On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes Page 2
The longtime model used by psychologists is that of a “spotlight” that picks out particular items of interest to examine, bringing some things into focus and awareness while leaving other things in the dim, dusty sidelines. The metaphor makes me feel like a headlight-wearing spelunker who can only see what is right in front of her in the darkness of the cave. Such a comparison can be misleading, because in fact one can still report on what was within one’s peripheral vision at rates better than chance. And despite that spotlight, we seem to miss huge elements of the thing we are ostensibly attending to.
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. This cacophony can be found right outside your house or apartment. Should someone see us standing quietly on the sidewalk in front of an apartment building, and ask us, “What’s up?” we might be hard-pressed to respond accurately: “My eyes are being tickled with a splendid display of colors; we are surrounded by improbably large stone towers; occasionally a storm of metal and plastic roars by me on the street; soft-faced irregularly-moving forms come near me and pass by; smaller tight-bodied things move by my head in the air; there is a rumble from somewhere, intermittent jabbers from the soft faces, continual hums from these stone towers; my nose is attracted and repelled by something ripe and rotting . . .” we could begin.
Instead, we say, “Nothing much.”
And “nothing” is more or less what we notice, in fact. One way to solve the problem of the “blooming, buzzing confusion” an infant confronts on entering the world is to tune much of it out. As we grow up, over the course of days and months, we learn to deal with the confusion by paying little of it mind. By the time we are old enough to walk outside to the sidewalk, we have organized the perceptual melee into chunks of recognizable objects. After a few years, we learn to see the street scene—without really seeing it at all.
The second problem is that, even ignoring most of it, we can only take in so much of the world at a time. Our sensory system has a limited capacity, both in range and in speed of processing. The light we see, “visible” light, is an impossibly small snatch of the solar spectrum; similarly, what we hear is but a fraction of what there is to hear. Our eyes, like other sensory organs, can process a finite amount at once: the neural cells that transduce light to electricity effect this through a change in their pigment. In the time that this is happening, the cell cannot take in any more light. We do not see what cannot get past the eye. And, too, though with our highly fancy brains we are massive parallel distributed processers, there is still a limit to our computational capacity. The world’s best computers do not (yet) think like humans do, but they are much, much faster at processing information. Happily, not everything out there in the world is equally informative or important. We do not need to see everything.
If only we had a system that let us take in what we do need to see—
—and of course, we do: that system is attention. Having a way to tune out unnecessary information, to sort through the bombardment of visual and auditory noise, solves these problems. Objects in the world may seem benign, impotently hoping that your glance will light on them, but they are competing with each other for your regard. Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that. Why bother sorting out all the elements of a visual scene? Evolution has a simple explanation. Some things are good to eat, and some things are trying to eat you. At the most basic level, an organism needs to be able to discriminate between these two categories of things from the rest of the world. Indeed, for a simple organism, that could be nearly all that is noticed. The bacterium does not care if your orange shirt clashes horribly with your pink slacks. The subtle but important difference between the smell of sweaty feet and the smell of Limburger cheese (actually not so different to all but the cheesemongers) is lost on the brave bacterium that would happily lounge on either. For an early hominid on the savanna, detection of, say, a lion would be of paramount importance. As a result, modern humans still have a type of attention—vigilance—which helps keep the body ready to look out for that lion, and dash off if he appears. More recently, what is relevant for modern man is being able to nod at the right times to the person animatedly talking to you at a cocktail party, while blocking out all the other conversations around you (noticing if one of them mentions you, though). We have got another kind of attention—selective attention—to do this job for us.
When we can, we try to offload this work on the world: bringing attention by changing it—circling the key words of a book’s pages; marking with bright color anything to be noticed; keeping your preferred knife not among knives but among the poor defenseless spoons. Hence the commercial success of highlighter pens, bright orange construction cones (or, even better, construction cones in neon green, for contrast with the old orange), and advertising that blinks at you from its billboard.1 Indeed, the singularity of one unexpected element in a visual scene is so remarkable that the item can serve as just a marker for some other thing, tangible or intangible: to do the laundry or to call your mother. It is the string-on-the-finger phenomenon: in noticing the string, you do not head into a reverie about strings. Instead, you are reminded that there is something that needs remembering.
If you overuse this trick, though, you simply become accustomed to having strings on your fingers, and the strings no longer serve to do anything but keep you armed for tying knots at a moment’s notice.
The most successful spotlighting of any situation usually involves directions from upstream, in the brain. Your brain ties strings on fingers all the time, without wasting a single strand. Your own internal monologue about what you are doing in any given moment actually affects what you will see in that moment. If you know you are looking for the knife, it will be easier to find.
At a basic level, then, paying attention is simply making a selection among all the stimuli bombarding you at any moment. It need not be concerted or difficult. But it does require some direction from the brain. Simply to be reading these words at all is to be narrowing your range of mental field to the words on the page. Other sights, thoughts, sounds, and smells still fly by in your periphery, the suburbs of your mental viewfinder. They are a sublevel of attention, a kind of attention that we might not be aware of (until one of those sights or sounds migrates into our mental field of view). These are things we will quickly, and almost surely, forget—but that are ready for consideration. Later today, reflecting on the time spent sitting and reading this book, you will not remember an image of what was to your left or right, what was in your visual field above the top of the book’s pages, the tune flitting through your head, or the ambient sound track of muffled footsteps or car traffic that accompanies your reading.
