Viki Holland

Welcome to my site. As a cognitive scientist who writes about the interface between your brain, your senses, and the world around you, I feel that my job is to look hard and go deep into those subjects and reveal the way things actually work in the larger world where we live, not just what goes on inside our heads. Currently, we tend to ignore the information that we access from the world in favor of what we have archived in our minds. Yet the information we ignore is critical both to our survival and the survival of earth as we know it.

My new book, Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes deals with our perceptions of the world and the information we access through those perceptions. I have also edited and written five chapters in a more academic book Event Cognition: An Ecological Perspective for Taylor and Francis and written and taken the photographs for two children’s books for Scribners, We’re Having a Baby and How to Photograph Your World, under the name Viki Holland. As a side bar, I have designed prizewinning Japanese gardens and had gallery shows of my photography and my stone and sand sculptures. I live in a cabin on Puget Sound with my master-pruner, arborist spouse, the resident wildlife—including eagles, herons, humming birds, cormorants, kingfishers, gulls, otters, and seals—and two tiny, furry dogs both of whom speak a version of English that revolves around treats and car rides.

In closing, I feel compelled to write about a critical part of our lives that is under threat-- hardcover and paperback books that we can hold in our hands, loan to friends, and pass on to our children. What you may not know is that research has found that the topography of a book, its pages and layout are critical to our getting the most out of what we read. Along with the books they loan us, our libraries are also under threat. They are underfunded and therefore understaffed. Coming to Our Senses is dedicated to the local librarians on the island where I live because without their help obtaining research materials, I could not have written this book. Please support your local library. At this point in time they need all the help they can get.