A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision by Simon Ings

A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision Reviews

• 
  Trevor

  You ought to get hold of this book – it is one of those books that play with your mind in uncomfortable ways – but I mean that in the best of all possible senses. A lot of what I’ve been reading lately has pointed out that we humans are anything but very good at this whole self-awareness thing. Bizarrely, despite vision appearing to be one of the most obvious of our ‘talents’, the closer we study it the clearer it becomes that it doesn’t work in anything like the way we think it does.
  
  When we look out about ourselves it seems that what we see is a bit like a motion picture. There is an objective reality out there and we have a pair of eyes and those eyes register what we see on the back of our retina, in much the same way a camera registers images on film. That is, there is, more or less, a one to one correspondence between what our eye sees and what is out there in the real world. This illusion is remarkably hard to shake – in fact, I think it is impossible to believe we don’t see fully detailed representations in our minds of the passing world around us. That this can be comprehensibly shown to be an illusion is another of those things in modern science you have to just accept or ‘believe’ – as I am certain we never really can ‘unfool’ ourselves of this illusion.
  
  This book is really brilliant – not only can this guy write, but he tells stories in ways that, even if you have heard them before, breathes new life into them while also nearly always having something new and fabulously interesting to add along the way. I loved this book – I’ve tormented the people around me with it since the first few pages, even reading bits to people (always a pretty sure sign a book is really good).
  
  Now, having said that and having given it five stars, I’m going to complain a little bit. I wanted answers! The problem is that there probably aren’t any answers to some of the questions this book throws up along the way. Let's start with the question that has worried me the most. Essentially, there appear to be two kinds of eyes you can have – an eye like ours or a compound eye, like a fly’s. When these eyes were starting out as light sensitive patches of skin they could improve the image they created by either forming a little indent or dip (the first step towards making a human eye) or they could form a kind of little pimple – both improve the image obtained, but both have remarkably different long-term consequences.
  
  If we had compound eyes we would need to look like this guy to have the same resolution of images that our eyes provide us with:
  http://www.eyedesignbook.com/ch2/fig2... A one metre round eye on top of our already seriously large heads might be somewhat inconvenient. What is interesting is that no animals bigger than insects have compound eyes – animals growing bigger ought not to be too much of a problem for evolution. The size animals can grow to might well be decided in some why by the type of eyes they have, with larger animals needing better resolution of images and that to achieve this is due to an accident of cell formation at the very origins of sight (cells going up instead of going down to improve focus) so that animals with compound eyes can never really get much bigger than rather small.
  
  There is also speculation in the book that the reason for the Cambrian explosion (when suddenly life on earth seemed to get very, very creative) had to do with the evolution of sight. If you were unable to see then the chance of you bumping into something you might like to eat or that might have liked to have eaten you was pretty slim. But as soon as one creature developed sight the rules of the game changed. Now things could find you out and come looking for you. The Cambrian explosion is one of those mysteries of evolution that also messes with my mind. Suddenly, about half a billion years ago, animals that had been happy enough being tiny and worm-like for billions of years literally exploded. They became comparatively huge and developed shells and other defences and strange body shapes. The idea that perhaps all this was in response to predators that could suddenly see them is utterly fascinating.
  
  There is another speculation in this book has likewise done odd things to my brain. That is, the speculation that the Ancient Greeks (and, in fact, most of the ancient world) were colour blind – at least by modern standards. When Newton was describing the spectrum (the rainbow, basically) he decided that it had seven colours. He had reasons for this, none of them terribly good reasons, but at the time there were seven notes in the musical scale and seven planets in the sky, so why not seven colours in the rainbow? The problem ever since has been indigo – the colour he made up (both the name and the colour, if you see what I mean) to go between blue and violet to make up the seven – all the same, few people really have any idea what indigo looks like. There will be more on this over the next couple of days when I review
  Hallucinations by Sacks.
  
  Anyway, if we can’t see the seventh colour of the spectrum, we tend to have no trouble at all in seeing the other six. The rainbow clearly has red, orange, green, blue, purple and yellow – this is all as clear as day. Except that in the Iliad Homer says, with some confidence, that the rainbow only has three colours. If you want to know how bizarre this is, think about the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. What is really interesting is that Homer spends lots of time talking about how things glint – and this, apparently, is also a clear sign of colour blindness. Now, look, I know, Homer was supposed to be literally blind, but Homer’s isn’t the only ancient text referred to. The question I was most interested in was to wonder the extent to which colour is a socially conditioned response. I know that there are a number of cultures that effectively have two words for colours – dark and light – and others with four words – dark, light, red and green. I wonder if these limitations in linguistics are more pervasive than just not having enough words – if these literally change the ways we see colours or rather reflect socially conditioned colour vision. Some of Luria’s research in his book
  Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations on sorting colours is also interesting in this context.
  