Psychologists call this the selective enhancement of some area of your perceptual field and suppression of other areas. And therein lies my approach to “paying attention” to the block: each of my companions on these walks serves to do the selective-enhancing for us, highlighting the parts of the world that they see but which we have either learned to ignore or do not even know we can see.
• • •
This is not to say that everyone I walked with saw everything. Moments into my walk with one of the world’s foremost researchers on the science of paying attention, she stepped over sixty dollars lying in her path on the street.
She simply did not notice it.
A half-step behind her, I, and my eyebrows, expressed surprise. For this, an early walk for this project, I had headed out of town by train to walk with a psychologist who thinks a great deal about attention. We had just been talking about the psychological idea of being “mindful”—aiming to bring active attention to our daily li
ves by noticing new things. And we were on one of the prototypical elements of daily life, a neighborhood jaunt with dogs.
But the mindful psychologist walked mindlessly by the cash.
It was her dog and I who saw it (well, I am guessing the dog smelled it). One twenty-dollar bill, bereft of owner. A footstep later, another twenty. I goggled at seeing a third bill lying forlornly to the side of the first two. They bore the creases of having been folded with the same hand, in possessive quarter-folds, though they were now unfurling with their freedom. They must have leapt from a pocket together, parachuted to the ground at different speeds, and landed a stride apart. I stopped, reached down, grabbed the loot, and managed to mutter, “Look!”
She smiled broadly as she registered the money resting on my outstretched palms. The dog stood beside me, proudly quiet, nose pointed at the ground. But then I thought, Wait, did I miss another one?
• • •
In this book, I am looking for what it is that I miss, every day, right in front of me, while walking around the block. “The block” includes the physical elements of the street—from the sidewalks to the buildings—and their history. My first four walks attend to this inanimate city. The block includes who (or what) is on it now and who (or what) has passed before; the next three chapters attend to this animate city. The block is full of things we miss seeing, smelling, or hearing—and it holds untold stories of the things we do see, smell, or hear. The final three chapters attend to the sensory city.
The result of all this walking is not a master’s degree in the details of any one city or any single block. It is a tale about what there is to see in any environment, urban or rural. These walks re-awakened in me a sense of perpetual wonder in my surroundings—a perceptual skill typically available only to experts and to the very young (not yet expert in being people). Perhaps they will awaken wonder in you, too.
William James suggested that my experience will be “what I agree to attend to.” And so I headed agreeably to my first walk around the block, mind in my hand.
* * *
1 Before I had a child and the floor of our home became an in-progress canvas of wooden toys, squeaking balls, and plush animals, I could drop the single item I needed to remember to take with me the next day by the front door. There it would wait for me, utterly forgotten, until I spied it on my way out and stashed it in my rucksack.
INANIMATE CITY:
The Material of the Landscape
“You can observe a lot by watching.”
(Yogi Berra)
Muchness
“There was no decoration in front of the building save two pipes—one a humble pipe, the other a mysterious two-headed gnome. I did not investigate.”
By taking in my hand the small, soft curled fingers, and a good chunk of frayed wool jacket hem, both belonging to my nineteen-month-old son, I came to learn about the acute isosceles triangles on my block.
Before we even met the triangles, I was to have the conceptual foundations of my world rocked. When I headed out for a “walk” with my son, I was already being presumptuous. For me, to go for a walk is a simple matter, almost too simple to describe. But because my understanding of a walk was upended by a toddler, I’ll try. I thought a walk was a navigation of a path—sidewalk, street, or dirt—from point A to point B. I suppose that, if pushed, I would relent on “path”: it needn’t even be a true path, just a route along which to place my feet, one after the other, in going from somewhere to somewhere else.
How wrong I turned out to be. On a late afternoon on a late-spring day, we prepared to go for a walk around our block. At this age, my son had been walking on his own for seven months, but a walk outside—where he would be doing the walking, not being walked—was an unusual outing. He was still small and young enough that many expeditions were undertaken attached to Mama’s belly with an infant carrier, or to Daddy’s back in a retrofitted backpack. But today he was to lead me on a walk. Even more, I was going to ask him to tell me what he saw.
His response would, of course, require some amount of translation. Although he was a prodigious collector of vocabulary words—besides ma-ma, peek-boo, daddy, and apple, he was very fond of belly button, helicopter, and, after witnessing an impressive collapse of our liquor cabinet, catastrophe— he was not yet a conversationalist in the way that could be recorded on audiotape. On the other hand, he communicated all the time—with elaborate gestures, with expressions that spanned his face, with rudimentary sign language, and with emotion. On our walk, I would be listening to him reporting on what he saw by following his interests—and trying to imagine being in his six-inch-long shoes.
