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March 28 - April 19, 2021
gaped
incongruent
teaching students to analyze works of art in order to improve their patient observation skills.
botch
swashbuckling
When a housekeeper at a Minneapolis hotel noticed a young girl alone in a room who wouldn’t make eye contact, wasn’t dressed for the cold weather, and had no luggage, she reported it, and helped uncover an international sex trafficking ring.
Swiss hiker George de Mestral to look down at his burr-covered socks and see a new type of adhesion; Mestral’s discovery of what he christened Velcro
Leonardo da Vinci attributed all of his scientific and artistic accomplishments to the same concept, which he called saper vedere (“sah-PEAR veh-DARE-ay”)—“knowing how to see.” We might also call his gift “visual intelligence.”
Dr. Sebastian Seung. Thanks to his captivating TED talk and EyeWire, the visionary retina-mapping project
Art historian David Joselit describes art as “exorbitant stockpiles of experience and information.”
exigent
the best way to rethink something we’ve been doing for years—the way we do our jobs, the way we interact with others, the way we see the world—is to step outside of ourselves, and outside of our comfort zone.
squirm.
“the four As”—how to assess, analyze, articulate, and adapt.
attention is a finite resource that our brains must delegate. We
the average person checks his phone 110 times a day and nearly once every 6 seconds in the evening.
when distracted, workers suffered a ten- to fifteen-point IQ loss—a greater dumbing down than experienced when smoking marijuana.
students who were distracted while working on complicated math problems took 40 percent longer to solve them.
hubbub.
proffered.
invention is less about creation than it is about discovery. And discovery is made possible by simply opening our eyes, turning on our brains, tuning in, and paying attention.
squalid
observation is not just passively watching something but an actively engaging mental process. Before we can truly master it, though, we need to know our own blind spots.
slater.
If the speaker’s sharp senses and rapid-fire delivery of his deductions sound like Sherlock Holmes, it is for good reason: he was the real-life inspiration for the fictional detective. Dr. Joseph Bell, a professor of surgery, prolific writer, and a relative of Alexander Graham Bell, enthralled his young student Arthur Conan Doyle with his uncanny and uncommon yet in his words “elementary” talents. According to Bell, who often chanted, “Use your eyes, use your eyes” in his classes, the most important skill was a simple differentiation between passive sight and active assessment.
Observing is seeing, but consciously, carefully, and thoughtfully.
Dr. Graziano, another neuroscientist at Princeton and author of Consciousness and the Social Brain, uses Kevin in his lectures as a unique ventriloquist demonstration of the power of perception.
squealed
“attention schema theory.”
Since humans are bombarded with stimuli, both externally in the form of sights, sounds, and other sensory information and internally in the form of thoughts, emotions, and memories, the brain cannot process every bit of information it encounters. Instead, it must focus on some things at the expense of others. How the neurons in the human brain decide what to deal with is called attention.
“We don’t magically become aware of something,” Graziano says. “It’s an act of the brain processing data.”
attention, while hard to capture, is also finite. We do not have an unlimited capacity for decoding every single stimulus, both external and internal, that we encounter.
“It’s partly a source-parsing problem,”
“In many ways, your attention focuses you. You attend to one thing, and effectively your brain suppresses o...
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In 1999, Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris set out to prove that even though our eyes may be open and looking right at something in our field of view, we don’t always see it—an
“inattentional blindness.”
conscious perception requires attention, and that attention is selective. If our attention is absorbed by anything, even a task as mundane as counting, we can miss something else huge (and hairy) right in front of us.
“proper seeing is a skill which needs to be learned, like playing the piano, speaking French or playing good golf.”
we can increase our attention capacity dramatically with challenging visual attention tasks.
wilting,
“These new details that I’d never noticed before might not tell me a diagnosis,” she explains, “but they give me something just as important: information about what motivates the patient to live, how he can live best with his illness, and what sort of alternative treatments he might consider to palliate his suffering.”
Arthur Conan Doyle’s real-life inspiration,
deception specialist Apollo Robbins,
larcenist
Renshaw’s Cow
While most people can see, not everyone sees the same things.
Not only do we as individuals observe, notice, and gather information differently, we also perceive what we’ve gathered differently.
Perception is how we interpret the information we gather during observation;
Our perceptive filter is shaped by our own unique experiences in the world.
The published account of their “reflections on terror and loss” still resonates with her as a firsthand example of how your own perceptions of a situation are just that—your own—and of the fact that you can never assume other people experience anything the same way you do, even if you are right there with them.
