San Antonio College Library

What happens during a near-death experience? In an accessible style, this text reviews recent research about unbelievable events, creating an account of activity at the boundaries of science. It also examines research concerns, current theories, methodological issues and clinical implications.

University of California psychologist and researcher Lawrence D. Rosenblum explores the astonishing abilities of the five senses, abilities few of us even know we have. Drawing on groundbreaking insights into the brain's neuroplasticity and integrative powers, including findings from his own research, Rosenblum examines how the brain uses the subtlest information to apprehend the world. A blind person, for example, can "see" through batlike echolocation;...

This title follows on from "Odd Perceptions" with another collection of essays and anecdotes.It covers such topics as how we sometimes mis-see and misunderstand, why we blush, robot snooker and neural nets. It aims to be of interest to all those with a taste for the original and unusual.

"The problem of Perception offers two arguments against direct realism - one concerning illusion, and one concerning hallucination - that up to now no theory of perception could adequately rebut. Smith then develops a theory of perception that succeeds in answering these arguments; and because these arguments are the only two that present direct realism with serious problems arising from the nature of perception, direct realism emerges here for the...

In this book a leading researcher and artist explores how we see pictures and how they can communicate messages to us, both directly and indirectly by making allusions to objects in space or to stored images in our minds. Dr Wade provides fascinating examples of pictures that communicate hidden messages, either by implying something else, or by a shape or portrait which is carried covertly within another design. He analyses image processing stages...

Shadows appear to be counterexamples to the causal theory of perception. After all, an absence of light cannot reflect light into our eyes. Roy Sorensen sets out to resolve this anomaly and to show how the causal theory solves a broad range of visual puzzles about dark things.

This book argues that, since the 1950s, optical illusions have been secretly embedded in mass media in order to manipulate the public unconsciously. These subliminal images are extremely provocative, and involve nightmarish monsters as well as many forms of erotica. In addition, pictures with subliminal meanings understood only on an unconscious level have secretly aroused viewers' innermost fears and fantasies. This book presents many examples and...

"What makes us who we are? From a scientific viewpoint, any individual's existence is improbable at best. This work argues the view of self as a field of pure consciousness, debating the existence of a continuing self and drawing conclusions about this entity and its relation to the physical body and the physical world"--Provided by publisher.