Mark Changizi is an assistant professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research areas tend to concern the evolutionary function and design principles governing complex behaviors, perceptions and organisms. His first book appeared in 2003 and is called The Brain from 25,000 Feet: High Level Explorations of Brain Complexity, Perception, Induction and Vagueness (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht). Dr. Changizi is the first author on 25 journal articles in diverse topics, and his research has been in more than 75 media outlets worldwide, including Time, Newsweek, USA Today, Discover, New Scientist, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Scientific American, The Times of London, Natural History, Reuters, ABC News, MSNBC, Fox News, Gehirn & Geist Magazine, Bild der Wissenschaft, Der Standard, Rhein Zeitung, Die Presse, Die Welt, De Morgen, Suddeutsche Zeitung, NRC Handelsblad, Internet Haber, Spiegel and Arzte Zeitung. He has also appeared as a guest on the CBC News’ “As It Happens” radio show.

Introduction Super Naturally	p. 1
Color Telepathy	p. 5
X-Ray Vision	p. 49
Future-Seeing	p. 109
Spirit-Reading	p. 163
Index	p. 211
About the Author	p. 215
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

Introduction:

In the movie Unbreakable by M. Night Shyamalan, the villain
Elijah Price says, “It’s hard for many people to believe that there
are extraordinary things inside themselves, as well as others.”
Indeed, the story’s superhero, David Dunn, is unaware of his
super strength, his inability to be injured (except by drowning), and
his ability to sense evil. Dunn would have lived his life without anyone—
including himself—realizing he had superpowers if Unbreakable’s
villain hadn’t forced him into the discovery.

At first glance we are surprised that Dunn could be so in the dark
about his abilities. How could he utilize his evil-detection power
every day at work as a security guard without realizing he had it?
However, aren’t most powers—super or otherwise—like that? For
example, our ability to simply stand requires complex computations
about which we are unaware. Complex machines like David Dunn
and ourselves only function because we have a tremendous number
of “powers” working in concert, but we can only be conscious of a
few of these powers at a time. Natural selection has seen to it that
precious consciousness is devoted where it’s most needed—and least
harmful—leaving everything else running unnoticed just under the
surface.

2 the vision revolution
The involuntary functions of our bodies rarely announce their
specific purposes. Livers never told anyone they’re for detoxification,
and they don’t come with user’s manuals. Neurosurgeons have yet to
find any piece of brain with a label reading, “Crucial for future-seeing.
Do not remove without medical or clerical consultation.” The
functions of our body are carried out by unlabeled meat, and no
gadget—no matter how fancy—can allow us to simply read off those
functions in a lab.

Powers are even harder to pin down, however, because they typically
work superbly only when we’re using them where and when
we’re supposed to. Our abilities evolved over millions of years to
help us survive and reproduce in nature, and so you can’t understand
them without understanding the environment they evolved for, any
more than you can understand a stapler without knowing what paper
is.

Superpowers, then, can’t be introspected. They can’t be seen with
a microscope. And they can’t be grasped simply by knowing the ins
and outs of the meat. Instead, the natural environment is half the
story. Lucky for us there are ways of finding our powers. Science
lets us generate a hypothesis concerning the purpose of some biological
structure—what its power is—and then test that hypothesis
and its predictions. Those predictions might concern how the power
would vary with habitat, what other characteristics an animal with
that power would be expected to have, or even what that biological
structure would look like were it really designed with that power in
mind. That’s how we scientists identify structures’ powers.

And that’s what this scientist is doing in this book: identifying
powers. Specifically, superpowers. Even more specifically, superpowers
of vision—four of them, one from each of the main subdisciplines
of vision: color, binocularity, motion, and object recognition. Or in
superhero terms: telepathy, X-ray vision, future-seeing, and spiritreading.
Now, you might be thinking, “How could we possibly have
such powers? Mustn’t this author be crazy to suggest such a thing?”
Let me immediately allay your fears: there’s nothing spooky going
on in this book. I’m claiming we have these four superpowers, yes,
but also that they are carried out by our real bodies and brains, with
no mysterious mechanisms, no magic, and no funny business. Trust

supernaturally 3
me—I’m a square, stick-in-the-mud, pencil-necked scientist who
gets annoyed when one of the cable science channels puts a show on
about “hauntings,” “mystics,” or other nonsense.

