Amazon | The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision | Changizi, Mark

In The Vision Revolution, Mark Changizi, prominent neuroscientist and vision expert, addresses four areas of human vision and provides explanations for why we have those particular abilities, complete with a number of full-color illustrations to demonstrate his conclusions and to engage the reader. Written for both the casual reader and the science buff hungry for new information, The Vision Revolution is a resource that dispels commonly believed perceptions about sight and offers answers drawn from the field’s most recent research.

Changizi focuses on four “why” questions:
1. Why do we see in color?
2. Why do our eyes face forward?
3. Why do we see illusions?
4. Why does reading come so naturally to us?

The Vision Revolution explores phenomena such as cyclopses, peeking and many more you hadn’t even thought to wonder about. Changizi shows how deeply involved these evolutionary aspects of our vision are in why we see the way we do—and what the future holds for us.

The Vision Revolution is a book that finally gives attention to what before has been largely neglected by other works on human vision—a book that looks at the “why.”

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本の長さ

240ページ
言語

英語
出版社

BenBella Books
発売日

2010/6/8
寸法

15.24 x 1.27 x 22.86 cm
ISBN-10

9781935251767
ISBN-13

978-1935251767
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“A friendly tone, colorful everyday examples and many helpful figures will draw readers—science buffs or not—down the rabbit hole of cognitive theory and keep them there, dazzled.”
— from Publishers Weekly online (starred review), May 11, 2009

“... the novel ideas that Mr. Changizi outlines in The Vision Revolution—together with the evidence he does present—may have a big effect on our understanding of the human brain. Their implication is that the environments we evolved in shaped the design of our visual system according to a set of deep principles. Our challenge now is to see them clearly.”
—The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2009

“Throughout the book, Changizi peppers his explanations with quick, fascinating visual exercises that help to drive his points home ... Changizi's theories are appealing and logical, and he backs them with good circumstantial evidence. ... One thing is certain: The Vision Revolution will make you wonder the next time you notice someone blush, catch a ball or finish reading a magazine page.”
—Scientific American MIND, July 2009

“Changizi focuses on why humans have evolved such visual ‘superpowers’ as color vision and binocularity. His answers are surprising, overturning theories that have dominated primatology since the 1970s ... Readers, however, need not be well versed in academic debates to enjoy Changizi's lucid explanations. Filled with optical illusions and simple experiments for the reader to perform, this book may be the most fun you'll have learning about human cognition and evolution.”
—Barnes & Noble Spotlight Review, July 13, 2009

“… most imaginative, creative and entertaining ... This book will no doubt offer a revolutionary view on our daily experience of visual perception.”
—Shinsuke Shimojo, Professor in Biology/Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology

“Changizi has the unique ability to draw the reader into asking the most fundamental questions of ‘why’ rather than the more mundane ones of ‘how’...”
—Romi Nijhawan, Reader in Psychology, Sussex University

“This is a book that will open your eyes to the amazing feats of visual perception.”
—Michael A. Webster, Foundation Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno

“… [Changizi] fleshes out his findings and provides a fresh take on many key issues in perception.”
—Robert Deaner, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Grand Valley State University

“… a book full of invention and originality. … If you want to learn how to think outside of the box, then this is a book for you.”
—Peter Lucas, Professor of Anthropology, George Washington University

“... one of the most original accounts of vision ... novel ideas that are sure to radically change your mind about the way vision works.”
—Stanislas Dehaene, head of the CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory

抜粋

Introduction:

In the movie Unbreakable by M. Night Shyamalan, the villain Elijah Price says, “It’s hard for many people to believe that there are extraordinary things inside themselves, as well as others.” Indeed, the story’s superhero, David Dunn, is unaware of his super strength, his inability to be injured (except by drowning), and his ability to sense evil. Dunn would have lived his life without anyone—including himself—realizing he had superpowers if Unbreakable’s villain hadn’t forced him into the discovery.

At first glance we are surprised that Dunn could be so in the dark about his abilities. How could he utilize his evil-detection power every day at work as a security guard without realizing he had it? However, aren’t most powers—super or otherwise—like that? For example, our ability to simply stand requires complex computations about which we are unaware. Complex machines like David Dunn and ourselves only function because we have a tremendous number of “powers” working in concert, but we can only be conscious of a few of these powers at a time. Natural selection has seen to it that precious consciousness is devoted where it’s most needed—and least harmful—leaving everything else running unnoticed just under the surface.