Buttons were buttoned, zips zipped, knots tied and double-tied. With no small amount of excitement, we headed down the elevator to “Outside!” as he exclaimed. My son ran through the lobby to our apartment building’s front door, weighted heavily in glass and iron—and gigantic relative to his small body. Together, we peeled it open slowly, as though to admire its solidity. Hand in hand, we turned left and started our walk.
Then we stopped. We had not even turned fully to our left. Poised half off the bottom step and half onto the sidewalk, my son squatted—a young weight lifter’s pose, or the spring-loading of an infant rocket. There he crouched. And stayed there.
“Let’s go for a walk!” I prompted.
Nothing.
“Okey-doke!” I said, in my best off-we-go! voice.
Maybe an eyelash batted.
Eventually he reached out his hand again and I grabbed it with mine.
This was the beginning of my realization: to him, we were already “taking a walk.” As we proceeded, I began to get the details of his definition. A “walk,” according to my toddler, is regularly about not walking. It has nothing to do with points A, B, or the getting from one to the other. It barely has anything to do with planting one’s feet in a straight line. A walk is, instead, an investigatory exercise that begins with energy and ends when (and only when) exhausted. It began in the elevator, continued with running through the building, opening the door, and then being poised on the step. It began before the elevator, tying shoes—and before that, doing a going-to-tie-our-shoes march down the hall. To him, we were miles into our walk.
A walk is exploring surfaces and textures with finger, toe, and—yuck—tongue; standing still and seeing who or what comes by; trying out different forms of locomotion (among them running, marching, high-kicking, galloping, scooting, projectile falling, spinning, and noisy shuffling). It is archeology: exploring the bit of discarded candy wrapper; collecting a fistful of pebbles and a twig and a torn corner of a paperback; swishing dirt back and forth along the ground. It is stopping to admire the murmuring of the breeze in the trees; locating the source of the bird’s song; pointing. Pointing!— using the arm to extend one’s fallen gaze so someone else can see what you’ve seen. It is a time of sharing.
On our block, my son has shared his discovery of the repeating motif of lights under construction scaffolding (they come in fluorescent, yellow, red, and bare-bulb white, I am happy to share with you). Of the numerous intentional or unintentional letter Os—his first spoken letter, enunciated carefully and long, lips pursed and eyes beaming with pleasure—on signs and walls (on the STOP sign, of course, but also on license plates and the zeros of no-parking signs—and by the way, nO parking, buster); on the circle-pocked grating of a window air-conditioner; in a round call button; in an egg-shaped sidewalk crack; on an iron gate with O filigree. He has shared the feature of our building that, to him, distinguished it from its neighbors: the lion’s head, mid-roar, above our entrance. I had never noticed it, over thousands of entrances and exits.
Was he fixated? Obsessed? A lightbulb, letter O, or lion savant? No. My son was but an infant. And the perceptions of infants are remarkable. That infants reliably develop into adults, who for all their wisdom or kindness are often unremarkable, blinds us to this fact. The infant’s world is a case study in confused attention. A newborn, freshly plo
pped into the world, is unwittingly enrolled in a crash course in sensory experience. In some respects his biology takes care not to overwhelm him too much. Though all sensory organs—including those compellingly large, naive eyes; the ears the size of his hands; the perfectly soft, unblemished skin—are intact, the messages they receive from the world do not all get to the infant’s brain. At least not in an organized way. What the infant sees, for instance, is something quite fuzzier and more dazzling than what the normal adult sees: babies are very nearsighted and they lack the clouded filters that take bright light down a notch. Even more critically, the world is not yet organized into discrete objects for these new eyes: it is all light and dark, shadow and brightness. To the newborn infant, there is no “crib,” no “mama” and “daddy,” no floor no wall no window no sky. Much of this can be seen, but none can yet be made sense of.
Information taken in by the eyes might be processed in any part of the brain—it could be the visual cortex, leading to an inchoate “seeing”; but it could also be the motor cortex, leading to a leg kicking; or the auditory cortex, in which case a nearby teddy bear may be experienced as a bang, or a ringing, or a whisper. There is good reason to believe that this kind of synesthesia is the normal experience for infants. Synesthesia—literally “joining of sensations”—is a somewhat rare and highly improbable form of perception in adults. Synesthetes experience things from one sense—say, vision—overlaid with experiences from another, such as taste. Of course we often experience two or more sensations at once—it is hard to eat near a spewing sewer; we can locate the person who is speaking to us by looking at lips.
In some people, though, sensory overlays are less functional and more extreme. The nineteenth-century Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria wrote about his encounter with a synesthete, introduced as “S,” in The Mind of a Mnemonist (the patient also, not coincidentally, had an extremely good memory). In asking him to memorize lists of words, Luria became aware that S. was visualizing the words in his head, and that this “seeing” was not straightforward. For if someone coughed or sneezed when a word was being read from the list, S. reported that a “puff of steam,” a “splash” or blur, appeared on the images he was forming in his mind. For S., sounds came in colors and flavors: pink, rough, or tasting like pickles. Many synesthetes experience numbers and letters with distinctive overlays—a “gloomy” number 3; the letter h as a “drab shoelace”; an a reminiscent of “weathered wood.”