Cognitive Scenery Poem by gershon hepner

The cognitive inferences processed by senses,
unconscious as clocks to the notion of tenses,
create the perceptions embraced by the mind,
reliable timepiece we don’t need to wind,
oblivious to clockwork that runs the machinery
providing the background to cognitive scenery.


Ellen Ruppel Shell reviews 'Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See, ' by Donald D. Hoffman (W. W. Norton) in the Book Review of NYT ('If U Cn Rd Ths Mag, ' May 9,1999) . She points out that the thinking of cognitive science can be traced to Hermann von Helmholtz who described perception as an 'unconscious inference' from sensory stimuli, in contrast to behaviorists who held that perception and behavior were essentially an elaborate set of reflexes developed or 'conditioned' in response to experience.

5/10/99