The involuntary functions of our bodies rarely announce their specific purposes. Livers never told anyone they’re for detoxification, and they don’t come with user’s manuals. Neurosurgeons have yet to find any piece of brain with a label reading, “Crucial for future-seeing. Do not remove without medical or clerical consultation.” The functions of our body are carried out by unlabeled meat, and no gadget—no matter how fancy—can allow us to simply read off those functions in a lab.

Powers are even harder to pin down, however, because they typically work superbly only when we’re using them where and when we’re supposed to. Our abilities evolved over millions of years to help us survive and reproduce in nature, and so you can’t understand them without understanding the environment they evolved for, any more than you can understand a stapler without knowing what paper is.

Superpowers, then, can’t be introspected. They can’t be seen with a microscope. And they can’t be grasped simply by knowing the ins and outs of the meat. Instead, the natural environment is half the story. Lucky for us there are ways of finding our powers. Science lets us generate a hypothesis concerning the purpose of some biological structure—what its power is—and then test that hypothesis and its predictions. Those predictions might concern how the power would vary with habitat, what other characteristics an animal with that power would be expected to have, or even what that biological structure would look like were it really designed with that power in mind. That’s how we scientists identify structures’ powers.

And that’s what this scientist is doing in this book: identifying powers. Specifically, superpowers. Even more specifically, superpowers of vision—four of them, one from each of the main subdisciplines of vision: color, binocularity, motion, and object recognition. Or in superhero terms: telepathy, X-ray vision, future-seeing, and spirit-reading. Now, you might be thinking, “How could we possibly have such powers? Mustn’t this author be crazy to suggest such a thing?” Let me immediately allay your fears: there’s nothing spooky going on in this book. I’m claiming we have these four superpowers, yes, but also that they are carried out by our real bodies and brains, with no mysterious mechanisms, no magic, and no funny business. Trust me—I’m a square, stick-in-the-mud, pencil-necked scientist who gets annoyed when one of the cable science channels puts a show on about “hauntings,” “mystics,” or other nonsense.

But then why am I writing about superpowers? “No magic, no superpowers,” some might say. Well, perhaps. But I’m more inclined to say, “No magic, but still superpowers.” I call each of these four powers “superpowers” because each of them has been attributed to superhuman characters, and each of them has been presumed to be well beyond the limits of us regular folk.

That we have superpowers of vision—and yet no one has realized it—is one of the reasons I think you’ll enjoy this book. Superpowers are fun, after all. There’s no denying it. But superpowers are just a part of this book’s story. Each of the four superpowers is the tip of an iceberg, and lying below the surface is a fundamental question concerning our nature. This book is really about answering “why”: Why do we see in color? Why do our eyes face forward? Why do we see illusions? Why are letters shaped the way they are?

What on Earth is the connection between these four deep scientific questions and the four superpowers? I’d hate to give away all the answers now—that’s what the rest of the book is for—but here are some teasers. We use color vision to see skin, so we can sense the emotions and states of our friends and enemies (telepathy). Our eyes face forward so that we can see through objects, whether our own noses or clutter in the world around us (X-ray vision). We see illusions because our brain is attempting to see the future in order to properly perceive the present (future-seeing). And, lastly, letters have culturally evolved over centuries into shapes that look like things in nature because nature is what we have evolved to be good at seeing. These letters then allow us to effortlessly read the thoughts of the living . . . and the dead (spirit-reading).

Although the stories behind these superpowers concern vision, they are more generally about the brain and its evolution. Half of your brain is specialized for performing the computations needed for visual perception, and so you can’t study the brain without spending about half your energies on vision; you won’t miss out on nearly as much by skipping over audition and olfaction. And not only is our brain “half visual,” but our visual system is by far the most well-understood part of our brains. For a century, vision researchers in an area called visual psychophysics have been charting the relationship between the stimuli in front of the eye and the resultant perception elicited “behind” them, in the brain. For decades neuroanatomists such as John Allman, Jon Kaas, and David Van Essen have been mapping the visual areas of the primate brain, and countless other researchers have been characterizing the functional specializations and mechanisms within these areas. Furthermore, understanding the “why” of the brain requires understanding our brain’s evolution and the natural ecological conditions that prevailed during evolution, and these, too, are much better understood for vision than for our other senses and cognitive and behavioral attributes. Although about half the brain may be used for vision, much more than half of the best understood parts of the brain involve vision, making vision part and parcel of any worthwhile attempt to understand the brain.

