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In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of "polyphonicity" - of "many-voicedness" - in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience - all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences.

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Peter Pesic, writer, pianist, and scholar, is Director of the Science Institute and Musician-in-Residence at St. John´s College, Santa Fe. He is the author of Abel´s Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability; Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature; Sky in a Bottle; and Music and the Making of Modern Science, all published by the MIT Press.

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