Seeing Through Illusions (Used)
This book, published in 2009, is in like new condition with original dustjacket having no rips or tears.
- Looks at many extraordinary optical tricks and visual illusions, and explains why they happen and what that tells us about the physiology of our senses and the psychology of perception
- Addresses questions about consciousness and how our brains perceive the real world that have puzzled scientists and philosophers for centuries
- Combines psychology and brain science with evolutionary biology, psychological case-studies, and reflections on philosophy and art
Visual illusions have the capacity to both puzzle and delight: whether the swirling colours and vibrations that appear from simple concentric patterns, or surreal tricks of perspective, or the ephemeral shapes that appear as we stare into a random scattering of dots. They remind us that, contrary to the experience of everyday life, what we perceive isn’t always true.
In Seeing Through Illusion renowned neuropsychologist Richard Gregory explores what visual illusions can tell us about how our brains perceive the world. Looking at optical tricks and many other extraordinary phenomena, Gregory explains how scientists use them to peel back the normal processes of perception, and to reveal how the brain performs the remarkable feat of representing the real world with the kind of richness and success which we experience every day and take for granted. And these visual illusions can not only tell us about how our brain works, but they can also reveal its past. For as our nervous systems evolved, so the ways in which they perceived the visual world grew more sophisticated, moving from simple stimuli of light and darkness to the complex levels of cognition we have today. Traces of earlier stages remain buried within our brains like stratified layers, laid down through evolutionary time, and we learn how the study of different kinds of illusions helps us to glimpse these layers.
Interweaving science with reflections on art and philosophy, fascinating psychological case-studies, and some amazing visual phenomena, this book reveals that we really can ‘see through illusions’.
Readership: General readers of popular science, popular psychology and philosophy – particularly where these fields meet in the study of brain science. The book will also be of interest to artists, for its scientific yet accessible exploration of visual illusions and methods of perception.
