The fact that damage to certain parts of the temporal lobe results in an inability to recognize objects contains an extremely important lesson. For most of us, recognizing objects requires no effort or thought as long as we can see the object clearly. Because it’s easy for us, it might be tempting to think it’s an inherently easy task, one that shouldn’t require hardly any brain matter to perform. Certainly it never occurred to me before I studied neuroscience that object recognition might require a special brain region. But it turns out that tasks that seem easy to us can in fact require such a specialized region.

I think the more surprising thing here (perhaps not evident in the quote above, but evident from that chapter of the book more generally) is that visual recognition is separate from, e.g., olfactory recognition. I would have expected all the senses to feed into one monolithic recognition module.