240 Pages
    by Routledge

    240 Pages
    by Routledge

    Richard Gregory was one of the major scientific thinkers of our time. Originally published in 1986, here he presents essays on the rich subject of perception. How we experience colours, shapes, sounds, touches, tickles, tastes and smells is a mysterious and rich inquiry. Wonderful as these sensations are, though, he argues that perception becomes really interesting when we consider how objects are identified and located in space and time as things we interact with, using our intelligence to understand them. Gregory’s essays convey the crucial importance of the major scientists and their achievements in the study of perception; but they also show us how much we can learn from our surroundings, our language, our times, our successes and our failures. Why are we so often fooled, in scientific as well as everyday life?

    Illustrations.  Pre-script.  Part 1: Amusing  1. Laughing Matter  2. Toy Mates  3. Matches to Murder  4. When Worlds Collide  5. Swatting Truth  6. Ivory Towers of Babel: Illuminated by Eclipses of the Sun  7. Living with Robots  Part 2: Musing  8. Magical Mechanisms of Mind  9. Is Consciousness Sensational Inference?  10. Conjuring  11. The Oddest Perceptions: Illusions  12. Reflecting on Mirrors  13. With Two Pins and a Length of String: The Odd Perceptions of Johannes Kepler  14. French without Fears: Denis Diderot and Julian Offray de la Mettrie  15. Samuel Butler: Nowhere in a Mirror  16. On First Reading a Book by Einstein  17. Kenneth Craik’s The Nature of Explanation: Forty Years On  18. The Genius of Alan Turing  19. Premature Reductions and Mythical Productions: Gains and Losses of Explanation  20. Is ESP Crystal Balls?  21. This Estranged Intelligence  Part 3: Using  22. Inventing  23. Half-Baked Designs  24. The Fourth Dimension of 3-D  25. See Naples and Live: The Scanning Eye of Copilia  26. Bacon’s Last Egg: Exploratory Science Hands-On  27. Spelling Spells  28. Whatever Happened to Information Theory?  29. Designing Designers  30. Journey to Unconsciousness with Ketamine  31. Engineering Mind.  Post-script.  Index

    Biography

    Richard L. Gregory