Visual Intelligence – How We Create What We See - Hardcover

Hoffman, Donald D

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393046699 ISBN 13: 9780393046694

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998

Synopsis

We have long known about IQ and are beginning to appreciate emotional intelligence; yet there is another fundamental dimension of intelligence that shapes our experience. Our visual intelligence engages roughly half the brain's cortex and goes largely unnoticed. Far from a passive recorder of a pre-existing world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience. In an informal style, Donald Hoffman presents the scientific evidence for vision's constructive powers.

About this title

Review:

Visual intelligence, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman writes, is the power that people use to "construct an experience of objects out of colours, lines, and motions." And what an underappreciated ability it is, too; despite the fact that the visual process uses up a considerable chunk of our brainpower, we're only just learning how it works. Hoffman aptly demonstrates the mysterious constructive powers of our eye-brain machines using lots of simple drawings and diagrams to illustrate basic rules of the visual road. Many of the examples are familiar optical illusions--perspective-confounding cubes, a few lines that add up to a more complex shape than seems right. Hoffman also takes a cue from Oliver Sacks, employing anecdotes about people with various specific visual malfunctions to both further his mechanical explanation of visual intelligence and drive home how important this little-understood aspect of cognition can be in our lives. An especially intriguing example involves a boy, blind from birth, who is surgically given the power to see. At first, he is completely unable to visually distinguish objects familiar by touch, such as the cat and the dog. Other poignant examples show clearly how image construction is normally linked to our emotional well-being and sense of place. Visual Intelligence is a fascinating, confounding look (as it were) at an aspect of human physiology and psychology that very few of us think about much at all. --Therese Littleton, Amazon.com

Review:

"Artists as well as pundits of perception could gain a lot from [this] book..." -- Richard Gregory, The Times Literary Supplement

"[Donald Hoffman] combines a deep understanding of the logic of perception, a gift for explaining it with simple displays that anyone can-quite literally-see, and a refreshing sense of wonder at the miracle of it all." -- Steven Pinker

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0393046699
• ISBN 13: 9780393046694
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 310