USC Cinematic Arts

Donald Hoffman is a professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, best known for his ground-breaking studies of  perception of visual shape and for his masterful exposition of the constructive powers of the brain in the 1998 book called Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See.  Don is a proponent of an evolutionary view of perception. He advanced the intriguing notion that perception is a species-specific user interface between the world and the mind that evolved to expedite adaptive behavior and not to estimate truth.