Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes

by Viki McCabe

Overview

In Coming to Our Senses, cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that prevailing theories of perception, cognition, and information cannot explain how we know the world around us. Using scientific studies and true stories, McCabe shows that the ecological disasters, political paralysis, and economic failures we now face originate in our tendency to privilege cognitive processes and products over the information we access with our perceptual systems. As a result, we typically default to making decisions using inaccurate information such as mechanistic theories that reduce the world to extractable, exploitable parts. But the world does not function as an assembly of parts; it functions as a coalition of complex systems—from cells to cities—that organize and sustain themselves and cannot be partitioned and retain their purpose. McCabe also argues that we cannot describe such systems using theories and words. Instead, each system reveals itself in fractal-like geometric configurations that emerge from and reflect the structural organization that brings it into existence and determines its functions—a veritable physics of information. Thus, we comprehend phenomena as disparate as neural networks, river deltas, and economies by perceiving the branching geometry that organizes them into distribution systems. McCabe's key point is that form not only follows function, it doubles as information. If we put our theories aside and focus on the information the world displays, our perceptions can block hostile mental takeovers, reconnect us to reality, and bring us back to our senses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199988587
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/03/2014
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Visiting Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART 1: THE NATURE OF INFORMATION

CHAPTER 1 THE STRUCTURE OF REALITY

Theory overrides structure and promotes disaster: The Vincennes incident
The Origins and Nature of Structural Information
Saved by Structural Information
Our Complex Perceptual Systems: J.J. Gibson's Views
An Alternate View: Signal Detection Theory
Complexity and Structural Information
Seeing What We Believe: How the Mind Hijacks the Senses
The Source of Common Sense: Our Senses

CHAPTER 2 PERCEIVING STRUCTURE
Recognition and Structural Information
Altering Facial Proportions Alters Structure and Disrupts Recognition
Care-giving by Configuration
Facial Structure
Face Blindness and Super-Recognizers
What's Wrong with Eyewitness Testimony: Features vs. Structure
Why Features Fail as Evidence
Our Atomistic Worldview Leads Us Astray

CHAPTER 3 STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS

Catching a Child Molester
Dynamic Spatial Information
Oscillating Figure Eight Reveals Identity
Do We Have Memories of Structural Information?
Our Brain-World Interface
Navigation Grids and Space Cells
Walking in Other People's Moccasins
Reciprocating Structures: Experiencing Empathy

CHAPTER 4 RESTRUCTURING REALITY

Clouded Vision: No-Outlet Levees Destroy Delta Ecosystem
Controlling Nature: Eliminating Natural Structure—Tributaries and Meanders
The Whole is More Than the Sum of its Parts
Restoring a Meander
Structural Pattern Generators and Natural Structures
Branching
Spirals
Meanders
Hexagons

CHAPTER 5 REALITY'S GEOMETRY

The Good Friday Alaska Earthquake: The Real World Reinstates Itself
Bacteria's Quorum Sensing
Immune Cells Communicate Using Structural Configurations
Volatile Compounds Send Aromatic Messages
Animal Environment Reciprocities
Frogs
Crows
Geese
Mating, Foraging, Escaping
Migrating Through Space
Human-Environmental Affordances

Acquiring and Representing Structural Information
Benoit Mandelbrot's Fractals

Our Fractal Brain

CHAPTER 6 EXPERTS' EXPERTS

Repetitions without Repetition
Minimally Essential Spatial Information
Experts' Experts Rely on Structural Information
Diagnosing Injuries: Reading the Dynamics of Movement Deviations
Curing Pain in the Brain: How the Brain Can Restructure Reality
Diagnosing cancer: Pathology and Structural Information
Condensing the Structure of Reality: The Japanese Garden
Reading the Seascape: Sea Gypsies Survive a Tsunami
Translating the Structure of Reality into Words

PART TWO: MANUFACTURED INFORMATION AND THE BIASED BRAIN


CHAPTER 7 MIND OVER MATTER: Theories and Other Mental Fallout

Flawed Theory Disfigures Cancer Patients
Where do Theories Come from?
Theories and the Brain
Hijacking the Interpreter
Unacknowledged Theories that Threaten our Survival
How to Judge a Theory

CHAPTER 8 ARE SCIENTIFIC THEORIES DIFFERENT?