And who am I, in addition to being a square, stick-in-the-mud, pencil-necked cable viewer? I’m a theoretical neuroscientist, meaning I use my training in physics and mathematics to put forth and test novel theories within neuroscience. But more specifically, I am interested in addressing the function and design of the brain, body, behaviors, and perceptions. What I find exciting about biology and neuroscience is why things are the way they are, not how they actually work. If you describe to me the brain mechanisms underlying our perception of color, I’ll still be left with what I take to be the most important issue: Why did we evolve mechanisms that implement that kind of perception in the first place? That question gets at the ultimate reasons for why we are as we are, rather than the proximate mechanical reasons (which make my eyes glaze over). In attempting to answer such “why” questions I have also had to study evolution, for only by understanding it and the ecological conditions wherein the trait (e.g., color vision) evolved can one come to an ultimate answer. So I suppose that makes me an evolutionary theoretical neuroscientist. That’s why this book is not only about four novel ideas in vision science, but puts an emphasis on the “evolution” in “revolution.”

But enough with the introductions. Let’s get started. Or perhaps I should say . . . up, up, and away!

登録情報

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1935251767
出版社 ‏ : ‎ BenBella Books (2010/6/8)
発売日 ‏ : ‎ 2010/6/8
言語 ‏ : ‎ 英語
ペーパーバック ‏ : ‎ 240ページ
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781935251767
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1935251767
寸法 ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 1.27 x 22.86 cm

Amazon 売れ筋ランキング: - 385,065位洋書 (洋書の売れ筋ランキングを見る)
- - 31位Eye Problems
- - 1,425位Evolution (洋書)

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Daniel Bastian
Scientist Mark Changizi wades into the fascinating story behind human vision.
2013年11月9日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み
Amazonで購入
"Why do we see in color? Why do our eyes face forward? Why do we see illusions? Why are letters shaped the way they are?

Intriguing riddles such as these often necessitate interdisciplinary brilliance to solve. Theoretical biologist and neuroscientist Mark Changizi has been stockpiling research in these areas for much of the last decade, fixated on some of the fascinating but imperfectly understood precincts of human perception. Not content with asking how our central nervous system functions, Changizi is determined to provide explanations of why its architecture and inter-operative functionality exist as they do. The Vision Revolution, should it withstand the scrutiny of peer review, is a groundbreaking work in vision science that brings forward original research into the evolution of the human visual system.

In the book he pivots between four core ideas, each of which are given mystical titles:

(1) Color telepathy: "Color vision was selected for so that we might see emotions and other states on the skin."

(2) X-ray vision: "Forward-facing eyes were selected for so we could use X-ray vision in cluttered environments."

(3) Future-seeing: "Optical illusions are a consequence of the future-seeing power selected for so that we might perceive the present."

(4) Spirit-reading: "Letters culturally evolved into shapes that look like things in nature because nature is what we have evolved to be good at seeing."

Each entrée of this technical collation is truly mind-altering, and it is a joy to tag along as Mark architects the empirical struts of his developmental theses. Let's dive right in.

Color Vision

His first course of business is to provide an alternate explanation of the origin of color vision in primates. While we take it for granted today, color sensing is a relatively recent adaptation in the mammalian order. Until now, the default view among vision scientists is that color was selected for to distinguish between various types of fruit and leaves. The regnant explanation has survival value on its side, but Changizi believes it is not the complete answer. After all, not all mammalian diets are alike, but our color sensors and attendant properties are strikingly continuous with other color-sensitive primates.

Changizi instead makes the case that color acuity evolved to detect changes in skin oxygenation. When blood and oxygen levels fluctuate, we see an instant feedback effect on our skin. These shifts in skin tone and color signal us to changes in mood and emotion states and, more importantly, alert us to physiological dysfunction. A mother who can sense the full range of hue, saturation and brightness deviations in her baby's face and body is in a better position to detect when something is amiss and take proper action.

