{"product_id":"9780820457734","title":"Theatre and Consciousness: The Nature of Bio-Evolutionary Complexity in the Arts (Artists and Issues in the Theatre Series)","description":"\u003cp\u003eHuman beings have speech, we have consciousness, but 130,000 years ago we had nothing: why? \u003ci\u003eTheatre and Consciousness\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eHomo Sapiens\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peter Lang Publishing Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47020959301872,"sku":"9780820457734","price":74.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780820457734_p0.jpg?v=1763751799","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780820457734","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}