Lewis-Williams first published some of the ideas that would form the basis for his argument in The Mind in the Cave in a 1988 academic paper co-written with Thomas Dowson entitled "The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art" Fellow archaeologist Robert J. Wallis would later characterise this as "one of the most controversial papers" in rock art research.

[4] Chapter two, "Seeking Answers", proceeds to examine the various different interpretative approaches that scholars have taken to the Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe.

He then discusses the claims that the artworks did have symbolic meanings, being either totemic or representative of sympathetic magic, both arguments made from ethnographic parallels with modern hunter-gatherer communities such as those of Australia.

Lewis-Williams goes on to discuss structuralist interpretations of the artworks, such as those first advocated by Giambattista Vico and Ferdinand de Saussure, and later reformulated by the likes of Max Raphael, Annette Laming-Emperaire and André Leroi-Gourhan.

Proclaiming it to be "a timely introduction" to a shamanistic interpretation of Upper Palaeolithic rock art, Wallis believed that Lewis-Davidson puts forward "a compelling case" for the nature of such cave paintings.