This hypothesis puzzles out well enough for bare-skinned animals like humans, but what about hairy primates - the ancestors which supposedly evolved these traits long before our debut? It turns out there is a neatly correlated distribution between color vision and bare-faced primates. Changizi surveys the animal kingdom and finds that primates lacking color vision have furry faces, while those with hairless spots on their faces and body tend to have color vision just like us. He notes that this more "fleshed-out" explanation (pun intended) does not swear mutual exclusivity with the dominant explanation; indeed, they could be co-occurring drivers of selection.

X-ray Vision

Have you ever wondered why we have forward-facing eyes, as opposed to sideways-facing eyes like most reptiles, birds and fish? As Changizi demonstrates, this element of our physiology was selected for to better suit the habitat in which our ancestors evolved. This might at first seem like a non-intuitive proposition, as surely our survival would be better served by the ability to see both in front of and behind us (as animals with sideways-facing eyes most certainly can). But there's a more marvelous, some might say superhuman reason our current orientation was favored.

Close one of your eyes. Notice how your nose is suddenly visible. The result is the same when you close your other eye. With both eyes open, however, the portion of your visual field occupied by your nose is no longer blocked. You are, effectively, able to see through your nose. Remarkably, this trick can be reproduced with any object whose width is narrower than the width of your eyes. Hold up your hand, position it vertically in front of your face, and you can see through it to read the screen behind it.

According to Changizi, this ability was helpful in leafy habitats, enabling our predecessors to see through grass and other foliage to spot predators and food. As life transitioned from water to land, those acclimatizing to heavily verdant environments gradually evolved the optical design shared by humans today. The binocular region for animals with sideways-facing eyes, on the other hand, is far too narrow to be effective, explaining why this arrangement is less commonly found in lush surrounds. While we may be manifestly less dependent on this feature today, it is nonetheless fascinating that evolution has gifted us with a passive form of X-ray vision.

Optical Illusions (and why they trick us)

As we move into the book's third unit, we listen in as Changizi disassembles the aura of visual illusions. It's estimated that eyes first evolved around 500 million years ago. Why then, after all this time, aren't our eyes and brains complex enough to avoid being fooled by simple visual tomfoolery? Shouldn't we process these images correctly by now?

The answer lies in the communication protocols linking our optical and brain arrays. The deep relationships governing the brain and the eye help us function appropriately in a three-dimensional world. The architecture of our central nervous system is such that a gap of 1/10th of a second exists between the moment light first hits our photoreceptors and when that signal is processed by the brain. Our brain then compensates for this delay by projecting images 1/10th of a second into the future.

These premonitions aid us in catching a thrown ball, for example, but can trick our senses when viewing static imagery on a two-dimensional plane. In effect, our in-built neural lag causes us to intuit motion-like characteristics to inert images. Alas, our future-seeing ability is too favorable to our survival to ever part with, so the minor bug of awkwardly processing 2D geometry will remain an acceptable trade-off.

Nature's Alphabet

"Spirit-reading" is Changizi's nimble way of referring to all of the knowledge, thoughts and ideas nesting in the world's books, literature and other written material. Thanks to language and writing, we have the ability to peer into the minds of our ancestors. And what an uncanny ability it is! Written language is not a technology we could have guaranteed would mesh well with our biology. So how did it come about? And why was it such a glowing success?

Changizi seeks to explain the contagion of written communication by linking its design to the shapes and contours found in our natural environment. If the basic strokes, junctions, marks and symbols of writing were adapted from familiar objects in nature, then our streamlined visual system would be well-prepared to process this information effectively. In fact, if we rewind the clock to our most ancient writing systems, we find they are unmistakably logographic (object-like), including Sumerian cuneiform (the very first writing system ever developed organically ~3200 BCE), Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and the independently derived writing of the Mexican Indians appearing sometime before 600 BCE.

Through some involved visual linguistic analysis, Changizi submits that the fundamental structures of letters are akin to object parts observed in nature. The more common configurations we find in nature tend to find prevalence in human writing schemes. This relationship was no accident; our ancestors mimicked natural scenery to optimize information retrieval through the instrument of writing. In this sense, the clues to writing's triumph are lurking in the letters themselves.

Closing Thoughts

There should be more books like The Vision Revolution. Changizi presents a highly compelling, evolutionarily grounded case for four intriguing ideas, distills the related focus areas into readable prose, and tailors it to the nonspecialist. The abundance of visual aids is a thrilling, effective way to convey his ideas and goes a long way toward making this more engaging than the average non-fiction work. The Vision Revolution is concise, well-argued, easy to wade through, and comes enthusiastically recommended. These ideas will change the way we think about vision and our perception of the world, and I hope it spawns even more exciting research going forward.

