The Eye and Visual Optical Instruments Review

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(More customer reviews)I am a researcher in the field of visual optics. I first obtained a copy of this book nearly 5 years ago, when I was a lecturer at the University of Auckland. I thought the book was excellent then and the subsequent passage of time has reinforced my view.
I refer to my copy constantly. When I am dealing with a new and complicated topic as part of my work my first instinct is to check if Smith and Atchison have anything to say on the topic, and I'm usually rewarded. They nearly always provide good introductory material and analytical tools. The book contains very basic level material which is suitable for undergraduates in the area of clinical optics and develops these concepts to postgrad and research levels.
The section on aberrations is extremely useful, although it does not use the Zernike polynomials that have become popular in the last few years, it has still allowed me to do useful analysis of my data. I have also found the sections on optical quality calculations extremely useful, and the appendices on schematic eyes are the most complete I've come across in the literature.
I look forward to many subsequent editions of this text. An excellent book for researchers and students.

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A wide variety of optical instruments exists in which the human eye forms an integral part of the system. This book provides a detailed description of the visual ergonomics of such instruments. The book begins with a section on image formation and basic optical components. The authors then discuss various optical instruments that can be adequately described using geometrical optics, and follow this with a section on diffraction and interference, and the instruments based on these effects. There are separate sections devoted to ophthalmic instruments and aberration theory, with a final section covering visual ergonomics in depth. Containing many problems and solutions, this book will be of great use to undergraduate and graduate students of optometry, optical design, optical engineering, and visual science, and to professionals working in these and related fields.

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Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain Review

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(More customer reviews)as someone with a doctorate in psychology who has retired to a life of intensive painting, i can say this book falls short in its fundamental premise: if we can identify a distinct visual capability in the brain, that capability forms the basis for visual esthetic judgments. that argument unfortunately goes nowhere, and the result is a thin book with its substantive content spread even thinner.
zeki's argument is roughly that the mind is an active creator of visual experience; that we create visual experience using a variety of "modular" cerebral functions (specific neighborhoods of the brain that detect edges, analyze movement, perceive color, recognize faces); and that art works which "appeal" to these modular capabilities provide the foundation for art. claims that art that becomes "great" if the mind is presented with ambiguous or multiple interpretations, provoking it to "actively create" varied interpretations from the work in view. in this way zeki hopes to reason his way toward a "neurological esthetics," a biologically based prescription of what is beautiful or compelling art.
well, where to begin ... because a brain function is invoked by a stimulus does not make it interesting or great; my review invokes your language capabilities, but that doesn't make my words poetry. a painting does not succeed by creating a variety of specific but competing interpretations, as zeki claims, but by reframing awareness into a realm where the mundane categorizations necessary for behavior are stretched by the exercise of the senses. what counts as beautiful cannot be determined from the quantitative activity of different brain regions. what counts as beautiful depends heavily on cultural expectations, not on physiology ... on and on the objections roll.
in the end, zeki's argument is highly parochial. his examples come from the "edge detection" art of the supremacists or the cubists; the "color perception" art of the fauves, the "movement perception" art of calder, and so on -- simplistic art for simplistic art theories. (someone should ask, where are the edges in monet or turner, the color in kline or velazquez, the movement in vermeer or van dyck?) on the philosophical side, zeki seems willing to cite plato or hegel as straw men to knock down, but seems completely unaware of the many philosophical or social psychological theorists who could enrich his "active construction" view of visual perception. finally, zeki seems not to have had a personal colloquy with practicing artists, who could disabuse him of his naive reading of western art and its traditions.
psychologists will find this book to be unexpectedly thin on the facts of recent neural research and cognitive function, and lacking in philosophical depth. artists will look at zeki's simplistic reading of art and art history, shrug and wonder, what is this guy talking about?

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