This allows the visual messages to be transmitted to the brain to be interpreted.

Transduction: The image on the retina is then transformed into electrical signals through a process known as transduction.

The cornea and lens act together to project an inverted image onto the retina. The cornea helps focus the light as it enters and the iris controls the size of the pupils to determine how much light to let in.

Image on the retina: This part of the perception process involves light passing through the cornea and pupil, onto the lens of the eye.Attended stimulus: The attended stimulus is the specific object in the environment on which our attention is focused.Environmental stimulus is everything in the environment that has the potential to be perceived. Environmental stimulus: The world is full of stimuli that can attract attention.I might read Empire, the sequel that covers 14 CE to 138 CE, but I don’t have high hopes. Some of the chapters would cover the aftermath or mention this events, but these elisions made the last third of the book unsatisfying. But a lot of events were omitted that I was really hoping to read about: the Battle of Actium, the story of Cincinnatus, the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Augustus‘ rise to become emperor, etc. Granted, Roma covers 1,000 years of history. One of things that bothered me about this book–and it bothered me a lot–was Saylor’s tendency to gloss over important events in history. Something will happen, sometimes something small, and then a few stories and a few generations later, its a venerable tradition and no one knows exactly how it got started. Saylor uses Roman festivals like the Lupercalia and places like the Caci Stairs (Scalae Caci) and invents stories to explain their origins. They were very religious and superstitious.Īs I read Roma, one of the things that struck me was how small historical events can become legendary. Like the best works of historical fiction, it shows how much like us our ancestors were. If you read it that way, Roma is an amazing novel. Just like a Rutherfurd novel, you have to keep remembering that the main character isn’t really a person it’s the city. It also doesn’t help that some of the characters are jerks. Saylor follows the Pinarii and Potitii families from 1000 BC to 1 BC and we get to see Rome grow from a small trading post to the seat of an Empire.īecause the book is structure as a series of short stories, it’s hard to bond with any of the characters. It follows a pair of families down through the centuries, highlighting the turning points in their city’s history. Steven Saylor’s Roma is a book in the Edward Rutherfurd-mode: a generational story of a city.

Roma by Steven Saylor