続きを読む

Daniel Bastian

Scientist Mark Changizi wades into the fascinating story behind human vision.
2013年11月9日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み
"Why do we see in color? Why do our eyes face forward? Why do we see illusions? Why are letters shaped the way they are?

Intriguing riddles such as these often necessitate interdisciplinary brilliance to solve. Theoretical biologist and neuroscientist Mark Changizi has been stockpiling research in these areas for much of the last decade, fixated on some of the fascinating but imperfectly understood precincts of human perception. Not content with asking how our central nervous system functions, Changizi is determined to provide explanations of why its architecture and inter-operative functionality exist as they do. The Vision Revolution, should it withstand the scrutiny of peer review, is a groundbreaking work in vision science that brings forward original research into the evolution of the human visual system.

In the book he pivots between four core ideas, each of which are given mystical titles:

(1) Color telepathy: "Color vision was selected for so that we might see emotions and other states on the skin."

(2) X-ray vision: "Forward-facing eyes were selected for so we could use X-ray vision in cluttered environments."

(3) Future-seeing: "Optical illusions are a consequence of the future-seeing power selected for so that we might perceive the present."

(4) Spirit-reading: "Letters culturally evolved into shapes that look like things in nature because nature is what we have evolved to be good at seeing."

Each entrée of this technical collation is truly mind-altering, and it is a joy to tag along as Mark architects the empirical struts of his developmental theses. Let's dive right in.

Color Vision

His first course of business is to provide an alternate explanation of the origin of color vision in primates. While we take it for granted today, color sensing is a relatively recent adaptation in the mammalian order. Until now, the default view among vision scientists is that color was selected for to distinguish between various types of fruit and leaves. The regnant explanation has survival value on its side, but Changizi believes it is not the complete answer. After all, not all mammalian diets are alike, but our color sensors and attendant properties are strikingly continuous with other color-sensitive primates.

Changizi instead makes the case that color acuity evolved to detect changes in skin oxygenation. When blood and oxygen levels fluctuate, we see an instant feedback effect on our skin. These shifts in skin tone and color signal us to changes in mood and emotion states and, more importantly, alert us to physiological dysfunction. A mother who can sense the full range of hue, saturation and brightness deviations in her baby's face and body is in a better position to detect when something is amiss and take proper action.

This hypothesis puzzles out well enough for bare-skinned animals like humans, but what about hairy primates - the ancestors which supposedly evolved these traits long before our debut? It turns out there is a neatly correlated distribution between color vision and bare-faced primates. Changizi surveys the animal kingdom and finds that primates lacking color vision have furry faces, while those with hairless spots on their faces and body tend to have color vision just like us. He notes that this more "fleshed-out" explanation (pun intended) does not swear mutual exclusivity with the dominant explanation; indeed, they could be co-occurring drivers of selection.

X-ray Vision

Have you ever wondered why we have forward-facing eyes, as opposed to sideways-facing eyes like most reptiles, birds and fish? As Changizi demonstrates, this element of our physiology was selected for to better suit the habitat in which our ancestors evolved. This might at first seem like a non-intuitive proposition, as surely our survival would be better served by the ability to see both in front of and behind us (as animals with sideways-facing eyes most certainly can). But there's a more marvelous, some might say superhuman reason our current orientation was favored.

Close one of your eyes. Notice how your nose is suddenly visible. The result is the same when you close your other eye. With both eyes open, however, the portion of your visual field occupied by your nose is no longer blocked. You are, effectively, able to see through your nose. Remarkably, this trick can be reproduced with any object whose width is narrower than the width of your eyes. Hold up your hand, position it vertically in front of your face, and you can see through it to read the screen behind it.

According to Changizi, this ability was helpful in leafy habitats, enabling our predecessors to see through grass and other foliage to spot predators and food. As life transitioned from water to land, those acclimatizing to heavily verdant environments gradually evolved the optical design shared by humans today. The binocular region for animals with sideways-facing eyes, on the other hand, is far too narrow to be effective, explaining why this arrangement is less commonly found in lush surrounds. While we may be manifestly less dependent on this feature today, it is nonetheless fascinating that evolution has gifted us with a passive form of X-ray vision.

