From Library Journal
Stuffing his book full of illusions and visual tricks, cognitive science professor Hoffman solidly details how humans construct what they perceive with their eyes into an understandable reality. The many illustrations propel the curious reader through the book, and a website offers additional illustrations that require motion. Writing in an informal style that occasionally strays into pithiness, the author details the "grammar" of vision, or the rules that govern what you see. His text includes heavy philosophy and cognitive theory, but the casual reader is served entertaining examples from pop culture. Some might quibble with defining the ability to see, nearly universal among humans, as an intelligence, but the book will convince everyone that the human brain is an amazing thing. For larger science collections.?Kelly Hensley, East Tennessee State Univ. Lib., Johnson City
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Awkward though it be to accept Hoffman's case, it seems that vision is not what it appears to be. He argues that the brain, via the eyes, doesn't see what is "really" in a scene being viewed but rather constructs one image from "countless possible interpretations" from the scene gathered at the retina. To support this counter-experiential proposition, Hoffman diagrams circles, cubes, triangles, and more. He asks the reader to invert or rotate the book, and voila, the figure becomes the opposite of its first impression. Explaining why the brain does this, Hoffman adduces 35 innate rules it follows that guide its decisions on shape, color, motion, and depth. In pauses between his explications of the rules, Hoffman refutes likely objections, a typical one being, If I and everybody else see object A, then none of us "construct" it; therefore it has a real existence. Instead of being demoralized by Hoffman's dismantlement of such assumptions, one becomes enlightened by a part of one's intelligence that works hard without conscious awareness. Popular and nontechnical. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
A cognitive scientist synthesizes recent findings of vision researchers to unveil some of the secrets and explore still-unsolved puzzles of how we see. Hoffman (Univ. of Calif., Irvine) argues that children are born with innate rules of universal vision just as Noam Chomsky has argued for innate rules of universal grammar. These inborn rules of vision allow children to acquire, through visual experience, rules of visual processing by which the child constructs, in a multiplicity of stages, visual scenes. The first 20 of these rules, as spelled out here, have to do with seeing shapes. Rule 1, for example, is ``Always interpret a straight line in an image as a straight line in 3D.'' Next are eight rules for color and seven rules for motion. These are illustrated with line drawings and photographs - 120 in black-and-white and 30 in color - that draw the reader into participating in his demonstrations. The problem of showing motion is neatly solved by Hoffman: he directs readers to his Web site, where all the motion displays discussed here can be viewed. Like V.S. Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain, p. 1096), Hoffman draws on patients with pertinent brain anomalies to explain normal visual intelligence. Also like Ramachandran, he uses phantom limbs to explore briefly the sense of touch, for Hoffman is persuaded that the brain constructs not only what is seen, but also what is felt, heard, smelled, and tasted. He closes with a venture into the world of virtual reality that inspires a series of probing questions into the relationship between what we see relationally (i.e., what we interact with) and what we see phenomenally (i.e., what the visual intelligence constructs). With its many fascinating visual demonstrations, Hoffman's presentation fully engages the reader, demanding and rewarding attention. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Like a master magician demonstrating sleight of hand to an apprentice, Hoffman explains the brain's little tricks one by one. He makes frequent use of optical illusions, such as the familiar Necker cube, which seems to pop back and forth between a perspective view from above and to the left and a second view from below and to the right. Such ambiguous figures--and there are dozens in Hoffman's book that I've never seen before--enable cognitive psychologist to probe the subtle ways that conflicting cues of insufficient data can confound the brain. -- The Sciences, Laurence A. Marschall, March/April 1999
Those with the interest and the patience to overlook Hoffman's shortcomings as a writer can glean much from his insights. -- The New York Times Book Review, Ellen Ruppel Shell
About the Author
Donald D. Hoffman is professor of cognitive science, philosophy, and computer science at the University of California, Irvine.
