Seeing Through Illusions
ISBN13: 9780192802859ISBN10: 0192802852
Hardback,
280 pages
Aug 2009,
In Stock
Price:
$34.95 (5T)Description
There is a world of objects spread out before us in glorious color. It seems as if perception just happens. But does it? Is it really that simple? As Richard Gregory reveals in this attractively illustrated book, the more we discover about the senses and the brain, the more we realize that seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting depend on incredibly complicated machinery--both in the sense organs and in the brain.One of the world's leading authorities on perception, Gregory offers an insightful state-of-the-art tour of how the brain captures and interprets the world. He describes the evolution of the sense organs, a process so remarkable that even Darwin was reluctant to believe that natural selection could have "designed" structures as complicated as eyes or other sense organs. Gregory shows how perception actually works and in particular how the brain interprets perceptual information. The author reveals how the phenomena of illusions provide an important key for unlocking secrets of perception. And the book also examines the special case of pictures such as drawing and paintings, describing how the brain interprets them as representing objects.
Seing Through Illusions will enthrall everyone interested in the borderland where the inner and the outer world meet.
About the Author(s)
Richard Gregory is Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Eye and Brain and Mirrors in Mind , and the editor of The Oxford Companion to the Mind . He was founder and president of the first hands-on science center in Britain and "godfather" of the Mind Zone at the Millennium Dome. He lives in the U.K.
