Michael W. Levine

After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering at MIT, I decided the human was more interesting and earned a PhD in biophysics at The Rockefeller University. I was in the Hartline-Ratliff lab, working on goldfish retinal ganglion cells with Prof. Israel Abramov. I then continued that retinal work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After some 30 years of retinal investigations, I progressed to psychophysical studies.

As a professor at UIC, I taught courses in Introductory Psychology, Physiological Psychology, Statistics, and Sensation and Perception; in the latter area, I also offered a laboratory and graduate seminars. With a postdoctoral fellow, I coauthored a text called "Fundamentals of Sensation and Perception"; the third edition was mine alone.

I am now a Professor Emeritus, having retired from teaching some years ago. It was during this "retirement" that I wrote the present book, "Believing is Seeing". It is a general book about pattern perception, readable (I hope) by interested laypeople but also including some speculation about how the brain interprets visual information.