The Eye: A Very Short Introduction by Michael F Land | Goodreads
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The Eye: A Very Short Introduction
(Very Short Introductions #388)
by
Michael F Land
4.15 · Rating details · 27 Ratings · 5 Reviews
The eye is one of the most remarkable achievements of evolution, and has evolved up to 40 times in different parts of the animal kingdom. In humans, vision is one of the most important senses, and much of the brain is given over to the processing of visual information. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Land describes the evolution of vision and the variety of eyes found in both humans and animals. He explores the evolution of color vision in primates, and the workings of the human eye to consider how it contributes to our visual ability. He explains how we see in three dimensions and the basic principles of visual perception, including our impressive capacity for pattern recognition and the ability of vision to guide action. (less)
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Paperback, 128 pages
Published July 1st 2014 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published May 29th 2014)
ISBN
0199680302 (ISBN13: 9780199680306)
Series
Very Short Introductions #388
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September 15, 2018 – Shelved
September 15, 2018 – Shelved as: to-read
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The Oxford Very Short Introductions Series254 books — 50 voters
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Jun 26, 2017Cara rated it liked it
Part of this was much more interesting than you'd expect a book about the eye to be. Part of it was exactly as interesting as you'd expect a book about the eye to be. Probably more falls into the latter category than the former, which is unfortunate, but there's enough here that I don't regret reading it, at least.
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Jun 05, 2018lixy rated it it was amazing
Fascinating, concise, well written and with enough room for a little dry humor, of which this is an example: "an extreme form of color blindness is found in rod monochromats: people who failed to develop cones at all. They have no fovea, no colour vision, and poor resolution. They are, however, very popular with perceptual psychologists."
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Feb 11, 2015Bojan Tunguz rated it really liked it
Our eyes are some of our most precious and prized organs. We receive more information about the world using the sense of vision, than all of the other senses combined. Eye is also a very complex organ, and its complicated structure has fascinated biologists for as long as we have been studying the natural world in a systematic way.
This little book gives a surprisingly detailed glimpse at the nature of eye. It provides the reader with a fairly extensive information about the evolutionary development of the sense of vision, and the variety of eye shapes and mechanisms found in nature. The bulk of the book, unsurprisingly, focuses on mammalian eyes, and human eyes in particular. It covers the nature of vision - how the image is formed in the eye, and the cells and biological mechanisms of vision. It also covers the visual system as a whole, especially how the visual information is processed in the brain. The book also covers the vision defects and impairments, many of which are associated with the aging. I particularly appreciated a brief overview of some of the more advanced technologies that are now helping people with visual impairments see. I wish I could learn more about such topics, and am going to seek out further reading resources that deal with this issue.
The book is overall very informative and written in a very systematic and clear way. however, the prose tends to be a bit cut and dry. This is not the most scintillating popular science book that I have come across, but have nevertheless learned a lot from it. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the eye in a systematic way. (less)
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Jan 02, 2017Tso William rated it liked it
Shelves: a-very-short-introduction, medicine-health, non-fiction
The architecture critic Juhani Pallasmaa rallies against the exclusive use of sight to view buildings. Why not, he asks, uses our sense of touch to feel the buildings? One answer to this question is that our body is biologically predisposed to use our eyes to know the world. As Michael Land reveals in this very short introduction, 27% of the human cortex is devoted to visual function while only 7% to feeling of body surface. Judging with our sight is not a modern invention but an intrinsic part of our body.
This very short introduction is only around 90 pages, excluding the bibliography and index, which is quite unfortunate. A typical book of the VSI series is around 120 pages. Hence, Michael Land explains certain concepts in very terse prose. Certain concepts such as binocular stereopsis or how our eyes view distance are not immediately obvious because we often take them for granted. More than often, the diagrams serve to confuse the readers than to clarify the issues.
However the writer has made interesting comparisons between our eyes and other species' eyes. We have single-chambered eyes while the insects compound eyes. Our nerve is in front of our retina while the octopus' nerve is conveniently placed at the back of the retina. This lets us know why our vision is unique - either uniquely bad (e.g. the inability to view ultra-violet) or uniquely good (e.g. our single-chambered design has much better resolution than the insects's compound eyes). (less)
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Nov 28, 2014Vikas Datta rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
A lucid and accessible introduction to the instrument that makes this vital sense possible..
