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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

side, an escape from conflict and struggle (often associated with city
life), and an escape from the labor of thinking.
Spolsky identifies a curious feature of pastoral works: that as
soon as city dwellers escape to the country with its sensual pleasures,
they are overcome with the impulse to philosophize or moralize. Spol-
sky takes this movement as evidence of one of the most basic cognitive
tasks of the imagination: what she calls “the common, everyday ability
to toggle between concrete sense data and abstractions.” As Spolsky
puts it, “Ge ing away from thinking, it turns out, gives you important
things to think about.”
Spolsky demonstrates how the pastoral genre has been utilized
by artists and their audiences to explore what Andy Clark and Josefa
Toribio have called “representationally hungry problems.” These are
problems that are harder to think through than most others; such
problems structured by “absence” or “unruliness” make us hungry
for more of what representations might provide in the way of an an-
swer. As Spolsky ingeniously argues, “The repeated display of the
conflict in pastoral poems, plays, and pictures between sense data
and the mind’s ability to produce abstractions is evidence that the
issue has not been sufficiently clarified; that the cluster of images and
ideas the genre compacts remains tangled because there is at its cen-
ter an unsolved problem.” Through her readings of Torquato
Tasso’s Aminta, (c. 1573), Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (c. 1650),
and — surprisingly — Jennifer Haley’s The Nether (2013), a play
about internet pornography and pedophilia, Spolsky shows that “the
green world affords only a temporary holiday though always an in-
structive one.”

We believe that each of these essays provides a powerful example of
how fertile the cross-talk between the Two Cultures can be, by show-
ing the value of investigating human creativity and its reception from
a neurobiological perspective. The creative process, in spite of its ar-
ticulation as progressive abstraction and externalization from the
body, keeps its bodily ties intact, not only because the body is the in-
strument of creative image production, but also because it is the main
instrument of its reception.

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