  The graph on Page 227 of this book shows how the cells in our eyes respond to coloured light – effectively our red cones (the cells that identify red light) don’t actually make it up to the red end of the spectrum at all - struggling to get passed yellow to orange. This is one of those little facts that Ings uses to blow one’s mind. In so many ways sight seems the least problematic of our senses – we open our eyes and the world is just there – but that’s not how it works at all. The fact our eyes aren’t able to detect light at wavelengths for red really hurts my brain. Red is so vivid – to say that we can’t really see it, and that it is a creation of our minds determined by the context of the colours around it is so contrary to experience it just sounds like some kind of a joke. Like I said, this book is one of those that is hard to read, as you find yourself thinking more about what your eyes are doing as you read that you suddenly find it is a struggle to read at all.
  
  This book is overflowing with information on how eyes work and how we go about constructing images. I can’t begin to tell you how interesting it is – and he is so good at bringing out all of the human in-fighting between researchers and various scientist along the way and at picking the most jaw-dropping story to illuminate his point – look, just read the damn thing, you really won’t be sorry.
• 
  El

  I'm a dork for eyeballs. I like my eyes, I like other peoples' eyes. It's the "doorway to the soul" and all that jazz, and I really dig it. I like to contemplate whether or not the color green I see on the tree outside my house is the same color green that my boyfriend sees. Or is his color green more in line with the color I call blue? These sorts of things can keep a kid up at night. The anatomy of an eye has always intrigued me, in one of those "I'll never completely get it" sorts of ways. Like astronomy. Or why men can't seem to put the roll of toilet paper on the thingy the right way.
  
  So when I saw this book in the clearance section of my local reading-hole I was pretty stoked. A book about eyes? Hellz yeah! I want to know why and how we see the way we do!
  
  It's a good read, but at times still somewhat a bit out of my range of knowledge. And it's Canadian. Very Canadian, which makes me think that Canadians really do speak a different language than the rest of North America. I had to re-read some sentences more than once; I couldn't tell if I was having trouble understanding what Ings was saying, or if the sentence was riddled with typos. A few times I just gave up and moved along, hoping somewhere in the book Ings would tackle the subject of how someone can look at a sentence of familiar words and still not make sense of it. (Spoiler: He didn't.)
  
  The most interesting part of the book was actually pretty brief. (I excell at finding some throwaway bit of information and totally getting stuck on it and wanting to know more about that one thing that apparently no one else cares about.) In one of the Goodreads group I'm a part of some people have been discussing Homer's
  The Odyssey and one or two members commented on how strange Homer's description of different colors were. The sea is always "wine-colored", etc. Interestingly enough, Ings touches on that in one of his chapters and says,

  Have special pity for anyone translating an ancient Greek text. So-called Greek 'colour words' have no direct English equivalents. Worse, they don't refer to colours, relating more to a texture, consistency and quality, with colour a small, often irrelevant, part of the whole meaning. The sea is the colour of wine, but so are sheep. Honey, sap and blood are all chloros which, as far as we can tell, is a sort of yellow-green.

  And then later:

  William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), four times British Prime Minister under Queen Victoria, and a great classicist, was unequivocal in his criticism of Homer's colour palette: 'Although this writer has used light in various forms for his purposes with perhaps greater splendour and effect than any other poet, yet the colour adjectives and colour descriptions of the poems are not only imperfect but highly ambiguous and confused... we find that his sense of colour was not only narrow, but also vague, and wanting in description.'

  Then, on the next page,

  Perhaps the Greeks - or Greek writers - did not consider colour very important. Seven hundred years after the composition of the Iliad, in the third century AD, Heliodoros managed to write a sixty-thousand word romance, the Aethiopica, without once using the words red, green or blue. This same lack of interest has been encountered recently; in 1971 a team of Danish anthropologists went to Polynesia to study colour perception among the islanders. But in one village, they were told, 'We don't talk much about colour here.'

  As if "colour" is like "fight club" - something of which one does not speak. I love that. But as someone who is just as fascinated by the different colors in the world as I am about eyeballs, I wonder how any culture could not be interested in colors.
  
  Mostly, though, I'm totally tripped out by the concept that the ancient Greeks were color-blind and/or their vision just hadn't evolved enough to be able to discern between the different colors. That's going to keep me up at night.
  
