I’m a true believer in the ability of cognitive science information to jump-start photographic creativity. Great photographers always know, either intuitively or scientifically, many subtle nuances of how humans perceive visual information. Those who lack this knowledge go through life virtually shooting blind. By not knowing how to target emotionally compelling compositions they at best end up with a handful of good images from accidents that they cannot explain or repeat.

Though I’m often asked to recommend a single book that ties together photography and the cognitive sciences, I have yet to find one. Many touch on the important differences between the way we perceive the real world and photographs. My search for answers now fills a wall of the new library we had to add to our house. Some are “sleepers” with improbable titles, such as Clouds in a Glass of Beer or The Embodied Mind. Others are thick and academic.

Here are some capsule reviews of some of my favorites, but not all are in print… you’ll have to search [them] out at a good library or used book store.

Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye

Arnheim, Rudolp.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954.

This old classic asserts that all discussion of creating or experiencing art is essentially psychological. While one of the best early works to link art and perception in a broad-based way, it conspicuously lacks recent discoveries about the neural correlates of the visual process. A great place to start.

Color and Light in Nature

Lynch, David K. and William Livingston.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

A superb compendium of outdoor optical phenomena with revealing photographs and diagrams. Emphasis is on explaining all the varieties of light effects we see in nature, without direct descriptions of how to photograph them. The camera is mentioned as an “observing tool,” not a creative instrument. Nevertheless, the plethora of information on shadows, halos, glories, rainbows, sun dogs, twilight, northern lights, green flashes, polarization, and the night sky is more than enough to keep a nature photographer’s creative juices flowing for decades.

Light and Color in Nature and Art

Williamson, Samuel J. and Herman Z. Cummins.
New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983.

Though similar in title to the above, this in-depth textbook is less user-friendly. Phenomena are explained in great detail with math, formulas, and graphs. Forty pages on still photography, optics, and films are nicely positioned before sections on the visual system, pigments, dyes, paints, holography, and color broadcasting.

Evolution of the Eye and Visual System

Cronly-Dillon, John R. and Richard L. Gregory, eds.
(Vision and Visual Dysfunction Series, Volume 2).
Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991.

This advanced, esoteric work is a collection of scientific papers that trace the evolution of the vertebrate eye from photosensitive algae through sea snails to humans. It provides a deep understanding of how eyes have evolved to match the physical constraints of biological systems and the nature of light. Darwin wondered how something so complex that could not function without many fine parts in harmony could have evolved through natural selection, but this book displays the almost infinite stages in the process, beginning with photoreceptors in the skin that gradually recessed into depressions to increase shadow contrast nature’s own lens hoods.

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science & Human Experience

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

These eminent cognitive scientists challenge the traditional view of our minds simply representing what is out there before our eyes. They convincingly argue that the embodiment of information in our minds cannot be separated from human experience. Color vision is used as an example that what we see is really an emergent pattern of neuronal activity. Color does not exist in the physical world as a property of light or surface reflectance, but is embodied experentially within us as an emergent qualia. We have no way of knowing if others see “our” blue; all we can know is our own mental reality. As the authors link perception to tenets of Buddhist thought and modern science, differences between what we directly observe and see in photographs become far more understandable.

Seeing: Illusion, Brain and Mind

Frisby, John P.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

The author set out to explain illusions, but realized that he could not do so without educating his audience about the operation of the basic neural machinery of the visual system. His precise explanations allow photographers to gain a deep understanding of how and when certain visual illusions will appear on film. Seeing is “an explicit symbolic description of the scene observed,” and illusions happen when visual cues are too sparse to deliver full information about a subject. Photographs radically reduce the number of visual cues present in direct observation, and all photographs are, in fact, illusions.

Clouds in a Glass of Beer:
Simple Experiments in Atmospheric Physics

Bohren, Craig F.
New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987.

This delightful book by an atmospheric physicist explains dew, frost, rainbows, whiteouts, polarization, clouds, and the significance of nucleation bubbles in a glass of beer–all in laymen’s terms. Though photography is not a direct subject, the ability to anticipate changing situations in the natural world can have profound effects on the outcome of photographs.

The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics

Boyer, Carl B.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.

More than you ever wanted to know about rainbows from ancient myth through modern science, art, and photography. Related sky phenomena are also explained, such as moonbows and solar halos caused by refraction from ice crystals instead of rain drops.

Art, Mind & Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity

Gardner, Howard.
USA: Basic Books, 1982.

A prolific creativity researcher explores the artistic creativity of masters, children, and normal adults. Teaching, television, and the transmission of knowledge are well covered, but relevance to photography must be induced by comparison. He admits that the comprehensive aspects of artistic production “remain a complete mystery for the student of neuropsychology.” His descriptions of underlying order emerging from mental ideas stumbling all over one another in a chaotic fashion rings very true to dedicated photographers seeking artistically pleasing compositions.

Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing

Gregory, Richard L.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

An old classic that remains among the best popular books on how human perception works. Sir Richard, a knighted professor of neuropsychology, gives concise explanations of scientific concepts in as simple language as possible. He thankfully goes beyond known facts to speculate about the meaning of conscious experience and hopes for a conceptual breakthrough that “may truly link science and art and tell us what it is to be alive and to perceive with wonder the world around us.”

The Artful Eye

Gregory, Richard L. (editor).
Oxford/New York/Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Here, at last, is a major work that merges artistic and scientific conceptions of visual perception. It describes all artistic images as attempts “to bridge the gap from mind to mind, via the eye.” Many illusions fool us every time, even when we recognize and understand them. The authors ask, “Does this mean that art is neurologically beyond reason? If so, this is no essential criticism of art.”

Since every photograph is an illusion, subsequent chapters should have special meaning for photographers. They begin to explain the power of an artistic substitute for a real object in terms of neural transformations, such as lateral inhibition and orientation detectors. Just a few years ago, the point of view of neurobiologists studying at the cellular level and psychologists studying the behavior of whole beings was compared to two teams digging a tunnel by hand from the opposite side of a huge mountain. The chance that they would ever meet in the middle was considered remote and distant in time. Here we have contact.

For example, scientists wired and isolated 30 cells in the temporal cortex of a rhesus macaque that were found to be responsive in the monkey’s identification of a real face, something that scientists know includes an environmental “nurture” factor of experience, as well as the innate “nature” factor of inherited brain structure. So far so good. The surprise comes when a line drawing of the same face was substituted. Three cells responded, but when the same line orientations were disorganized into a configuration no longer recognizable as a face, none of those three cells responded.

This research strongly suggests that artistic representations including photographs trigger impoverished reactions of some of the same neurons as direct experience. The authors speculate that such low responses may trigger a greater amount of top-down processing (from stored mental imagery) to try to perceive what is before the eyes. Thus we see faces in clouds and stumps in a field as wild animals. The authors conclude, “It may well be that one reason humans enjoy art is precisely because it requires this extra interpretive effort. Natural images, with all the rich sources of information which make the perception of object structure unambiguous, are just too easy.” Maybe that’s why technically perfect large-format color landscapes made on absolutely clear days are usually boring.

Sir Richard Gregory has the final word: “art thrives on illusions, while science does its best to avoid illusions.… The fact that we accept pictures as surrogates of very different realities is the key to visual art. It is not obvious why marks on a cave wall are accepted as animals–they are very different!”

Images and Understanding

Barlow, Horace, Colin Blakemore, and Miranda Weston-Smith.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

This collection of broad-ranging essays is from an international symposium on how we see images. Nobel laureate Francis Crick lays the groundwork in the preface by saying “we do not see things in the way common sense says we should.” He further explains how the work of visual artists draws our attention to the higher levels of visual processing that are the subject of the essays. Sections cover the essence of images (photograph? Picasso? shadow? reflection?); image creation by artists, other animals, and computers; motion; visual thought; and meaning. A final chapter by an old-school psychologist takes the opposite position from The Embodied Mind by calling into question the very existence of mental imagery (yet I have a distinct mental image of the kind of dispassionate nature photograph such a mind-set would generate).

How the Mind Works

Pinker, Steven.
New York, London: Norton, 1997.

Despite its 660 pages, this is by far the most readable and comprehensive popular book on what modern science knows about the workings of the brain and visual system. Pinker is as great a creative writer as he is director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at M.I.T. He is at once bold (“Human evolution is the original revenge of the nerds.”) as he is humble (“Every idea in the book may turn out to be wrong, but that would be progress, because our old ideas were too vapid to be wrong.”).

According to Pinker, the eye is an instrument of information processing, and “before there was photography, it was adaptive to receive visual images of attractive members of the opposite sex, because those images arose only from light reflecting off fertile bodies.” Lest you think Pinker is sexist, he quotes Gloria Steinem saying, “There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone.”

With similar wit, Pinker tells us, “The camera does not lie; left to its own devices it renders outdoor scenes as milk and indoor scenes as mud.” Then, he edges into scientific explanation with, “The harmony between how the world looks and how the world is must be an achievement of our neural wizardry, because black and white don’t simply announce themselves on our retina.” After some insight into how our brain makes some rather rash assumptions about surfaces being evenly illuminated, he suggests that we should be easily seduced into hallucinating objects that aren’t really there. “Could that really happen? It happens every day. We call these hallucinations slide shows and movies.…”

Cognition and the Visual Arts

Solso, Robert L.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

A splendid cognitive science slant on how we visually experience art, despite conspicuously avoiding explaining how we create artistic imagery. Photography is not even mentioned in the index, but the author does espouse a wonderfully broad reverse view of artistic cognition, saying “we do not ‘see’ art, we see the mind.… When we create or experience art, in a very real sense we have the clearest view of the mind.”