The Space Between Our Ears by Michael Morgan, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 拢20, ISBN 029782970X Reviewed by Simon Ings
FORM and colour, distance and depth, movement and rotation: we do not simply react to the complexities of the visual world, we consciously perceive them. Where does this 鈥減erception鈥� take place? Is there a screen inside the brain, and a watcher, watching it? And another screen inside that watcher; and another, inside that? Worryingly, the answer seems to be yes.
Salomen Henschen discovered as early as 1893 that the occipital lobe contained a nervous 鈥渕ap鈥� of the visual field. In 1964, Alan Cowey demonstrated that another, neighbouring part of the visual brain, dubbed V2, also contained a systematic map. In 1965, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel showed that a third visual area, V3, also boasted a map.
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So there are many screens in the visual brain, but who is watching? These days, we tend to explain away the fact of visual perception by muddying it up in another seemingly unrelated fact 鈥� that of language. David Marr鈥檚 multiple drafts theory suggests that we perceive the world using symbols, which we arrange according to rules of grammar.
This, argues Michael Morgan in his book The Space Between Our Ears, is a neat model but a poor explanation. Using language to describe vision as a kind of language borders on a dangerous tautology. 鈥淲e almost certainly need to think about consciousness and the brain in an entirely new way,鈥� Morgan says.
There have been stabs at this new way of thinking in the past. The most salient of these came from J. J. Gibson in the 1960s, when he argued that the visual brain 鈥渞esonates鈥� to the many salient patterns light contains. For Gibson, the self was an emergent property of such resonances. Morgan鈥檚 hard-nosed account contains startling similarities to these unfashionable ideas: especially when he describes the brain as a community of analogue computers, resonating to the physics of the outside world.
Morgan鈥檚 book has already earned him the Wellcome Trust prize, and rightly so: his is the most acutely imagined account of the visual brain for the lay reader since Steven Pinker revealed How the Brain Works. But why omit Gibson? Is Morgan afraid of appearing out-of-date? Similarly, why does he feel the need to camouflage this cogent contribution to the consciousness debate with fashionably snide comments about how exhausted the consciousness debate is? This is a good book, after all 鈥� and next time, Morgan can afford to watch his back a little less.