Book picks similar to
Basic Vision: An Introduction to Visual Perception by Robert Snowden
science
non-fiction
psychology
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The Girl in building C
Mary Krugerud - 2018
She entered Ah-gwah-ching State Sanatorium at Walker, Minnesota, for what she thought would be a short stay. In January, her tuberculosis spread, and she nearly died. Her recovery required many months of bed rest and medical care.Marilyn loved to write, and the story of her three-year residency at the sanatorium is preserved in hundreds of letters that she mailed back home to her parents, who could visit her only occasionally and whom she missed terribly. The letters functioned as a diary in which Marilyn articulately and candidly recorded her reactions to roommates, medical treatments, Native American nurses, and boredom. She also offers readers the singular perspective of a bed-bound teenager, gossiping about boys, requesting pretty new pajamas, and enjoying Friday evening popcorn parties with other patients.Selections from this cache of letters are woven into an informative narrative that explores the practices and culture of a midcentury tuberculosis sanatorium and fills in long-forgotten details gleaned from recent conversations with Marilyn, who "graduated" from the sanatorium and went on to lead a full, productive life.
A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
V.S. Ramachandran - 2003
Ramachandran, now shares his unique insight into human consciousness in an entertaining, inspiring, and intellectually dazzling brief tour of the ultimate frontier—the thoughts in our heads.A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness is made up of five investigations of the greatest mysteries of the brain. The first chapter shows how amputees feel pain in limbs they no longer have as it introduces the great revolution of our age: neuroscience. The second chapter walks through the way what we see determines our thoughts, and demonstrates the counterintuitive point that believing is in fact seeing. The third chapter takes a leap beyond cutting edge science to audaciously set out a general theory of beauty, explaining why, the world over, cultures have fundamentally similar notions of what is attractive. The fourth chapter explores the bizarre world of synesthetes, people who see colors in numbers, textures in smells, sounds in sights, and flavors in sounds. Finally, V. S. Ramachandran one of the foremost brain researchers in the world today, sums up the implications of the revolution in our understanding of consciousness, to make a fascinating argument about our essential sense of self and its distributed nature.
Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson - 1973
This third edition has been fully revised and uses a story-telling approach to illustrate how research is done and the results of such research. Each chapter begins with a real-life vignette that epitomizes the social psychological concepts that follow, and experiences and historical events are used to illustrate theories within social psychology.
Origami Tessellations: Awe-Inspiring Geometric Designs
Eric Gjerde - 2008
With step-by-step instructions, illustrated crease patterns, and how-to photos, you'll learn to create these wonderful designs yourself. Eric's first book covers the fundamentals of origami tessellations, provides history, and describes simple beginning techniques with detailed illustrations and photographs. An extensive gallery showcases tessellations folded by the world's leading origami fine artists---inspiring you to experiment, innovate, and eventually create your own unique designs.
At the Bench: A Laboratory Navigator, Updated Edition: A Laboratory Navigator
Kathy Barker - 1998
In this newly revised edition, chapters have been rewritten to accommodate the impact of computer technology and the Internet, not only on the acquisition and analysis of data, but also on its organization and presentation. Alternatives to the use of radiation have been expanded, and figures and illustrations have been redrawn to reflect changes in laboratory equipment and procedures.
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
Juhani Pallasmaa - 1996
This new, revised and extended edition of this seminal work will not only inspire architects and students to design more holistic architecture, but will enrich the general reader's perception of the world around them. The Eyes of the Skin has become a classic of architectural theory and consists of two extended essays. The first surveys the historical development of the ocular-centric paradigm in western culture since the Greeks, and its impact on the experience of the world and the nature of architecture. The second examines the role of the other senses in authentic architectural experiences, and points the way towards a multi-sensory architecture which facilitates a sense of belonging and integration.
The Visual Arts: A History
Hugh Honour - 1971
It presents art history as an essential part of the development of humankind, encompassing the arts of Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas-spanning from the primitive art of hunters 30,000 years ago to the most controversial art forms of today.
Language: The Basics
R.L. Trask - 1995
It features chapters on 'Language in Use', 'Attitudes to Language', 'Children and Language' and 'Language, Mind and Brain'.
Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind
Arthur Zajonc - 1993
When the boy's eyes were healed they removed the bandages and, waving a hand in front of the child's physically perfect eyes, asked him what he saw. "I don't know," was his only reply. What he saw was only a varying brightness in front of him. However, when allowed to touch the hand as it began to move, he cried out in a voice of triumph, "It's moving!" He could feel it move, but he still needed laboriously to learn to see it move. Light and eyes were not enough to grant him sight. How, then, do we see? What's the difference between seeing and perception? What is light?From ancient times to the present, from philosophers to quantum physicists, nothing has so perplexed, so fascinated, so captivated the mind as the elusive definition of light. In Catching the Light, Arthur Zajonc takes us on an epic journey into history, tracing how humans have endeavored to understand the phenomenon of light. Blending mythology, religion, science, literature, and painting, Zajonc reveals in poetic detail the human struggle to identify the vital connection between the outer light of nature and the inner light of the human spirit. He explains the curiousness of the Greeks' blue and green "color blindness": Odysseus gazing longingly at the "wine-dark sea"; the use of chloros (green) as the color of honey in Homer's Odessey; and Euripides' use of the color green to describe the hue of tears and blood. He demonstrates the complexity of perception through the work of Paul Cézanne--the artist standing on the bank of a river, painting the same scene over and over again, the motifs multiplying before his eyes. And Zajonc goes on to show how our quest for an understanding of light, as well as the conclusions we draw, reveals as much about the nature of our own psyche as it does about the nature of light itself. For the ancient Egyptians the nature of light was clear--it simply was the gaze of God. In the hands of the ancient Greeks, light had become the luminous inner fire whose ethereal effluence brought sight. In our contemporary world of modern quantum physics, science plays the greatest part in our theories of light's origin--from scientific perspectives such as Sir Isaac Newton's "corpuscular theory of light" and Michael Faraday's "lines of force" to such revolutionary ideas as Max Planck's "discrete motion of a pendulum" (the basis of quantum mechanics), Albert Einstein's "particles of light" and "theory of relativity," and Niels Bohr's "quantum jumps." Yet the metaphysical aspects of the scientific search, Zajonc shows, still loom large. For the physicist Richard Feynman, a quantum particle travels all paths, eventually distilling to one path whose action is least--the most beautiful path of all. Whatever light is, here is where we will find it.With rare clarity and unmatched lyricism, Zajonc illuminates the profound implications of the relationships between the multifaceted strands of human experience and scientific endeavor. A fascinating search into our deepest scientific mystery, Catching the Light is a brilliant synthesis
Untitled
Blaine Hogan - 2011
The blank page.It has so much power.Some days it's terrifying, sometimes thrilling, but mostly it's just plain old scary.It is the reason many people never finish that novel, or complete that project, or follow through with that one thing they used to dream about.Sadly, it is the reason many people never even begin.Blaine Hogan's manifesto, UNTITLED: Thoughts on the Creative Process is here to change all that.As an artist who has designed t-shirts, made light fixtures, created performance art in alleyways, performed on big and small stages all across the country, acted on network television, and is now a creative director at one of the largest churches in North America, Blaine walks you through the creative process of attacking the blank page, executing vision, finding the importance of contemplation, fighting the battle with resistance, and learning from your failures.Blank pages be gone!Read UNTITLED and get ready to fill those suckers with good and meaningful work.
The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art
Anjan Chatterjee - 2013
Chatterjee uses neuroscience to probe how an aesthetic sense is etched in our minds and evolutionary psychology to explain why aesthetic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses fundamental questions: What is beauty? Is beauty universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art? Chatterjee starts by probing the reasons that we find people, places, and even numbers beautiful. At the root of beauty, he finds, is pleasure. He then examines our pleasures by dissecting why we want and why we like food, sex, and money and how these rewards relate to aesthetic encounters. His ruminations on beauty and pleasure prepare him and the reader to face art. He wanders through the problems of defining art, understanding contemporary art, and interpreting ancient art. He explores why art, something that seems so useless, also feels fundamental to our humanity. Replete with facts, anecdotes, and analogies, this empirical guide to aesthetics offers scientific answers without deflating the wonders of beauty and art.
Psychology
Saundra K. Ciccarelli - 2005
Using the recommended APA undergraduate psychology learning outcomes, the authors establish clear learning objectives for students and tie the text assessment to these objectives.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture
Marco Livingstone - 2012
These large, colorful works are the capstone of his engagement with nature, not only in England but also in the American Southwest, through the media of painting and photography. This book, the catalog of the first major Hockney museum exhibition in many years, offers a glorious view of the landscape as seen by the artist, and it includes not only his recent paintings but also his iPhone and iPad drawings. Essays by leading art historians—as well as a more literary piece by novelist Margaret Drabble and Hockney’s own reflections on his recent work—explore Hockney’s art from various perspectives.Praise for David Hockney:"Supplemented with numerous essays by art critics and Hockney himself, this is a mesmerizing volume of an established artist who continues to assert his dynamic relevancy." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "This glorious volume showcases this unique and exhilarating body of work, which celebrates the pulse of life in trees, fields, flowers, and clouds over the great cycle of the seasons . . . The enlightening commentary is merely prelude to a swoon once the reader turns to the 300 resplendent color reproductions." —Booklist, starred review
Men Chase, Women Choose: The Neuroscience of Meeting, Dating, Losing Your Mind, and Finding True Love
Dawn Maslar - 2016
Music, literature, and movies are filled with common folklore about love and millions of TV viewers tune in to shows like The Bachelor and read the latest relationship tome with one simple hope: to uncover some nugget of mystic wisdom that will help them understand the exciting, addictive, insane experience called 'love'. Men Chase, Women Choose, is the first book to offer cutting-edge research that explains how the brain works when two people first meet, start to date, fall in love, and then move into long-term, real love. Maslar's unique approach brings together the latest and most relevant neurological, physiological, and biochemical research on the science of love while incorporating stories and examples of composite characters based on participants of her popular classes and seminars. She explains that 'love' is actually neural activity as well as the presence or absence of certain neurotransmitters that bathe the brain, and it follows a precisely timed path of four, easy-to-understand phases: the exciting norepinephrine-charged meeting phase; the addictive dopamine dating phase; the insane falling-in-love and losing your mind phase; and finally, the safe, warm and wonderful, true, long-term love phase. For the past decade Maslar has made it her mission to learn all she can about the science behind falling in love, including its evolutionary benefits. Her goal—and the purpose of this book—is to help men and women find and maintain love by understanding and applying the science behind it. The bottom line? We actually can have long-lasting, nourishing, exciting, passionate love with little or no risk!
My Life After Life: A Posthumous Memoir
Galen Stoller - 2011
He was able to make contact in dream states with his intuitive father within days and verbal contact by the end of the first month. Two years later he requested his father write down communication from Galen about his new circumstances. Dr. Stoller’s only comments in this revelatory account appear in Editor’s Notes at the end of each chapter. While there are many accounts of near-death experiences, never has an account been written documenting a personal encounter with such detail and clarity. The story of this gifted boy intent on getting through to earth the knowledge of what lies beyond is both comforting and sobering with a message relevant for all of us still living in this dimension.