ABSTRACT

The roots of the Western study of perception in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology lie in the philosophy of ancient Greece. One of the fi rst accounts of vision and the brain comes from the fi fth century BC philosopher Empedocles. He believed that the eye had come down to man from the goddess Aphrodite, who had “confi ned a fi re in the membranes and delicate cloths; these held back the deep waters fl owing around, but let through the inner fl ame to the outside” (fragment 84, DK). This might be a somewhat fanciful account of perception, but it is surprisingly modern too in its dynamic and fl uvial nature. A century later, the philosopher Epicurus in his “Letter to Herodotus” claimed that perception was a matter of fi lms that were “given off by the object and that convey an impression to the eyes” (O’Connor 1993: 24). This bottom-up view of perception, also known as an atomist account, was later adopted by the fi rst-century BC Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius in his On the Nature of Things. Epicurus added that these emanations occur “at the speed of thought, for their fl ow from the surface of bodies is constant” (1993: 24). Like Empedocles’s claim, that of Epicurus involved a fl uvial dimension, as he suggested that his theory of perception was like a kind of “ascending rain, drenching us in all the qualities of the object (cited in Manguel 1996: 28; see also Lindberg 1983). In On the Soul Aristotle, with his empirical world-view, also came down on the side of the philosophers who believed in the notion that visual information, including written information, streams upward into the mind of a viewer or reader through the retina.