What do you think?
Rate this book
Understanding the Secrets of Human Perception
Your senses aren't just a part of you-they define you. Nothing you experience would be possible without the intricate power of your senses. But how much about them do you really know?
Your ability to sense and perceive the world around you is so richly detailed and accurate as to be miraculous. No tool in the entire universe of scientific exploration can come close to matching the ability of your brain to use information sensed by your eyes, ears, skin, tongue, and nose to produce a rich sensory experience in just milliseconds.
In recent years, neurobiologists and other scientists have uncovered new insights into how your senses work and the amazingly complex and fascinating things they can do. And now you can share in what they've discovered-through this intriguing series of 24 lectures from an award-winning teacher.
Knowing how your senses work and the ways they shape how you see, interact with, and understand your life will help you think more critically about everything you sense and perceive, strengthen your appreciation of the senses that make this possible, prepare you to be an active consumer of new scientific evidence on how our senses work, and much more.
With Professor Vishton as your guide, you'll. consider each of your senses from multiple perspectives:
Explore how your brain processes different sensory information
Consider how your senses work together and within the context of the environment around you
discover how your senses connect you to the world and other people.
Using both cutting-edge research and simple experiments, tests, and demonstrations to hone your understanding, he has created a world-class learning experience that will change the way you think about your senses.
Your ability to sense and perceive the world around you is so richly detailed and accurate as to be miraculous. No tool in the entire universe of scientific exploration can come close to matching the ability of your brain to use information sensed by your eyes, ears, skin, tongue, and nose to produce a rich sensory experience in just milliseconds.
In recent years, neurobiologists and other scientists have uncovered new insights into how your senses work and the amazingly complex and fascinating things they can do. And now you can share in what they've discovered-through this intriguing series of 24 lectures from an award-winning teacher.
Knowing how your senses work and the ways they shape how you see, interact with, and understand your life will help you think more critically about everything you sense and perceive, strengthen your appreciation of the senses that make this possible, prepare you to be an active consumer of new scientific evidence on how our senses work, and much more.
With Professor Vishton as your guide, you'll. consider each of your senses from multiple perspectives:
Explore how your brain processes different sensory information
Consider how your senses work together and within the context of the environment around you
discover how your senses connect you to the world and other people.
Using both cutting-edge research and simple experiments, tests, and demonstrations to hone your understanding, he has created a world-class learning experience that will change the way you think about your senses.
13 pages, Audio CD
First published July 8, 2013
8 people are currently reading
153 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 11, 2015
A truly excellent resource that informed me about various illusions, developmental issues, and lots of other things related to perception. Anyone with a deep interest in psychology should get this.
March 27, 2018
The Great Courses never fail to inspire, to enlighten and to entertain. This Audio work was ordered after serendipitously coming across it in a list of other works. It was ordered under the mistaken belief that this would be a work in psychology explaining how we come to understand various concepts (human perception, right?)
It is a work in psychology, but not quite in the sense one usually thinks of as psychology. It is not about the progression and association of different ideas changing our ideas, but is rather about the physical science of our five senses. This series of 24 fascinating lectures explores how we receive and process information through our various senses. It shows a much firmer grounding of psychology in the physical sciences than is usually contemplated.
These lectures open windows on our understanding of how we learn and how we process information and how this shapes our perceptions of the world around us. Dr. Vishton keeps the subject interesting and can share in depth without becoming arcane or oversharing.
This is a great read/listen for those who wish to understand more thoroughly how we can relate to the world and our environment, and the influences it holds on us.
It is a work in psychology, but not quite in the sense one usually thinks of as psychology. It is not about the progression and association of different ideas changing our ideas, but is rather about the physical science of our five senses. This series of 24 fascinating lectures explores how we receive and process information through our various senses. It shows a much firmer grounding of psychology in the physical sciences than is usually contemplated.
These lectures open windows on our understanding of how we learn and how we process information and how this shapes our perceptions of the world around us. Dr. Vishton keeps the subject interesting and can share in depth without becoming arcane or oversharing.
This is a great read/listen for those who wish to understand more thoroughly how we can relate to the world and our environment, and the influences it holds on us.
August 7, 2021
These fun and informative lectures provide a tour of human perception systems and processes. They start by addressing each sensor: vision, hearing, tasting and smelling, and touching. The author then provides self-contained lectures on some interesting phenomena and research work in the field to provide a deeper understanding of sensory systems and human neurology in general. The facts that impressed me most are:
• Our visions are coupled with head motion senses. If you push your eyeball with a finger to move it, you see the world move in the opposite direction, as expected. But if your eyeball moves under the eye muscle control or because of the head motion, the world would appear stationary. Namely, the apparent motion is compensated by the brain.
• Vision and actions are closely related. While we have optical illusions and misjudge an object’s size, our hands know the correct size when we reach out to grab the object. Also, when we get ready to grab the object, the optical illusion about size goes away. This means we have two sets of neurons for size measurements. The action-related set takes over when we intend to take action.
• Before the body takes action, our mind rehearses the move. So, a more complicated move takes longer to get started.
• Our neural systems are plastic. But practicing a particular cognition task, we group multiple steps into a unit and execute faster. I wonder if I can leverage this knowledge in piano practice.
• Infants are born with certain cognitive prepositions. They recognize the mother’s voice and even the poem if the mother reads to them during pregnancy. They also display preferences to face and certain other objects.