  Someone else in the group brought up a different theory about the Greeks based on a book she read,
  Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, which also looks terribly interesting. The ancient Greeks rocked.
  
  Oh - but I digress! Eyeballs!
  
  The rest of the text is also interesting, and mainly focuses on the history of the study of vision and eyes, not so much the science of eyes (outside of how knowledge of the science of vision has changed over the years). There's plenty of biology for those of us who are also dorks about animals and the different anatomies across species.
  
  Still, I felt Ings was just sort of repeating everything he learned from other people. While my To-Read list has grown exponentially since reading this book, I wish Ings had had more to say on his own. Though there's a bit in the first chapter about his daughter's eyesight that totally freaked me out. Eyeballs can be totally freakish and unstable.
• 
  Dеnnis

  This one sat long on my bookshelf until I had a heated argument with some friends regarding the proper color for fire-extinguishers. They insisted it should be only red, since this is the color majority of animals are primed to see best. However, in the absence of evidence I refused to take such claims at face value. Thus I reached out for the dusty tome… and found justification for my doubts. Besides this answer I found a boundless source of information about vision and eyes. The author possesses erudite knowledge of the topic, draws on numerous and very appropriate examples, and presents all these revelations in a very structured and digestible manner. A real eye-opener.
• 
  Khris Sellin

  This was a great read, and I really learned a lot. Though there was a lot of scientific/technical jargon in this book that was way beyond me, it really is amazing all that is involved in SEEING. It's a wonder things "go right" as often as they do.
  
  And thank god, for dummies like me, there were lotsa pictures, diagrams, and optical illusion type tests.
  
  I thought it was interesting that there was a time when scientists spent a lot of time (and money) studying optograms, which is a faint image stamped on the retina for a brief period after death. They really believed they could look at these as an aid in determining how someone died or what they experienced right before death. (Sounds like a movie I saw once...)
  
  The last few pages I found most interesting, though, bc it was about studies conducted as to whether people only see what they want to see or what they've been trained/told to see or expect to see. One of the studies I had actually seen on TV a few years back, where they showed a film clip of two teams playing basketball - one team wearing white, one team wearing black. The viewers are told to watch to see which team passes the ball more often. OK, so you count. Then the viewer is told, OK, now this time, just sit back and watch the game and don't worry about counting anything. Do you see anything you didn't notice before? Well, YEAH, someone in a gorilla suit wandering right through the middle of the game! And stopping and waving at the camera! Huh? How did we not see that the first time???
• 
  Ben

  So much fascinating stuff in here. Some of it was a bit too complex for me to follow, but at least I know why Bees bump into walls so much now. The writing style is fluid and easy to read but factual and authoritative at the same time, and with an infectious curiosity and fascination for the subject matter. Definitely up there with some of my favourite science writing.
• 
  Shyamal

  This is really an amazing work and an "eye-opener" on the history of scientific discoveries relating to the eye, perception and vision! I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in evolution, biology, ecology, and behaviour.
• 
  Bogdan

  -I am not interested much on evolution, a bit too much emphasis on it.
  
  +Excellent, almost each page has quotes I want to save.
  
• 
  Kathy Sebesta

  Seems I sent quotes from this book over and over, it was so full of things that made such sense, if you just thought about it that way. Wonderful and highly, highly recommended.
  
  Just one excerpt:
  
  "No big animal sees far into the ultraviolet. The larger the eye, the more light it can take in, and there must be a point at which the potential damage ultraviolet light can do when focused outweighs its usefulness. Many birds and insects have evolved to see ultraviolet wavelengths, but they live for only a short time, dying before the damage becomes significant. Large animals have much longer lives, and their exposure over years could destroy their eyes' photopigments and turn their lenses cloudy [cataracts]. ... The particular, and unique defence evolved by primates, including human beings, involves a yellow pigment that absorbs ultraviolet light almost completely. This 'macular pigment' covers the whole fovea, which is why it turns a bright lemon-yellow when the retina is exposed to the air .... By far the most effective ultraviolet filter in the human eye is the lens. Our lenses are extremely efficient filters of ultraviolet light, reflecting our daylight habits, but with the lenses removed, human eyes can perceive ultraviolet wavelengths, something which, though barely wondered over, must have been apparent to ophthalmic patients for at least two thousand years. In the first century AD, Roman doctors routinely displaced and removed irreversibly swollen and clouded lenses from the eyes of their patients. The condition they were treating, cataract, is still with us, and still irreversible. Since 1947, it has been possible to replace the lens with a plastic substitue. Before artificial lenses were available, however, those who had their lenses removed by surgery found that they could see into the ultraviolet; blues were clearer and richer, and ultraviolet light, energetically triggering every photoreceptor it hit, was a blueish-white wash.
• 
  Ellen

  "When I look at the sculpture, I sense the presence of a three dimensional object. when Keller touches it, so does she...Keller can curl her fingers around the object, whereas, to perceive it from different angles, I have to move my body."
  
