Eye and Brain Review

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(More customer reviews)Who would have thought that a book about the mechanics, physiology and psychology of seeing could be such a riveting read? This is one of the best popular science books around, and I don't even think Gregory intended it to be a layman's book--it's just so well written and interesting that it will delight lay readers as well as its intended student audience.
Gregory starts with a short chapter intended to outline some of the less-obvious issues in understanding how we see. Here, as well as throughout the book, he uses optical illusions to make points. The next chapters cover light itself, and the structure and function of the eye and brain, including accounts of how the eye evolved. The rest of the book discusses brightness, colour, and questions such as "How do we visually determine size?" and "Can machines be taught to see?"
The book is full of accounts of intriguing experiments and case-studies. Two examples of many: Gregory and a colleague, Jean Wallace, worked in 1961-1962 with a man of 52 whose sight was restored to him after a life of blindness. The account of his slow and incomplete adaptation to the world of sight, and his ultimate slide into depression and death (he had been active and capable as a blind person) is fascinating and moving. Another example: Gregory discusses various researchers who spent some time wearing vision apparatus that dramatically changed their perceptions, such as Stratton, Ewert and the Paterson's. In these cases--where for example the wearer could see their own body suspended in front of them, or see everything upside down--the details of the adaptations of perception are thought-provoking and still not completely understood.
Strongly recommended.

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Since the publication of the first edition in 1966, Eye and Brain has established itself worldwide as an essential introduction to the basic phenomena of visual perception. In this book, Richard L. Gregory offers clear explanations of how we see brightness, movement, color, and objects, and he explores the phenomena of visual illusions to establish principles about how perception normally works and why it sometimes fails. Although successive editions have incorporated new discoveries and ideas, Gregory completely revised and updated the book for this publication, adding more than thirty new illustrations. The phenomena of illusion continue to be a major theme in the book, in which the author makes a new attempt to provide a comprehensive classification system. There are also new sections on what babies see and how they learn to see, on motion perception, and tantalizing glimpses of the relationship between vision and consciousness and of the impact of new brain imaging techniques. In addition, the presentation of the text and illustrations has been improved by the larger format and new page design. The thousands of readers of the previous editions of Eye and Brain will find this new revised edition even more attractive and enthralling.

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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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