Seeing and learning in three dimensions
The greatest problem in learning anatomy comes from trying to form a three dimensional mental picture without three dimensional learning tools. Few people can create a mental image that's three dimensional by looking at pictures in books, or static images on a monitor:
The best three-dimensional learning experience comes from dissecting the human body itself, but we don't all have access to that, and when we do it's not always at the best time in our learning careers. For those who must learn or relearn human anatomy without access to cadaver dissection, there's a critical need for a learning aid that presents images of the real human body in three dimensions. The DVD Atlas of Human Anatomy is designed to meet that need at an affordable price, and in a form that can be used by anyone with a DVD player, or a computer with a DVD drive.
Our eyes and brains give us two ways to see things in three dimensions, one much more effective than the other. One way is to use our stereoscopic vision, the other is to let our brain create a three dimensional image as the thing we're looking at turns around. To convey a three dimensional image, a learning tool must harness one or other of these ways of seeing.
Stereoscopic vision is something we all learn about in school. It's what we use for our everyday depth perception, and it's the basis for 3D visual aids we've all experienced. These include antique stereoscopes, Viewmaster® slides, 3D movies and experimental split-image television. These visual aids all require special equipment that's not useful for much else. They all suffer from the shortcoming that stereoscopic vision is not our most effective way of seeing things in three dimensions. Our most effective way is the other way: rotation of the object.
Object rotation is what we do without thinking, every time we're curious to learn about a solid object that we haven't seen before. If it's small, we turn it around. If it's big, we walk around it. By doing so we give our seeing brain a succession of images that we synthesize to create a three dimensional mental image. Once we gain that image, we "know" the object in a way we never could by looking at two-dimensional pictures. What's more, once we've seen that three-dimensional image, any two dimensional image of the object that we see later makes three-dimensional sense to us.
We take object rotation for granted as a constantly active part of our sense mechanism, but you may find it hard to envision its power as a way to transmit a three-dimensional image. For a demonstration, view one of the video examples. You don't need any special 3D glasses or any visual adjustment to make it work.
