Transcribers note: In the original some footnotes read 'note[1]and
note[2]'. They have been renumbered to allow readers to refer directly
to them.
About This Book
The author surveys sensory and mental errors, defining and classifying illusions across perception, introspection, memory, dreams, insight, and quasi-presentative errors. He analyzes physiological and psychological mechanisms—sensory limits, misinterpretation, preperception, expectation, and environmental conditions—distinguishing passive (organism/environment) and active (voluntary/involuntary) causes and their continuum with hallucination. Dreaming, hypnotic states, and variations of memory receive structural explanations linking neural activity, associative processes, and emotion to distorted recall, time perspective, and imaginative transformation. Throughout, scientific description and examples are used to explain how normal processes can produce systematic cognitive and perceptual errors.