But then why am I writing about superpowers? “No magic, no
superpowers,” some might say. Well, perhaps. But I’m more inclined
to say, “No magic, but still superpowers.” I call each of these four
powers “superpowers” because each of them has been attributed to
superhuman characters, and each of them has been presumed to be
well beyond the limits of us regular folk.

That we have superpowers of vision—and yet no one has realized
it—is one of the reasons I think you’ll enjoy this book. Superpowers
are fun, after all. There’s no denying it. But superpowers are just a
part of this book’s story. Each of the four superpowers is the tip of
an iceberg, and lying below the surface is a fundamental question
concerning our nature. This book is really about answering “why”:
Why do we see in color? Why do our eyes face forward? Why do we see
illusions? Why are letters shaped the way they are?

What on Earth is the connection between these four deep scientific
questions and the four superpowers? I’d hate to give away all
the answers now—that’s what the rest of the book is for—but here
are some teasers. We use color vision to see skin, so we can sense
the emotions and states of our friends and enemies (telepathy). Our
eyes face forward so that we can see through objects, whether our
own noses or clutter in the world around us (X-ray vision). We see
illusions because our brain is attempting to see the future in order to
properly perceive the present (future-seeing). And, lastly, letters have
culturally evolved over centuries into shapes that look like things in
nature because nature is what we have evolved to be good at seeing.
These letters then allow us to effortlessly read the thoughts of the
living . . . and the dead (spirit-reading).

Although the stories behind these superpowers concern vision,
they are more generally about the brain and its evolution. Half of
your brain is specialized for performing the computations needed for
visual perception, and so you can’t study the brain without spending
about half your energies on vision; you won’t miss out on nearly as
much by skipping over audition and olfaction. And not only is our
brain “half visual,” but our visual system is by far the most well4
the vision revolution understood part of our brains. For a century, vision researchers in an area called visual psychophysics have been charting the relationship between the stimuli in front of the eye and the resultant perception
elicited “behind” them, in the brain. For decades neuroanatomists
such as John Allman, Jon Kaas, and David Van Essen have been mapping
the visual areas of the primate brain, and countless other researchers
have been characterizing the functional specializations and
mechanisms within these areas.
Furthermore, understanding the “why” of the brain requires understanding
our brain’s evolution and the natural ecological conditions
that prevailed during evolution, and these, too, are much better
understood for vision than for our other senses and cognitive and
behavioral attributes. Although about half the brain may be used for
vision, much more than half of the best understood parts of the brain
involve vision, making vision part and parcel of any worthwhile attempt
to understand the brain.

And who am I, in addition to being a square, stick-in-the-mud,
pencil-necked cable viewer? I’m a theoretical neuroscientist, meaning
I use my training in physics and mathematics to put forth and
test novel theories within neuroscience. But more specifically, I am
interested in addressing the function and design of the brain, body,
behaviors, and perceptions. What I find exciting about biology and
neuroscience is why things are the way they are, not how they actually
work. If you describe to me the brain mechanisms underlying
our perception of color, I’ll still be left with what I take to be the most
important issue: Why did we evolve mechanisms that implement that
kind of perception in the first place? That question gets at the ultimate
reasons for why we are as we are, rather than the proximate mechanical
reasons (which make my eyes glaze over). In attempting to
answer such “why” questions I have also had to study evolution, for
only by understanding it and the ecological conditions wherein the
trait (e.g., color vision) evolved can one come to an ultimate answer.
So I suppose that makes me an evolutionary theoretical neuroscientist.
That’s why this book is not only about four novel ideas in vision
science, but puts an emphasis on the “evolution” in “revolution.”
But enough with the introductions. Let’s get started. Or perhaps I
should say . . . up, up, and away!