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Monthly Archives: January 2014
Inverting Albert: A Puzzling Illusion Involving Faces
Human beings are mostly quite good at recognising faces. We seem to have evolved this skill as part of becoming a large-scale social animals, and we share it with only a few species – as far as we know, anyhow. … Continue reading
Posted in Stroke, Disability, Cognition, The brain and visual perception
Tagged face blindness, facial recognition problems, grumpy cat, Margaret Thatcher effect, Margaret Thatcher illusion, Neurology, Oliver Sacks, Optical illusion, prosopagnosia, Stroke, Thatcherise, Thatcherize, visual illusions
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Touching the Stars: Blind Photographers and Space Telecopes
When I was very small I thought I could literally stretch up and touch the stars. I got a chair, but it still wasn’t enough. BBC News magazine recently ran an impressive feature on Juan Torre, a blind photographer from … Continue reading
Posted in Assistive technology, Blindness and visual impairment
Tagged 3D printer, accessibility, Blind, blind photographer, Hubble Telescope, impaired vision, Juan Torres, low vision, NASA, NGC 602, partial sight, Space Telescope Science Institute, tactile photography, vision loss, visually impaired
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Lost Continents of Sight: 2 Ways the Brain Hides Them From Me
People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: ‘How can anyone NOT be interested in it?’ Vilayanur S. Ramachandran I’ve been reading Ramachandran’s book Phantoms in the Brain, and it stated me thinking again … Continue reading
Cat Encounter 2
Last night the same cat was waiting for me. Same place, same time. Even though we’ve only met once before I thought he would be there. He clearly isn’t a stray or anything, he wears a collar with a little … Continue reading
Household Gadgets
Do washing machines and printers count as gadgets? I’m not sure but, for me, they certainly fall into the category of things that should make daily life easier. There is one big proviso for the person with low vision and…
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A cat encounter of the furred kind
This is the first post in a new category, Animal Intelligence, which I’ve started to separate posts about how animals see and perceive from ones about stroke, disability and cognition. I’ve often seen a very large ginger cat in a … Continue reading
Posted in Animal Intelligence
Tagged animal intelligence, cat, maine coon cat, norweigian forest cat, Thomas Wyatt
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Bee Bee See: Insects Recognising Faces
Some three years past I photographed this swarm of honeybees. Many passers-by stopped while I was there and all were intrigued, surprised, and pleased to have seen it. Finding this swarm reminded me of a tradition I’ve always found rather … Continue reading
How Many in this Half-Blind Club?
If you acquire a medical condition you’d never heard of before, then naturally you wonder how big the club is. Am I alone or any there many like me? And so I have often wondered how many people in the … Continue reading
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