  "Most animals care very little for the substance of things. They are much more interested in where things are going. If it moves, it matters. Moving targets may be threats, meals or mates."
  
  "Our eyes interrogate the world, and through our eyes, the world announces itself."
  
  "If everything we see is a representation of the world, then seeing becomes just a representation. If I cannot apprehend the world directly, but can only perceive representations of it, then where exactly am I, and where, exactly, is the world?"
  
  "'Bodies do not produce sensations,' he wrote, 'but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.'"
  
  "Our bodies are not the same as they were yesterday."
  
  "Only if we rob an object of all context can the eye be fooled. A full moon at night, lit by the sun we can no see, and suspended in the non-reflecting vacuum of space appears white - yet moon dust is black."
• 
  s

  This is a good one for giving you fun conversational facts about the eyeballs, like how the only remnant of our third eyelid is that pinkish membrane in the inside corner of your eye, and how blind people can see if you put a t-shirt with special vibrating thingamajigs on it that is wired up to a camera and somehow manages to transmit visual stimulus into a vibratory code, so that if you throw something at a blind person wearing said t-shirt, they will duck in the appropriate direction, etc. etc.
  
  However it is not a properly scientific book, so the conversational nature of it ('oh yeah, did I mention this other cool thing about the eye?') means you find yourself asking questions all the time, some of them more annoying than others (e.g., what exactly does that term mean? how common is this type of complex eye really? and the like). So this is why I only give it three stars, because it should have had some footnotes, really, getting into some hard science or at least being more generally useful.
• 
  Katherine

  This book probably deserves another star but I didn't "love" it so I gave it four instead. The reason I didn't love it, really can’t be blamed on Simon Ings. I think he has actually accomplished something quite amazing. The fault lay in my being not quite knowledgeable enough going in, so that bits of it were a bit of a slog. I will confess that some pages, I read twice and then just shrugged and moved on. Other bits, however, were absolutely fascinating. I found the chapter on how we perceive colour particularly interesting.
  
  This book is quite broad in scope, despite being entirely about the eye, so those looking for specific, in depth information in any one area will probably need to go elsewhere. If, however you are interested in evolutionary theory generally, the history of our knowledge of vision and the role that it plays in our lives (and the lives of other beasts as well) and want something meatier than your average pop science offering, then this is your book.
  
• 
  Todd Martin

  Eyes have independently evolved between 40 and 65 times along different evolutionary pathways. Solutions to the problem of sight has resulted in eyespots in simple organisms, compound eyes in insects and camera like eyes in vertebrates (like us!).
  
  A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision examines the science and natural history of vision as well as the scientific theories and discoveries which led to our current understanding of the eye.
  
  Ings spends a little too much time covering science history than I would have liked, but otherwise the book is interesting and informative.
  
• 
  Andrea Patrick

  S'allright, not great. Very interesting information, but too many times I had to think to myself, "But what does that really MEAN?!" The writing often sacrifices clarity for lyricism. There's probably a better book out there about the science of vision; I just picked this up at the library because it looked interesting. Now I want to find that better book, because this was a bit of a slog. If you read this, read Crashing Through by Robert Kurson.
• 
  Mary

  Wow, I picked this book up just out of curiousity, and I had almost as much trouble putting it down as a fiction book. In the end, I wished some of the stuff had been gone into in more depth, but I guess that is what the Further Reading section is for.
• 
  Mary

  Surprisingly entertaining.
• 
  David Cooke

  Well worth the effort. I wasn't sure when I started but perseverance will reward you.
• 
  Brandon Meredith

  Awesome book. I learned a million things. I suggest it to anyone.
• 
  Analu

  Did you know...We spend about one-tenth of our waking hours completely blind. Only one percent of what we see is in focus at any one time. The blind can be taught to see through their chests.
• 
  Joost

  Not bad, but I need a second opinion.
• 
  Frankie

  A random book to read on holiday, but I wanted to get as far away from the trash I usually read, as possible. Glad I did. A fascinating book.