Getting Inside Your Head

Lisa Zunshine is Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She is the author and editor of ten books, including Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative and Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, both also published by Johns Hopkins. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

• List of IllustrationsPreface: Fantasies of Access1. Culture of Greedy Mind Readers2. I Know What You're Thinking, Mr. Darcy!3. Sadistic Benefactors4. Theaters, Hippodromes, and Other Mousetraps5. Movies: The Power of Restraint6. Mockumentaries, Photography, and Stand-Up Comedy: Upping the Agony7. Reality TV: Humiliation in Real Time8. Musicals (Particularly around 11 pm)9. Painting Feelings10. Painting MysteriesCodaNotesBibliographyIndex

Zunshine's book was difficult to stop reading; while she handles all these genres with skill, clearly her strength is in reading literature (as she returns to literary references even in the other chapters). Having an understanding of human evolution and how the brain works makes reading a book such as Zunshine's more satisfying. -- Gregory F. Tague ASEBL Journal Offers readers a good deal of food for thought and exemplifies how illuminating the principles from science can be when applied to other forms of culture. Highly recommended. Choice Drawing widely and judiciously on recent research in neuroscience, Getting Inside Your Head expands [theory of mind] to cover all of human culture, from novels to films, plays, musicals, paintings and reality shows. -- Michael Berube American Scientist