| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.75
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.75, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk 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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Steven Pinker
"[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."
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
You are a creative genius. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
You are a creative genius. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a ground breaking book. Hoffman proposes that seeing is a creative act of intelligence and that we literally create the visual world we live in. He explains, with persuasive clarity, that this ability is innate. We are born visually competent and that all we need to acquire visual skill is to see. Seeing is not something we learn to do, it is something we grow to do.
Hoffman shows that the image at the eye is two dimensional, not, as many people believe, three dimensional. He further shows that the visual cortex, according to certain rules, converts that 2D image into a 3D image. Hoffman describes these rules simply and clearly and with more than ample illustration. In all Hoffman describes 35 rules, most of which concern how we convert a 2D image at the retina into a 3D image in the brain. He also deals with some aspects of seeing motion.
In many ways Visual Intelligence makes a break with the traditional ways of dealing with visual perception. He comes at it from cognitive science rather than the older perspectives of psychology. For this reason this book is both powerful and up to date. Although Hoffman makes only passing reference to visual art what he has to say about how we see is hugely relevant to the work of artists who work in 2D media.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful
I loved reading this book
8 April 2002
Format:Paperback
This book is a lot of fun to read, not only because it's really interesting but because you learn through experience while you read. The book is about how our minds interpret the visual information that our eyes see, and it includes many visual examples -- optical illusions, basically, that make you pay attention to how your mind is working while you take in the experience.
I read the book because of an interest in graphic design, and it brings design concepts together with psychology and biology in a really involving way. It was just a pleasure to read from the beginning to almost the end.
Another reviewer points out that the last chapter is a bit of a letdown, and that's true. It's kind of an "everything's relative and you construct your own reality" message that's obviously very important to the author for academic reasons but much less so to the audience. Still, it takes nothing away from the rest of this fascinating book.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
How our senses create reality
6 Nov 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I got turned onto this book in graduate school, but never got around to reading it until now. But having read it, I'd have to say it's a fascinating book about vision and the cognitive functions of the brain that help people construct what they see. The author also briefly discusses the sense of touch and how it constructs reality, but the main focus is on vision.
What I really liked was the explanation behind optical illusions. I didn't agree with everything the author wrote, because I found with some of the exercises that my experiences differed from his. Yet what this book does show is that what we see isn't always he objective reality we'd like it to be...in fact rarely, at least through our senses, is reality objective.
If there's one complaint I had, it was that he purposely chose to leave out the citations. Granted he drew on a lot of work, but it'd be nice to trace his sources and the context of those sources. That said I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in how our senses help us construct reality.
What I really liked was the explanation behind optical illusions. I didn't agree with everything the author wrote, because I found with some of the exercises that my experiences differed from his. Yet what this book does show is that what we see isn't always he objective reality we'd like it to be...in fact rarely, at least through our senses, is reality objective.
If there's one complaint I had, it was that he purposely chose to leave out the citations. Granted he drew on a lot of work, but it'd be nice to trace his sources and the context of those sources. That said I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in how our senses help us construct reality.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Visual process as active construction
27 April 2000
Format:Hardcover
We construct our visual and perceptual experience of objects by touch, taste, smell, sound and sight -- or as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman writes in VISUAL INTELLIGENCE, "... to experience is to construct, in each modality and without exception". Hoffman sets forth an extremely detailed and convincing explanation to support this assertion, and in the process takes us on a journey through the rules of visual intelligence. Many of us know that we construct each curve or surface we see, since the rods and cones inside our eyes use discrete pixel-like "dots" that can only approximate the images we perceive... but I didn't realize until I read this book how powerfully our visual interpretations affect our emotional responses.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Medical & Healthcare Practitioners > Internal Medicine > Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Cognition & Cognitive Psychology
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Neuropsychology
- Books > Science & Nature > Biological Sciences > Human Biology > Neuroscience
- Books > Science & Nature > Mathematics > Popular Maths
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
