Learning to see (Conference Presentation)
Human beings are born with a remarkable visual apparatus, but even if all the parts - lens, retina, optic nerve, and so on - are present in working order, seeing remains at least in large part a learned skill. This is reflected in the fact that some people can see and understand things that others find meaningless or even fail to notice. One striking example is the radiology education of medical students and residents, who over the course of their training move from not knowing what they are looking at to quickly making complex diagnoses. In this session, we consider how seeing is learned and weigh the respective contributions of science, technology, and the arts in cultivating this remarkable human capacity.
