Images and Understanding - Horace Barlow

How do you paint a picture of infinity? How do you dance about death? How do you draw a diagram explaining entropy? Images and Understanding explores the human problem of moving facts and ideas from one mind to another - the problems of how we see and communicate using images expressed in pictures, diagrams, words, music and dance. For artists as well as scientists discussion of this topic is timely; electronic and computing technology is expanding the means of generating and communicating images, while physiology and psychology are revealing the neural mechanisms of coding, perceiving and understanding them. The book is divided into six sections, each with an explanatory introduction followed by comprehensively illustrated contributions from internationally distinguished figures from fields as diverse as art history, choreography, psychology, computer science, and philosophy. Images and Understanding is unique in viewing the problems of imagery through the eyes of both science and art; it gives new insight into images and new ideas about understanding.