ABSTRACT
The first and perhaps the most important aspect of cognitive theory is that, unlike the cultural theory so far discussed, which grounds itself for the greatest part in philosophy, theories of art, and social sciences, cognitive theory draws its authority from the so-called hard sciences, especially the biological sciences. There are three concepts from cognitive theory which have dominated its application to theatre studies and which produce a kind of monolithic effect across much of the scholarship: metaphor, conceptual blending, and mirror neurons. George Lakoff argues that, unlike a computer randomly accessing and processing data, the human brain processes information through metaphor and the primary metaphors come from the way we exist in the world. Cognitive theory is, if not celebratory of metaphor, then not focused on ideology or seeing things in moral terms, at least not of the orthodox leftist variety. Cognitive theory is being used to explain various forms of participation in theatre as playwright, actor and audience.
