To: Jeffrey EpsteinBeeyacalion©gmail.com]
From: Al seckel
Sent: Thur 7/2/2009 5:04:18 PM
Subject Specific Proposal

## Jeff,

Here is a specific proposal for you and would be of some importance, and I hope of interest.

I want to do a comprehensive academic treatise on illusions and perception. Illusions are a very nice window in how the brain perceives, because they can reveal the hidden constraints of the perceptual system in a way that normal perceptual processes do not. They can show in a dramatic fashion the underlying constraints that work beneath the level of awareness.

Although I have done a number of books on illusions/perception, they have all been confined to static images. There is no opportunity to interact or to change parameters. Additionally, the really interesting and important material is dynamic, i.e, motion illusions, auditory illusions, cross-modal

illusions, etc.

I would like to do an academic treatise that contains an interactive CD (this may also be done via a website) where the user can actually interact with these illusions in fundamentally important ways, thereby revealing deep insights into perception. Only by adjusting paramaters such a luminance, contrast, speed, distance, can you really start seeing how these processes are connected.

There is so much being done in this field right now, which is so important to perception, vision, ai, etc., but it is all completely scattered, and with no central place where it is gathered in a way that will be helpful to students, researchers, etc. You will come across the occasional interesting demo, such as Arthur Shapiro's demonstration on the curved ball, but the field is clamouring for such a work.

I was approached by MIT Press to do such a book (through various recommendations from leaders in the field from Caltech, MIT, and Harvard), but MIT did not have the funds to do the programming aspect, which would be roughly $300,000. BTW, Arthur Shapiro (as well as vilaymur Ramachandran) wanted to be my co-author on this book, and I have literally my pick of anyone else in the field of who's who. This IS what I am good at, and I would like to return to it. In a sense, I feel a bit like Darwin who, just after returning on the Voyage of the Beagle, has amassed such an enormous quantity of information, but who has not yet published any of it in a substantive way. Blue World Alliance is sufficiently organized and run by other people now, so that I can return to doing what I am most passionate about. With funding, it would be published by MIT Press.

Is this something of interest to you? Hey, not only would it be significant for the field, but you would see an enormous amount of very cool stuff! ;-)

Yours,
me