• The brain can fill in the details that a sensor fails to catch. Our field of vision with high resolution is very small. However, the brain forms a large picture with high resolution by stitching multiple sensed images due to eye movement. I also noticed a video seems to be of higher resolution than a frozen frame. Perhaps that is related.\
• The opposing systems in the sensory systems suppress each other. The “red” sense suppresses the “green” sense. The “left-tilting” sense suppresses the “right-tilting” sense. These mechanisms usually work very well in enabling our ability to perceive the world. However, they can also create interesting illusions.
I wish the author cover the following topics in more details
• How does the brain construct a narrative from senses, and what role does attention play in the process? The author talked about attention and narrative here and there. A more systematic coverage would be excellent.
• What can AI and robotics learn from human perception studies?
• How do people vary in their perception abilities? Are these differences due to generics, childhood experiences, or training?
• How would our views of the world be if our sensory capability is different? What if we have a much sharper vision? What if we can hear a higher pitch or a lower pitch sounds?
Overall, these are outstanding lectures. They are easy to follow without requiring physiology and neurology backgrounds. The author passes not only his knowledge but also his love for the field. The lectures are worth listening to again at a later time.
• Our visions are coupled with head motion senses. If you push your eyeball with a finger to move it, you see the world move in the opposite direction, as expected. But if your eyeball moves under the eye muscle control or because of the head motion, the world would appear stationary. Namely, the apparent motion is compensated by the brain.
• Vision and actions are closely related. While we have optical illusions and misjudge an object’s size, our hands know the correct size when we reach out to grab the object. Also, when we get ready to grab the object, the optical illusion about size goes away. This means we have two sets of neurons for size measurements. The action-related set takes over when we intend to take action.
• Before the body takes action, our mind rehearses the move. So, a more complicated move takes longer to get started.
• Our neural systems are plastic. But practicing a particular cognition task, we group multiple steps into a unit and execute faster. I wonder if I can leverage this knowledge in piano practice.
• Infants are born with certain cognitive prepositions. They recognize the mother’s voice and even the poem if the mother reads to them during pregnancy. They also display preferences to face and certain other objects.
• The brain can fill in the details that a sensor fails to catch. Our field of vision with high resolution is very small. However, the brain forms a large picture with high resolution by stitching multiple sensed images due to eye movement. I also noticed a video seems to be of higher resolution than a frozen frame. Perhaps that is related.\
• The opposing systems in the sensory systems suppress each other. The “red” sense suppresses the “green” sense. The “left-tilting” sense suppresses the “right-tilting” sense. These mechanisms usually work very well in enabling our ability to perceive the world. However, they can also create interesting illusions.
I wish the author cover the following topics in more details
• How does the brain construct a narrative from senses, and what role does attention play in the process? The author talked about attention and narrative here and there. A more systematic coverage would be excellent.
• What can AI and robotics learn from human perception studies?
• How do people vary in their perception abilities? Are these differences due to generics, childhood experiences, or training?
• How would our views of the world be if our sensory capability is different? What if we have a much sharper vision? What if we can hear a higher pitch or a lower pitch sounds?
Overall, these are outstanding lectures. They are easy to follow without requiring physiology and neurology backgrounds. The author passes not only his knowledge but also his love for the field. The lectures are worth listening to again at a later time.
January 29, 2018
Another "great courses" listen. Very interesting stuff, if a bit long-winded. I'm starting to notice a pattern with these types of lecture series, where each lectures goes something like this: "Here's what we're going to talk about, here are the details of a study done by so-and-so at whatchamabum University, here's what happened, and here's what that means in layman's terms". The acknowledgement of this pattern isn't an indictment by any means, just an observation I had while listening to this book.
The subject was quite fascinating, and made me think about my interaction with the world around me differently. Certainly, it made me think about how subjective our interactions with the world around us is to each individual person. The old saying "we both hear the same words, but are listening to completely separate stories" definitely rings true.
The subject was quite fascinating, and made me think about my interaction with the world around me differently. Certainly, it made me think about how subjective our interactions with the world around us is to each individual person. The old saying "we both hear the same words, but are listening to completely separate stories" definitely rings true.
August 29, 2017
I really can't recommend this enough. The lectures are clear and concise and worth listening to more than once. If you want a greater appreciation for our sensory lives this is a great place to start. You'll leave with some assumptions destroyed and hopefully a greater curiosity for just how we interact in the world.
November 17, 2017
This was truly fascinating. Our understandings have come so far since I learned these topics 25+ years ago. Reminds me how important it is to stay current on our own functionality...and how much we have left to learn!
November 30, 2020
An amazing read on the various human perceptions - seeing, hearing, touching etc. Brilliant.
February 26, 2021
The book should have contained all the illustrations described in the lectures.
July 16, 2023
Amazing course with a lot of insightful information. It surprised me quite a few times and gave me a lot to think about.
February 19, 2017
This was different than I thought it was going to be, but that made it great. It was so much more than I thought it was going to be. It was neuroscience and psychology and magic tricks all in one. I assumed it would be about the way we see, but it's about all of the senses, and there are way more than five. It was truly fascinating to learn how we interpret the world around us into what we experience as perception.
January 5, 2016
This is from The Learning Company. I've listened to dozens of these, and this is one of the best. In the realm of Cognitive Science, this series of lectures over-delivers, going far past mere "human perception."
April 24, 2016
This was fascinating! I've been reading a lot about skepticism and how our minds trick us, so it was refreshing to be reminded just how amazing human sensory perception is.
Especially recommended for those who enjoyed Radio Lab's MANTIS SHRIMP!!!!!!!!!! episode.
Especially recommended for those who enjoyed Radio Lab's MANTIS SHRIMP!!!!!!!!!! episode.
September 3, 2013
Great review of issues and insights into human perception
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews