How We See What We See (Science For Everyone) | V. Demidov

We now come to another book in the Science for Everyone Series called How We See What We See by V. Demidov.

The title of the book is self-explanatory. The back cover of the book says:

Pattern recognition and freaks of fashions, the perception of color and the structure of the visual tract, optical illusions and shaping of the mental model of the world are some of the topics discussed in this fascinating and enlightening account of the extremely important frontiers of neurophysiology, and psychology, cybernectics and medicine. The author (a journalist and an engineer) visited many laboratories even participated in many experiments – that is why he is so successful in conveying the atmosphere of scientific search and adventure. The book will appeal to the general reader  and non-specialist researcher.

From the foreword

The author of this book is a journalist and an engineer. The book itself is a result of tive years of fruitful cooperation between the author and the investigators of the Vision Physiology Laboratory at the I.P. Pavlov Physiology Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences at Koltushi, near Leningrad. During this time the author has kept a keen eye on the advances of the Laboratory and covered them in the mass media. Demidov presents his case drawing on the holographic hypothesis of the workings of the brain, which in recent years has been developed actively by international authors (it is to be noted, however, that this concept is shared not by all the workers). Prominent among these studies are  contributions of Soviet scientists, notably at the Pavlov Institute. And since holography is a creation of engineers, it is clear why one of them has been able freely and easily to take bearing using the holographic compass in the sea of evidence, which on the face of it seems to be scrappy,but in fact demonstrates the profound unity of the material foundations of the world before us.

Demidov’s book is one of the most successful attempts to expose the tight interplay of results from a wide variety of fields of learning. Furthermore Demidov relates these findings to problems of vital interest for literally every human being. The book is a brilliant combination of the insight of a scientist and the lively, provoking style of a man of letters.

With that said, the book explores also the history of how we came to know about what we know in this matter.

The book was translated in Hindi as दृश्य और दृष्टि, we do not know of any other translations.

The book was translated from the Russian by Alexander Repyev and was first published by Mir in 1986.

Contents

Chapter One. The Boundary of thePreconscious 1 1

Chapter Two. Galen’s Foresight 26

Chapter Three. Traps for Details of the Image 38

Chapter Four. The Tree of Recognition of Good and Evil 54

Chapter Five. When We Cannot Say A, We Say B 63

Chapter Six. Cycles in Dress 75

Chapter Seven. The World Is Made Up of Details 85

Chapter Eight. All Roads Lead to Rome 102

Chapter Nine. Library or Telebrary? 121

Chapter Ten. The Flat Three-Dimensional World 137

Chapter Eleven. Direct Consequences of the Inverted View 154

Chapter Twelve. The Palette 163

Chapter Thirteen. A Sieve for Images 182

Chapter Fourteen. Illusions Produced by Our Search for Truth 198

Chapter Fifteen. A New Clue to Old Mysteries 214

Literature 239