Optical Illusions (and why they trick us)

As we move into the book's third unit, we listen in as Changizi disassembles the aura of visual illusions. It's estimated that eyes first evolved around 500 million years ago. Why then, after all this time, aren't our eyes and brains complex enough to avoid being fooled by simple visual tomfoolery? Shouldn't we process these images correctly by now?

The answer lies in the communication protocols linking our optical and brain arrays. The deep relationships governing the brain and the eye help us function appropriately in a three-dimensional world. The architecture of our central nervous system is such that a gap of 1/10th of a second exists between the moment light first hits our photoreceptors and when that signal is processed by the brain. Our brain then compensates for this delay by projecting images 1/10th of a second into the future.

These premonitions aid us in catching a thrown ball, for example, but can trick our senses when viewing static imagery on a two-dimensional plane. In effect, our in-built neural lag causes us to intuit motion-like characteristics to inert images. Alas, our future-seeing ability is too favorable to our survival to ever part with, so the minor bug of awkwardly processing 2D geometry will remain an acceptable trade-off.

Nature's Alphabet

"Spirit-reading" is Changizi's nimble way of referring to all of the knowledge, thoughts and ideas nesting in the world's books, literature and other written material. Thanks to language and writing, we have the ability to peer into the minds of our ancestors. And what an uncanny ability it is! Written language is not a technology we could have guaranteed would mesh well with our biology. So how did it come about? And why was it such a glowing success?

Changizi seeks to explain the contagion of written communication by linking its design to the shapes and contours found in our natural environment. If the basic strokes, junctions, marks and symbols of writing were adapted from familiar objects in nature, then our streamlined visual system would be well-prepared to process this information effectively. In fact, if we rewind the clock to our most ancient writing systems, we find they are unmistakably logographic (object-like), including Sumerian cuneiform (the very first writing system ever developed organically ~3200 BCE), Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and the independently derived writing of the Mexican Indians appearing sometime before 600 BCE.

Through some involved visual linguistic analysis, Changizi submits that the fundamental structures of letters are akin to object parts observed in nature. The more common configurations we find in nature tend to find prevalence in human writing schemes. This relationship was no accident; our ancestors mimicked natural scenery to optimize information retrieval through the instrument of writing. In this sense, the clues to writing's triumph are lurking in the letters themselves.

Closing Thoughts

There should be more books like The Vision Revolution. Changizi presents a highly compelling, evolutionarily grounded case for four intriguing ideas, distills the related focus areas into readable prose, and tailors it to the nonspecialist. The abundance of visual aids is a thrilling, effective way to convey his ideas and goes a long way toward making this more engaging than the average non-fiction work. The Vision Revolution is concise, well-argued, easy to wade through, and comes enthusiastically recommended. These ideas will change the way we think about vision and our perception of the world, and I hope it spawns even more exciting research going forward.

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2014年8月25日に英国でレビュー済み
Amazonで購入
Having read all the five star feedbacks (from amazon US) I enthusiastically bought this book only to be sourly disappointed.
The standard approach of the Author is to propose an idea (usually in "I think..." form) and then to search for facts and evidence to support it.
But what about evidence that contradicts his theories? They are conveniently swept under the rug.
Now I do concede that the book's first chapter about why our cones have developed sensitivity to specific frequencies are validly supported, and that there could be truth in this, but what ruins the Author's credibility are endless cases where the facts are clearly wrong or badly supported.

One of these "threads" where things get pretty bad is when the Author tries to convince the reader that mankind has lost its fur for "color signaling". To me, his line of reasoning sounds absurd (p.28): "Skin that is bare -not skin of any particular color- is what we expect to see in primates with color vision, and that's what we find. Bare skin, then, is for color signaling".
This is an example of "cargo cult science" (google it): by seeing two thing happen together, it is deduced that one is cause of the other.
Then again about why we humans still retain some facial hair: "...eyebrows, probably useful for exaggerating facial expressions...". Eyebrows are there so that sweat and rain don't go into the eyes!
Later (p.34) the Author again argues that bare skin is for color signaling: "...Once an animal is bare-skinned and begins to color signal, natural selection could cause specific injured spots to become more visible". That natural selection would change the chemistry of wounds to make them more visible is utterly contorted and unproved, but it gets worse. Veterinarians assure the Author that bruises on dogs are just as bad as on humans (which would not fit with his assumptions) so he goes on arguing that a controlled test should be done (if a controlled test to see a difference in color is needed then it is not for color signaling, is it?). This in not science, the Author is just making it up on the spot.

