambitious” and “exhilarating” by the New Yorker, delves into the psychology of art. It looks at how we distinguish art from other things, decide that some works of art are good and others not, or determine why the original work is valued and the forgery not. Our taste in art, according to Winner, is determined by many things, some of them unconscious. Cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf looks at how our brains are changing to adapt to digital media and what it means for our intellectual capacity. Her book, Reader Come Home, is a series of letters written to her readers and is deemed by Shelf Awareness a “joy to read and reread, a love letter to literature, literacy, and progress.” Their conversation will be moderated by professor of psychology Aniruddh Patel, who is working on a book on the evolution of music cognition.