Book Reviews

Philip Swarm Images and Understanding: Thoughts about Images, Ideas about Understanding, H. Barlow, C. Blakemore, and M. Weston-Smith, eds., A collection of essays based on a Rank Prize Fund's International Symposium, organized with the help of Jonathan Miller and held at the Royal Society in October 1986, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1990, 401 pp., ISBN O-521-34177-9 (cloth), ISBN O-521-36944-4 (paper). This volume is a well-written, informative, and thought-provoking collection of essays that should interest anyone concerned with the psychology of vision and visual communication. The aim of the original symposium was to bring together people from the arts and sciences who could present different perspectives on the subject of images and understanding. The result is an informal tour conducted by leading specialists (predominantly British) that visits both famous scientific battlefields and quaint artistic backwaters. Numerous striking pictures enliven the book: Here you can find the sensory somatic cortex of a bat, the British miners' leader Arthur Scargill in full rant, a notation for ballet, a mole used to advertise British Gas, instructions for righting a caravan, and many others.