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It is forgotten because we failed to pay attention to the journey to begin with. On the phone, worrying over dinner, listening to others or to the to-do lists replaying in our own heads, we miss the world making itself available to be observed. And we miss the possibility of being surprised by what is hidden in plain sight right in front of us.
I was paying so little attention to most of what was right before us that I had become a sleepwalker on the sidewalk.
We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders.
we need to know what attention is. The very concept is odd. Is it an ability, a tendency, a skill? Is it processed in a special nugget in the brain, or by your eyes and ears? The psychologists have no clear answer. Since we all feel comfortable using the word, it has been customary to agreeably nod when someone starts talking to you about attention, but is it coherent to discuss something that we cannot even define, much less locate?
A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve.
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.
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.
Happily, not everything out there in the world is equally informative or important. We do not need to see everything.
Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.
At a basic level, then, paying attention is simply making a selection among all the stimuli bombarding you at any moment.
Psychologists call this the selective enhancement of some area of your perceptual field and suppression of other areas.
This is not to say that the world can be seen in infinitely many ways. There is a logic to the images we see; but the logic the child sees is as yet uninfected by the logic of the world seen through an adult’s eyes.
The urban child is, unfortunately, trash height on garbage day;
There is a richness in the child’s analogies that we lose when we learn to be obsessed with “appropriate” word use. It is a sign of smallness of mind to think of this appreciation for the shoe’s situation or the blooming flower’s emotion as an error.
Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive.
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” (Paul Valéry)
For the first five years of life, it is said, children learn approximately one word every two hours they are awake.
Every hour, children are losing more and more ability to think without language—and without the cultural knowledge that language passes along. Every hour, children are less able to not notice words. And to me, the lack of language is what is enviable.
Signs and storefronts and billboards and computer screens barrage us with text that we, with our language-besotted minds, cannot help but read.
Today we rarely encounter a public surface completely without words. In New York City, signs identifying shops have migrated from the shop face and door onto awnings, banners, and placards thrust into the line of vision of a passing pedestrian.
Instructions, directions, labels, assertions, names, descriptions, suggestions, and commands abound.
“When I do walking tours, I forget to look where I’m going.” With all the signs, a person could get lost.
Some researchers theorize that we have an innate hunger to pursue visual stimuli that give us pleasure. When we sate that hunger, a flood of the brain’s natural opioids is released. What, exactly, gives us pleasure? Things rich with information, packed tight with perceptual pudding that calls forth the knowledge we have and associations we have made with similar experiences in the past.
I felt relieved, for the moment, of my compulsion to read what was readable, to parse text when I saw it. Surprisingly, this relief came not from avoiding text, but from seeking it out—only to zoom in on the details held within. It was a vision that let me miss the forest and see the trees. Rather than words, I saw the components of words. Some small part of my brain (the linguistic part) rested; the shape-identifying part hummed with activity.
The thing you are doing now affects the thing you see next.
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” (Sherlock Holmes)
we summarize and generalize, stop looking at particulars and start taking in scenes at a glance—all in an effort to not be overwhelmed visually when we just need to make it through the day. The artist seems to retain something of the child’s visual strategy: how to look at the world before knowing (or without thinking about) the name or function of everything that catches the eye. An infant treats objects with an unprejudiced equivalence: the plastic truck is of no more intrinsic worth to the child than an empty box is, until the former is called a toy and the latter is called garbage.
To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant; little is unseen.
Her frank interest in others made me think about the feeling of privacy we carry with us from our homes into public, where there is truly no privacy. 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.
Kalman minded people’s spaces, but she seemed to see personal space as an indication that there was a person in that space to engage with.
Unlike most mammals, we have highly developed facial musculature, including around the eyes and even in the eye itself. What we lost in expressive potential when we lost tails is made up for by our ability to squint an ironic half smile—distinct from a full-bore joyous grin or a grimace.
Take a left turn where you ordinarily take a right; open the gate to the block garden you have never visited; view the passerby as a person who is waiting for you to speak to him.
Cities are filled with a variety of private and public spaces, spaces one can enter and spaces one must be invited into. In the latter case, an open door may be the only sign that the public is invited in (but owners reserve the right to take a look at you and boot you back out).
“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” the researchers wrote.
In fact, as a culture we tend to value the rare over the common, in our sensibilities and in our policies. We mourn the passenger pigeon, hunted out of existence a century ago, but vilify the pigeon on every city street;
Tinbergen suggested that, once the birds found a food they liked, they began to look just for that food, ignoring all others. He called this a search image:
The concept of a search image has now been widely studied in the animal world and is used to help explain the efficiency many predators have in finding their prey, despite the best efforts of the prey to be unfindable.
Search images are not just used or useful for finding prey or avoiding capture; they are the way we find our car keys, spot our friends in a crowd, and even find patterns that we had never seen before.
Everyone needs a mechanism to select what, out of all the things in the world, they should both look for and at, and what they should ignore.
“Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.”
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.
Attention and expectation also work together to oblige our missing things right in front of our noses. There is a term for this: inattentional blindness. It is the missing of the literal elephant in the room, despite the overturned armchairs, dinner-plate footprints, and piles of dung.
If we notice things faster simply by expecting them, then looking at the world as if it holds “cues” for us just might work.
“We must always say what we see, but above all and more difficult, we must always see what we see.” (Le Corbusier)
urban pedestrian behavior is quick and fluid—all the more impressive for being largely unconscious. Together we are doing a cooperative dance, a kind of pedestrian jig, without even knowing we are dancing. When we walk in a heavily trafficked city, we adapt to being but a wee fish in a big pond by subtly adjusting our behavior in parallel with those around us.
First, Avoid bumping into others (while staying comfortably close).
The second rule: Follow whoever is in front of you.
The final rule: Keep up with those next to you.
This seems like an impossible calculation, until you realize how little effort you have to pay to walk next to someone else down the street, never once considering how you will be able to keep at the same pace.
Urban pedestrians make other small adjustments to others near us. When crossing paths with another walker, one party slows his pace just enough—maybe only for a fifth of a second—to enable both to keep the direction of their route unaltered.
