http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/12/on-looking-eleven-walks-with-expert-eyes/
“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote,
“is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail
at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban
life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float
past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the
purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world
by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. And yet:
“The art of seeing has to be learned,and it
can be learned".
Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is
happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body,
in the distance, and right in front of you.
By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a
distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount
of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of
the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places
your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the
roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or
jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum
of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own
shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine
of a kitchen appliance.
This adaptive ignorance, she argues, is there for a reason — we
celebrate it as “concentration” and welcome its way of easing our
cognitive overload by allowing us to conserve our precious mental
resources only for the stimuli of immediate and vital importance, and to
dismiss or entirely miss all else.
While this might make us more efficient in our goal-oriented
day-to-day, it also makes us inhabit a largely unlived — and
unremembered — life, day in and day out.
“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”:
A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems
that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve. The first
problem emerges from the nature of the world. The world is wildly
distracting. It is full of brightly colored things, large things casting
shadows, quickly moving things, approaching things, loud things,
irregular things, smelly things.
Thus, evolution’s problem-solving left us modern humans with two kinds of attention: vigilance,
which allows us to have a quick and life-saving fight-or-flight
response to an immediate threat, be it a leaping lion or a deranged
boss, and selective attention, which unconsciously curates the
few stimuli to attend to amidst the flurry bombarding us, enabling us to
block out everything except what we’re interested in ingesting.
Much like French polymath Henri Poincaré argued that to invent is simply to choose ideas,
to attend, it turns out, is simply to choose stimuli — but what sounds
so deceptively simple turns out to be marvelously complex.
Horowitz tickles this latter type of attention to unravel all the
unseen, unsmelled, and unheard miracles of a city block, the wonderlands
of sensation and awareness that bloom behind the looking glass of our
evolutionarily primed everyday inattention.
Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are
able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, sound — but to
function, we have to ignore some of it. The world still holds these
details. Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending
to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed
as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.
Part of toddlers’ extraordinary capacity for noticing has to do with their hard-wired neophilia
— the allure of the new and unfamiliar, which for them includes just
about everything that we, old and jaded, have deemed familiar and thus
uninteresting.
Eventually, we made it from A to B, but not before visiting all of the
later letters of the alphabet. … Objects and people on our route became
possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as
the urban pedestrian might define them.
I had not noticed, until forced to by Kalman’s sociability, how I was
engaging in a fundamentally social activity by walking out in public.
our minds are constantly coerced into reading the “dull, tedious words”
that bombard us from storefronts, billboards, and computer screens
nearly every waking moment — but besides the linguistic burden, embedded
in each letter we ingest is also a design one, for typography can
quietly convey an unwritten message, set a mood, create an ineffable
sense of something being either terribly wrong or terribly wonderful. There is a humanistic quality of words.
We learn that on every square inch of surface,
entire microcosms
oscillate between vibrant life and violent death. (“If a driveway holds
an ecosystem,” Horowitz ponders, “what of a parking lot? Perchance a
universe.”)
“Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.”
Once you have an eye for these things, even when you’re not looking for
them, they just jump out at you. Everything is a sign of something.
Every single crack, hole, and slit between buildings is part of a vast and elaborate transit system of urban wildlife passageways.
Part of what restricts us seeing things is that we have an expectation
about what we will see, and we are actually perceptually restricted by
that expectation. In a sense, expectation is the lost cousin of
attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process of the world
“out there.” Attention is the more charismatic member, packaged and sold
more effectively, but expectation is also a crucial part of what we
see. Together they allow us to be functional, reducing the sensory chaos
of the world into unbothersome and understandable units.
Humans are visual creatures. Our eyes have prime positioning on our
faces. We have trichromatic vision, which is sufficient to paint a
Technicolor, million-colored landscape of the world. Our brains’ visual
areas, with hundreds of millions of neurons designed to make sense of
what we see, takes up a full fifth of each of our cortices. The
resplendent scene our eyes carry to us is entrancing. As a result, we
humans generally do not bother paying attention to much other than the
visual. What we wear, where we live, where we visit, even whom we love
is based in large part on appearance — visual appearance.
I imagined that someone who has lost her sense of sight could lead me,
however superficially, into the invisible block that I miss with my wide
open eyes.
Gordon navigates swiftly along the sidewalk, masterfully using her cane — a sort of sensory extension of herself .
Our brains are changed by experience — in a way directly
related to the details of that experience. If we have enough experience
doing an action, viewing a scene, or smelling an odor to become an
“expert” in a field, then our brains are functionally — and visibly —
different from nonexperts.
And yet:
The brain is plastic, and can creatively adapt to a new
situation, but it changes right back when it no longer needs to be
creative.
The dog nose has
hundreds of millions of receptors in that nose; All animals house hormones, which are involved in bodily and brain
activities, and those hormones we emit, called pheromones, are detected
by the vomeronasal organ. This is how a dog could detect another dog’s
stress or sexual readiness in a spray of her urine left on the ground.
Dogs are called macrosomatic, or keen-scented, while humans are called microsomatic, or feeble-scented.
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http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/07/annie-dillard-the-writing-life-1/
In our obsession with
optimizing our creative routines and
maximizing our productivity, we’ve forgotten how to be truly present in the gladdening mystery of life.
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http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/29/the-art-of-observation/
Why genius lies in the selection of what is worth observing.
“In the field of observation,” legendary disease prevention pioneer
Louis Pasteur famously proclaimed in 1854,
“chance favors only the prepared mind.” “Knowledge comes form noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us,”
Aristotle commented that on observing that the bright side of the moon
is always toward the sun, it may suddenly occur to the observer that the
explanation is that the moon shines by the light of the sun.
The thing noticed will only become significant if the mind of the
observer either consciously or unconsciously relates it to some relevant
knowledge or past experience, or if in pondering on it subsequently he
arrives at some hypothesis.
what is more important and more difficult is to observe (in this
instance mainly a mental process) resemblances or correlations between
things that on the surface appeared quite unrelated.
“real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge
of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and
which are completely unnecessary to know”
One cannot observe everything closely, therefore one must discriminate
and try to select the significant. When practicing a branch of science,
the ‘trained’ observer deliberately looks for specific things which his
training has taught him are significant, but in research he often has to
rely on his own discrimination, guided only by his general scientific
knowledge, judgment and perhaps an hypothesis which he entertains. Most of the knowledge and much of the genius of the research worker lie
behind his selection of what is worth observing. It is a crucial choice,
often determining the success or failure of months of work, often
differentiating the brilliant discoverer from the … plodder.
Training in observation follows the same principles as training in any
activity. At first one must do things consciously and laboriously, but
with practice the activities gradually become automatic and unconscious
and a habit is established. Effective scientific observation also
requires a good background, for only by being familiar with the usual
can we notice something as being unusual or unexplained.
“chance favors the connected mind.”
