cover image A Second Way of Knowing: The Riddle of Human Perception

A Second Way of Knowing: The Riddle of Human Perception

Edmund Blair Bolles. Prentice Hall, $18.95 (213pp) ISBN 978-0-13-471582-7

How human perception works is a mystery that science has scarcely begun to unriddle, observes Bolles ( So Much to Say! ). Perception, as he defines it, is a creative faculty by which we keep ourselves oriented, evaluate experience and pick out meaningful qualities from the sensory deluge. Behaviorism ``tried to bluff its way through'' this puzzle, while computer-based models of perception--for example, neural nets to imitate the brain's actual circuitry--``come up short,'' in Bolles's judgment. Interjecting his personal experiences, he takes readers on a conversational tour through the maze of perception, throwing fresh light on visualization, optical illusions, theories of dreaming, color vision, cultural differences in perception and the pervasive roles of pleasure, pain, emotion and awareness in determining how we perceive and construct reality. Illustrations. (July)