Read an Excerpt
You're holding a book. Or you could be looking at a screen. Perhaps someone's reading this to you. Maybe you learned it by heart. By chance you're in a garden. In all cases you are experiencing a world with this word “now” in it which has been constructed for you by complex systems largely fed by data from your senses. Things you cannot sense you tend to be largely unaware of, and neither telling your senses to sense themselves, nor developing new ones, is going to be an easy task. There are, right now, monks, bats, and ordinary people across the world who are accessing senses which other people, snails and cheese plants can hardly dream of. This small book uses sight, the seen world, and the many ways of reproducing it as an allegory for all our senses, although schematic systems, maps, printed circuits, technical diagrams and other widely-used representational techniques are omitted here for lack of space. Why question the way we look at the world? Look at William Hogarth's catalogue of errors opposite. All seems well at first, but then, studying it more closely, consistent impossibilities will begin to emerge one by one. Customs have been broken, we are in a strange world, we have been tricked. Welcome to one of the few sane disciplines (excluding eye-popping shamanics and monotonous meditations) which can actually awaken your mind to some of its invisible biases and help it become more aware of the way it constructs the world. Welcome to the world of perspective and optical illusions.
