Field guides
Every claim the guides label as fact, with where to check it. Observations, interpretations, exercises and metaphors are labelled as what they are — argue with those directly.
Field Guide Nº 1
02 / The filter
Your brain predicts, selects, filters and fills in gaps rather than recording the world like a camera.
Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press, 2016.
The predictive-processing account of perception, in book length.
Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Faber & Faber, 2021.
The same idea for a general reader: perception as a controlled hallucination.
02 / The filter
Where the optic nerve leaves the eye there is a patch with no light receptors, and the brain fills it in.
Edme Mariotte, Nouvelle découverte touchant la veüe. Paris, 1668.
The first description of the blind spot, found by the same kind of test the guide asks you to run.
V. S. Ramachandran, "Blind Spots." Scientific American 266, no. 5 (May 1992): 86–91.
How the brain fills the gap, and how to catch it doing so.
07 / A name for the idea
Philip K. Dick named the image the Black Iron Prison.
Philip K. Dick, VALIS. Bantam Books, 1981.
The novel where the Black Iron Prison appears.
Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Where Dick takes the idea much further — the part the guide says you do not need to follow.
Field Guide Nº 2
Nº 2 labels no panel as fact — it is a method rather than a set of claims. These are what the method is drawn from, printed on its last panel.
NASA — the scientific method.
The plain statement of observe, hypothesise, predict, test, revise.
Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science" — Caltech commencement address, 1974.
On the kind of honesty that consists of reporting what would prove you wrong.
Field Guide Nº 3
Nº 3 is a method too. Its worked example is invented, and it says so on the panel.
NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods — randomized block designs.
Why pairing comparable occasions and randomising the order inside each pair is fairer than running one condition and then the other.
Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science" — Caltech commencement address, 1974.
Keeping the sessions that disappoint you is the whole of it.
Think a claim is wrong, or a source does not say what I say it does? Tell me. If I’ve got something wrong, I want to know.