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It is forgotten not because nothing of interest happens. It is forgotten because we failed to pay attention to the journey to begin with.
Even the feeling of time passing changes on our walk: with less to notice, time speeds up. The capacity to attend is ours; we just forget how to turn it on.
I would find myself at once alarmed, delighted, and humbled at the limitations of my ordinary looking. My consolation is that this deficiency of mine is quite human. We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object.
We are not blinded, but we have blinders.
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.
I am looking for what it is that I miss, every day, right in front of me,
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.
The infant’s world is a case study in confused attention.
Synesthesia—literally “joining of sensations”—is a somewhat rare and highly improbable form of perception in adults.
We all begin in a kind of sensory chaos—what William James called an “aboriginal sensible muchness”:
Soon, though, we acclimate. Familiarity begins following us around. Before we know it, we have become entirely accustomed to how that vacation spot looks.
the trash-top shoe is forlorn-looking, if not itself feeling that way. 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. I myself felt I was losing the sensitivity to broken chairs left out on the street that I once had.
Expertise changes what you see and hear, and it even changes what you can attend to.
I now saw Horenstein, too, changed by his own expertise. He can never walk down a block and not see its geology. We all have our own chesslike expertise in our heads, the place we know impossibly well, the images with which we are intimately familiar, the fine motor skill or athletic grace we can recognize in other people.
The infant vacillates between being a catastrophist and a purring kitten.
For the first five years of life, it is said, children learn approximately one word every two hours they are awake.
Words are the ample cleavage of the urban environment: impossible not to look at.
packed tight with perceptual pudding
One perceptual constraint that I knowingly labor under is the constraint that we all create for ourselves: we summarize and generalize, stop looking at particulars and start taking in scenes at a glance—all
To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant; little is unseen.
She left the route and wandered
her ability to transcend the social and cultural knowledge of where one is allowed to go felt like a superpower.
The reduction in receptors might actually increase information flow to various parts of the brain,
“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” the researchers wrote.
My mind boggled a small boggle.
expectation magically sorts the world into things-we-are-looking-for and things-we-are-not.
rats are thigmotaxic: a splendid word to describe an animal who likes to walk along walls, touching something as it goes. Thigmotaxic, or thigmophilic—touch-loving—animals
Watching the birds soar, pitch, and roll, and feeling happier just observing them, it occurred to me that one of the reasons that it is hard to pinpoint the function of this behavior may be that it is functionless. And the most classic functionless behavior, seen in all mammals and most vertebrates, is play. Might these birds be soaring for the mere pleasure of it, a communal recess run to nowhere in particular?
Sometimes we see least the things we see most.
Philadelphia is already the color of rain, and she wore the damp comfortably.
Gait is like the poker player’s tell: revealing of all faults.
Efficient was how Johnson defined the perfect gait.
our brains are also alert to “peripersonal space,” the bubble of space outlined by and directly surrounding our bodies. The bubble extends to right about where our limbs can extend—so it is larger for people with longer arms, piano-player fingers, or legs up to there. Neuroscientists discovered cells in the brains of monkeys and humans that are specialized to fire to sounds, touch, and sights in this near space.
The urban windscape manifests a Who’s Who of physics phenomena, involving forces and flows described by the Bernoulli principle, the Venturi effect, turbulence, and the properties of eddies and vortices.
the air being blown around in a large, wide-open area accelerates dramatically as it gets pushed into the small canyon of the street (the Venturi effect).
Tall buildings create other wind effects: winds that hit high on a building rush down its face,
Sheer glass towers can pull air not just down, but also up from below (the Bernoulli principle)—as
Naming, though, is not the exclusive reason for listening. Indeed, at times naming a sound aborts the experience of hearing altogether, shutting us off from continued listening and exploring the nature of the sound. Oh, that’s just a downy woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting. (Now we can move on.) Satisfied with our identification, we shift from attending to the downy ruckus to ruminating on dinner plans.
If those vibrations are strong enough, the hair cells bend deeply under their force. Air pressure can mow, crush, or sever the hairs until they are splayed, fused, floppy, or fractured—an
Bent and damaged enough because of exposure to loud sounds for prolonged periods, the hair cells do not grow back; the ears lose their neural downiness. The world becomes progressively quieter for the person attached to those ears, until there are no sounds, no music, no noise.
The force required to move our dancing ear hairs is so minimal that it would disrupt the tiniest mosquito not at all. Unlike our other senses, in listening, the normally functioning ear actually makes its own noise, something called otoacoustic emissions.
There is a tactile side to sound. More so than with vision, we can experience the physical agent (sound waves) in two ways at once.
Once light becomes “ultraviolet” and invisible to us, we can feel it, but it is the feeling of our tissues slowly burning.
There are other cross-modal components to listening. It is visual, for one thing. Close your eyes, and your hearing is more focused.
different temperatures control how far and where sounds will travel.
evolution favors those who intuitively know how to best send a sound signal through a medium—say, air or water.
In the back of the nose is an “olfactory recess” separated from the main respiratory pathway by a bony plate, allowing smelling to be distinct from breathing, and letting odors loiter for a long time to be considered.
One out of every fifty genes is committed to making cells that can detect smells. So smells are important to us.
Dogs detect odors at one or two parts per trillion, unimaginably more sensitive than we are.