Trial by Theory: Galileo and the Holy Office of the Inquisition
Alfred Wegener and the Theory of Continental Drift
Barbara McClintock and the Theory of Jumping Genes
How Science can Progress by Extending Our Eyes
Theories and Complexity

CHAPTER 9 ARE ECONOMIC THEORIES DIFFERENT?

Proctor and Gamble and Gibson Greeting Cards v. Bankers Trust
Replacing Reality: The Evolution of the Derivative
Seeing the Structural Information that Specifies the Market
The Sad Saga of Brooksley Born
An Alternative Theory of the Economy

CHAPTER 10 COMPLEXITY, COMPONENTS, AND MENTAL CONCEPTS

Death by Financial Concept
Viral Components and Complex Systems
Agribusiness: Turning Sustainable Complexity into Unsustainable Simplicity
A Sustainable Complex System: The Family Farm
From Complexity to Simplicity: From Whole Grains to Empty Calories
From Nutritional Simplicity To Obesity

EPILOGUE: A Cautionary Tale

Editorial Reviews

"McCabe has given us a wise and timely book that applies cutting edge thinking from perceptual psychology and from the analysis of complex natural systems to many contemporary social problems. The work is both fascinating in its presentation and important in its implications."
- Harry Heft, Professor, Psychology Department, Denison University

"Reality, we generally think, is a simple thing, and yet, different people constantly come up with conflicting and often troublesome views. Viki McCabe offers an important, thoughtful and thought-provoking perspective on why this happens and what we might do about it. Enhance your reality, and give it a read!"
- David P. Barash, Professor, Psychology Department, University of Washington, author of Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature.

"A wonderful read that clarifies the role of perception, information and complex systems in understanding and dealing with world problems."
- Reuben M. Baron, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist, Department of Psychology, The University of Connecticut

"Viki McCabe breaks boundaries by writing a book that expands our awareness of complex systems on which our health and survival depend. She directs us to trust the intelligence of our senses as a path away from illusory theories and the damage that they wreak. Rarely is a book so compelling and significant in its message as well as its structure. People of all professions need to hear and heed this book's message."
- Louise Chawla, Professor, Environmental Design Program, University of Colorado

"How do we know the world? A conventionally obvious answer is we break it down into component parts and produce theories to explain their mechanisms. McCabe's bold and captivating book maintains that this answer is dead wrong. Drawing from exhilarating diverse examples, from natural disasters to the Wall Street crash, from face recognition to fractal patterns, from cognitive science to criminology, McCabe argues that our analytic reason and mental abstractions not only obscure the greater part of our creaturely capacities-our direct perceptions and intuitions—but have contributed to the social and ecological emergencies we confront today. Written with wit and urgent clarity, Coming to Our Senses is at once a well-supported thesis and a welcome voice in the wilderness.
Natalie Melas, Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature, Cornell University, and author of All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison

"McCabe offers rich observations [... and] provides chilling illustrations [that] scientific theories are closer to direct perception." -Arlene Walker-Andrews, Science Magazine

"This beautifully written, persuasively documented book seems to call for a sequel in which McCabe would show how our culture might look if we began to take seriously the task of imitating nature's processes instead of imposing our own." —American Scholar

"One of the great strengths of McCabe's book is the synthesis of research from fields as diverse as cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, physics, mathematics,
neuroscience, complex systems, evolutionary biology, developmental systems theory, and movement science, among others. One of McCabe's strengths as a writer is making this diverse body of knowledge accessible to expert and layperson alike by illustrating concepts by means of vignettes. In addition, McCabe has a knack for explaining a complex concept in a down-to-earth way without compromising or misrepresenting the science. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the research presented, the radical (yet likely correct)
argument being presented, the critical and far-reaching implications of that thesis, and
McCabe's strengths as a writer, Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid
Catastrophes is worth reading by experts and laypeople alike." —Jeffrey B. Wagman, PsycCRITIQUES

"Coming To Our Senses is an important book that delivers its promised message on the importance of 'perceiving complexity to avoid catastrophes' quite well. The book is very well written: the author weaves a complex web of skillfully interconnected tales in which the recurrent theme is that failure to perceive complexity leads to disasters on a multitude of levels and circumstances. The book serves as a warning for practitioners, scientists, and lay people on the use and misuse of knowledge. I find the book entertaining and very well-written." —Ittay Weiss, Mathematical Association of America

From the Publisher