A Second Way of Knowing: The Riddle of Human Perception

by Edmund Blair Bolles

Traces the development of scientific and psychological theories of human perception and consciousness and shows their significance in relation to such enduring questions as the nature of reality and of humanity

213 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1991

Reviews

[Lissa Notreallywolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very dated book-apparently the term mouse was not in current usage at the time it was written, nor were voice activated phones and gps in common existence. What remains current is the idea that human perception is an inside job-what we see and perceive is conditioned by what we expect to see and perceive as much as anything else. For those philosophy geeks out there, he's Leibniztian rather than Aristotelian. For the rest of us, this it means that our senses pick up impressions, yeah many like a camera, but our mind only sees what it anticipates or for which it is searching. I had never given much thought to the knowledge that a film is sequenced by the brain into a "moving" picture until I read Moffitt's Painterly Perspective. And then I read this book and it tells me that all of my perception is conditioned by my mind and what I expect to perceive. The human mind is sort of like a party, which culls out which strands of conversation to give attention. The more "buzz" something has, the more likely it is to register. Exhaustion, of course, plays a role in this ,the way you learn to block out traffic when reading on the bus. An interesting point he makes is that it is less important that we speedily process information as it is that we do eventually process the stimulai. Artificial intelligence is largely designed for speed,but in terms of evolutionary survival it is the mammalian trait of contemplation or strategy that hold the day over purely reptilian fight or flight. Left me wondering about the post modern obsession for speed in contrast to the Enlightenment's preoccupation with rationality and thought. And somewhat comforted that speed isn't always the winner in terms of response.