On Looking: About Everything There is to See

by Alexandra Horowitz

Viewed with this lens, the city feels less artificial. The cold stone is natural, almost living: it absorbs water, warms under the sun, and sloughs its skin in rain. Like us, stone is affected by time, its outer layer softened and its veins made more prominent. And viewed as a natural landscape, the city feels less permanent: even the strongest-looking behemoth of an apartment tower is gradually deteriorating under the persistent, patient forces of wind, water, and time. Weather continuously wears at the building, carving its influence by subtraction. Dirt stains; rainwater leaves a trail of salt tearing from a sill to the ground; a decorative copper touch oxidizes—and then its greenness washes onto the stone below it; steel rusts earthly red. Little is as convincing of the naturalness of the city as the process of weathering. Stones become covered with moss; ivy creeps up, disjoints, and eventually obliterates brick; wood darkens with moisture and lightens with age, then gets worn into a soft-cornered version of its former self. Eventually, this town—all towns—will dissolve and become fodder for another generation’s construction.

Expertise changes what you see and hear, and it even changes what you can attend to. Neuro-imagery shows us how expert and naive brains look when attending: fundamentally different. Watch the brains of dancers while they watch a dance performance, and you will see considerably more activity than you would find in the brains of nondancers. Expertise leads to the ability to acquire more expertise.