My Coursera Obsession: Visual Perception and the Brain

Did I already mention this MOOC watching habit I developed over the summer? I got sucked in to watching lectures online from all sort of classes. It is sort of like being in college again, but when I fall asleep during lecture, I can rewind when I wake up (if I want to).

One of the classes that I devoured video lectures from is , taught by Duke neuroscience prof Dale Purves. It’s got a little bit of that evolutionary-psychologist-explains-everything flavor, and a lot of visual illusions to use-not-abuse in data visualizations.

I remembered it when watching animal videos with my two year old today (his choice). Here is something that 75 million years of primate evolution can do, and it needs quite the visual system to do so: http://www.arkive.org/verreauxs-sifaka/propithecus-verreauxi/video-06a.html

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2 responses to “My Coursera Obsession: Visual Perception and the Brain

  1. kjforeman

    Freshman year I took David Hubel’s course “The Neurophysiology of Visual Perception”. His book “Eye, Brain and Vision” is cool because it includes images and graphs from the original experiments that won him the Nobel prize. And it’s all online for free! http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/book/bcontex.htm (click download for the pdf versions, the html is a bit messy)

  2. Good link! Now if only there was a series of videos of him reading it.