A Mind’s Eye View


Book Description

A Mind’s Eye View shares a mixed bag of life experiences that has brought joy and an appreciation of the marvels of the natural world to author Marie Thompson. She has an eye for detail that takes the mundane to a level of unexpected enlightenment; her encounters with nature and people reflect her wonder when she looks upon a spider, a homeless man, or considers her own DNA. In this book, Marie’s essays, poetry, and short stories express sensitivity to aspects of life that bring insight and humor.




A Mind's Eyeview


Book Description

By writing this book I experienced a freedom to express my emotions and feelings. To communicate freely without the restrictions that my impaired speech places on me. My parents ignored advice to put me in an institution when I was young and I have dedicated my life to honour them in an attempt to make them proud of me. When walking, I stagger; when writing I fly




In the Mind's Eye


Book Description

How can we best describe the processes by which we visually perceive our environment? Contemporary perceptual theory still lacks a coherent theoretical position that encompasses both the limitations on the information that can be retained from a single eye fixation and the abundant phenomenal and behavioral evidence for the perception of an extended and coherent world. As a result, many leading theorists and researchers in visual perception are turning with new or renewed interest to the work of Julian Hochberg. For over 50 years, in his own experimental research, in his detailed consideration of examples drawn from a wide range of visual experiences and activities, and most of all in his brilliant and sophisticated theoretical analyses, Hochberg has persistently engaged with the myriad problems inherent in working out the kind of coherent theoretical position the field currently lacks. The complexity of his thought and the wide range of areas into which Hochberg has pursued the solution to this central problem have, however, limited both the accessibility of his work and the appreciation of his accomplishment. In this volume we seek to bring the full range of Hochberg's work to the attention of a wider audience by offering a selection of his key works, many taken from out-of-print or relatively inaccessible sources. To facilitate the understanding of his accomplishment, and of what his work has to offer to contemporary researchers and theorists in visual perception, we include commentaries on salient aspects of his work by 20 noted researchers. In the Mind's Eye will be of interest to researchers working on topics such as perceptual organization, visual attention, space perception, motion perception, visual cognition, the relationship between perception and action, picture perception, and film, who are striving to obtain a deeper understanding of their own fields, and who want to integrate this understanding into a broader, unified view of visual perceptual processing.




Theory of Mind and Literature


Book Description

Theory of Mind is what enables us to "put ourselves in another's shoes." It is mindreading, empathy, creative imagination of another's perspective: in short, it is simultaneously a highly sophisticated ability and a very basic necessity for human communication. Theory of Mind is central to such commercial endeavors as market research and product development, but it is also just as important in maintaining human relations over a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, it is a critical tool in reading and understanding literature, which abounds with characters, situations, and "other people's shoes." Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that reading literature also hones these critical mindreading skills. Theory of Mind and Literature is a collection of nineteen essays by prominent scholars (linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers) working in the cutting-edge field of cognitive literary studies, which explores how we use Theory of Mind in reading and understanding literature.




In the Mind's Eye


Book Description

This comparative, interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between literature and the visual arts in France and Britain from 1750-1900. Through a close examination of the prose writings of Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin, read against the background of contemporary philosophy, aesthetics and theories of language, In the Mind's Eye proposes a new interpretation of the influence and rivalries underlying the development of art criticism as a genre during this period. The visual impulse - the desire to transcend the limitations of language and make the reader see - is located within the historical traditions of ekphrasis, enargeia and the paragone, while in each chapter, the individual author's theories of the mind, memory and imagination provide a critical framework for his stylistic experiments. In the Mind's Eye presents an in-depth analysis of the cultural, theoretical and aesthetic implications of artistic border crossings, and by contextualizing the movement toward visual/verbal hybridity in the fiction and criticism of Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin, brings new perspectives to nineteenth-century studies in art and literature.




Survival City


Book Description

On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten’s stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century. “A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating.”—Dave Eggers “A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.”—Los Angeles Times “A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.”—Greil Marcus, Bookforum




On Metaphoring


Book Description

Metaphor familiarizes things strange with things familiar to enrich old things with things newly made familiar. Thus metaphor is an effective intercultural highway without shared thinking-way, for each culture is a specific thinking-way. This volume shows such intercultural communication.




Can the World Afford Autistic Spectrum Disorder?


Book Description

The world affords to most of us a web of subliminal nonverbal communication that regulates our minds, indicates whether our beliefs have, or have not, social approval, and generally guides us. People with autism do not seem to be influenced by these subliminal signals as much as others, and this results in the difficulties in social interaction that are so characteristic of all the autistic spectrum disorders. How is such nonverbal communication carried out, and why do people on the autism spectrum find it so difficult? What are the consequences of this for them, and how do these consequences affect their personality, self-awareness, and sense of place in the world? Digby Tantam explores current theories on nonverbal communication and how it shapes social behaviour, and the evidence for it being impaired in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). He shows how knowledge of this difference can be used to overcome some of the impairments in nonverbal communication in people with ASD, but also how acknowledging them can result in more positive development elsewhere. This groundbreaking book will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in communication, as well as people who have ASD themselves, their families, and all professionals working with people on the autism spectrum.




The Eye's Mind


Book Description

The Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with photography and film as well as the methods of observation used by the social sciences, Karen Jacobs identifies distinctly modernist kinds of observers and visual relationships. This important reconception of modernism draws upon American, British, and French literary and extra-literary materials from the period 1900-1955. These texts share a sense of crisis about vision's capacity for violence and its inability to deliver reliable knowledge. Jacobs looks closely at the ways in which historical understandings of race and gender inflected visual relations in the modernist novel. She shows how modernist writers, increasingly aware of the body behind the neutral lens of the observer, used diverse strategies to displace embodiment onto those "others" historically perceived as cultural bodies in order to reimagine for themselves or their characters a "purified" gaze. The Eye's Mind addresses works by such high modernists as Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and (more distantly) Ralph Ellison and Maurice Blanchot, as well as those by Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathanael West which have been tentatively placed in the modernist canon although they forgo the full-blown experimental techniques often seen as synonymous with literary modernism. Jacobs reframes fundamental debates about modernist aesthetic practices by demonstrating how much those practices are indebted to the changing visual cultures of the twentieth century.




How the Mind Works


Book Description

"A model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear." —New York Review of Books In this Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness? How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life. This edition of Pinker's bold and buoyant classic is updated with a new foreword by the author.