If Mark Changizi (web, blog, twitter, G+) is right, you don’t have to go see The Avengers in theaters to be impressed by superheroes and their super abilities. Instead, just consider the human eye. That’s right: your visual system contains superhuman powers! X-ray vision? No problem. Color telepathy? Sure. The ability to see into the future? That too. Oh, and communicating with the dead. Sort of. In his book The Vision Revolution, Changizi explains just how it is that you – yes, you – possess such extraordinary capabilities.
Using these four human superpowers as a hook, Changizi brings an evolutionary perspective to several of the most fundamental questions facing vision scientists today. For example, if color and people are both so central to our experience of the world, why do so few languages have color terms explicitly for skin colors? Why do humans have forward facing eyes? (You might think you know the answer to this one, but Changizi has a very different explanation.) How is it that most of us learn to read with relative ease, if reading itself is so new in evolutionary terms that our brains could not have evolved specialized reading mechanisms? (Hint: letters are designed such that they take advantage of our brain’s inherent systems for recognizing objects.)
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