On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (2 page)

Each residence had its own one or two distinguishable features.
At one building, there were rolled-up, rubber-banded newspapers just sitting on the step outside closed doors. I marveled, for the umpteenth time, that delivered newspapers do not just go missing every morning. Another building had ivy trained over its steps, forming a hopeful arch. A third presented a well-ordered set of trash cans underneath a metal fence.

Clustered along the curb were the loitering film crew and their loitering trucks, generators loudly generating. The crew wore badges or headsets, and nearly everyone held a coffee cup, some kind of early-morning security blanket. They stared at me: they had nothing to do, and they were not in their own neighborhoods, where eye contact is brief and polite. The smells of a nearby caterer caught me: breakfast. The front of a church I had never been in had become a gaping hole, its many doors propped widely open, as men in long shorts hoisted crates inside.

In the middle of this hubbub a honey locust tree sat broken. A recent furious storm had felled its top half, now folded messily next to its trunk. Passersby simply stepped around the police tape unhelpfully slung across it.

A breeze lured me from down the street and I reflexively pursued it, continuing back across Broadway. This block climbed ever-so-slightly up and then down a hill, which seemed to give it great character: the row of identical houses looked more intriguing at slightly different altitudes. On the second floor of one building an old dog studied me through the rails of a balcony. His ears dangled becomingly over his face, and he wagged as I greeted him.

Dominating the street was a single-family mansion, a true anomaly in this city. From behind its wall popped a squirrel, who headed across the street in fits and starts, pausing under a car and in the middle of the road before scurrying across and into a bush.

I turned my final corner, toward the mansion entrance, gazing up at its pair of stone lions waiting patiently for royalty that never
arrives. A wooly caterpillar, his head crowned with four fearsome green horns, moved lazily on the first step, heading nowhere good for caterpillars. I scooched him onto a finger and deposited him in a nearby potted tree. I arrived back on my doorstep. The newspaper that should be rubber-banded outside my door had been stolen. I turned the key and was home.

 • • • 

I had waltzed out my door with considerably more self-consciousness than usual, not unaware that I was out to take a “typical” walk around the block. I reveled in my naïveté, pleased to be embarking on a walk whose limitations I knew I would spend the rest of this book delineating. But I also thought to myself that I might just impress myself with my uncanny observational skills. After all, in my professional life I am an observer—of dogs in particular. That skill should translate to observing my own behavior, and certainly to observing my own block. Hadn’t I heard how observant I was, from those many friends onto whom I’d lobbed surely unwelcome observations?

So on my return I felt plenty pleased with myself and my walk. Surely I had seen all that really mattered on the block. Not a car passed without my gaze upon it; nary a building got by un-ogled. I had stared down the trees; I even knew one’s name. I had eyeballed the passersby; noted a daring squirrel; spied a wooly caterpillar. I was consciously looking. What could I have missed?

 • • • 

As it turns out, I was missing pretty much everything. After taking the walks described in this book, 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 see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders.

My deficiency is one of attention: I simply was not paying close enough attention. Though
paying attention
seems simple, there are numerous forms of payment. I reckon that every child has been admonished by teacher or parent to “pay attention.” But no one tells you
how
to do that.

The consensus is that it is in some way taxing. Gustave Fechner, a nineteenth-century German psychophysicist, claimed he felt a physical sensation when attending: “a strain forward in the eyes,” and when listening, “one directed sidewise in the ears.” The American father of modern psychology, William James, reported that when attending to a memory, he felt “an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs,” as though fixing on the striations of neurons in the interior of his head. In researching what people perceived attention to be, psychologists found that schoolteachers instructed their students to pay attention to an image by “hold[ing] the image still as one would with a camera.” To concentrate, to
pay attention,
is viewed as a brow-furrowing exercise. Sit still, don’t blink, and
attend
.

Given a thorny sentence to read, or asked to listen to a whispered secret while a truck rumbles by, you will quickly be brought to that mind-straining place that James and Fechner described. We take on a characteristic attentive pose. In reading, you might frown slightly, your eyes narrowed as though contracting the words into finer focus. In listening, you may lean toward the speaker, looking down to avoid visual distraction, your mouth falling slightly open. You hold something tensed—a flexed foot, fingers curled into a loose fist, shoulders raised protectively. You are surprisingly still, as though the noise of your muscle movement might drown out a whisper.

This may do for a moment of concentration, but it is not the
way to better attention in your daily life. For that, 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?

Surely “everyone knows what attention is,” claimed James over a century ago.
Maybe,
but it is notable that James himself then spent sixty pages of his psychology opus largely theorizing about what exactly it might be. If we are unsure what attention is, we are bound to have difficulty honing it.

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.