Another example is when the Author is trying to "prove" that his daughter is using symbols to represent reality in her drawings: "Look at nearly any of the objects in my daughter's drawing in Figure 1. An attempt at realism? Hardly." (p.174).
Saying that children use "symbols to represent reality" because his 5 year daughter's drawing is not "realistic" seems quite hilarious to me, but this is the level at which the Author reasons throughout the whole book. (One could argue that any drawing is a symbol of reality, even a photograph)

The main proposition of the last chapter, the 4th, is: "...If written words must be built out of multiple symbols, then to make words look object-like, symbols should look like object parts. And as we'll see, that's what culture did. Culture dealt with the speech-writer dilemma by designing letters that look like the object parts found in nature..."
And what constitutes "nature" according to the Author? Cubes (!?). Due to the bottom left corner of a cube (a common shape in nature, according to the Author) he concludes that an shape "L" is commonly found in nature (!?), and this is the reason we find it in writing (!?). So THIS "proves" that the letter "L" was inspired by nature. Totally absurd.
I am not saying that in some culture, some written symbol was not inspired by something seen in nature. The problem is that arranging a number of cubes (this is nature?) and finding that some parts of the resulting figure resemble letters constitutes no kind of proof. Very bad science, again. Furthermore there are more plausible explanation as to why letters are shaped with "strokes". A stroke in stone was easier than carving out a curve for instance.

I could go on and on with this kind of examples. The point I want to make is that the Author makes some very bold statements throughout the book with weak or absurd evidence.
I have found the 5 star reviews given to this book totally misleading. There is no inquiry, no verification of what the Author states, everything is taken for true. Readers are praising the Author for revolutionary explanations about vision, when in fact these have only been proposed, and very weakly that is.

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Interesting book about vision
2014年4月8日にドイツでレビュー済み
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The book is nicely written, everything is clearly explained but the style is more that of a magazine than a serious book (which might be an advantage or a disadvantage dependeign on what you are looking for).

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Hgnomentat
worth it regardless
2010年12月17日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み
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lots of important new ideas here make this definitely worth reading. however, it doesn't "overturn everything" we know about human perception and this author along with a lot of other "new" psychologists would benefit from a more thorough study of what has been known and remains true. in this case i will mention perception of the neutral density spectrum (black-grey-white) as particularly uninformed, though even here there are contributions - just not the revolutionary and "overturning" sort the author hypes. believe it or not, in the early 20th century, by the time i graduated in 1968, perception psychology had already solved a great many mysteries and those solutions stand up quite well because the studies were well and elegantly designed and done. wolfgang koehler and hans wallach, for instance, are among the gestalt psychologists who showed us many things and whose writings are just as interesting as "the latest" stuff.

i think the section on illusions and perception of the future alone is probably reason enough to buy this book.

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Fergus McClelland
Stunning and weird
2012年7月10日に英国でレビュー済み
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When you read this book your whole idea of seeing and sight changes. It is deep and challenging - and heavily backed up by science. Fascinating, a great read. At times dense ideas - but explained in simple language. If you are interested in perception you just have to read it. Be prepared to work with the book though, not just skim it - otherwise you will be wasting your time.

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The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision ペーパーバック – 2010/6/8

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Mark Changizi

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Scientist Mark Changizi wades into the fascinating story behind human vision.

Science upside down

Interesting book about vision

worth it regardless

Stunning and weird

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著者をフォロー

The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision ペーパーバック – 2010/6/8

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著者について

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著者について

Mark Changizi

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上位レビュー、対象国： 日本

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5つ星のうち4.0 Scientist Mark Changizi wades into the fascinating story behind human vision.

5つ星のうち1.0 Science upside down

5つ星のうち4.0 Interesting book about vision

5つ星のうち5.0 worth it regardless

5つ星のうち5.0 Stunning and weird

上位レビュー、対象国：日本

Scientist Mark Changizi wades into the fascinating story behind human vision.

Science upside down

Interesting book about vision

worth it regardless

Stunning and weird