On Looking
“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” William James.
I have been reading a fascinating book called ‘On Looking’ by Alexandra Horowitz, who describes it as eleven walks with expert eyes. Horowitz lives in New York City, and regularly walks her dogs around her city block. She observes, “what I saw and attended to was exactly what I expected to see; what my dog showed me was that my attention invited along attention’s companion: inattention to everything else”.
Horowitz’s eleven experts were her dog (of course) and her toddler son, a typographer, geologist, artist, naturalist, wildlife biologist, physician, blind woman, sound designer, and the president of the Project for Public Space. In the book Horowitz tells how on a walk, usually around her block, these experts showed her different perspectives, which meant she completely changed her view of her surroundings.
In ‘Whose View?’ I wrote about unconscious bias, and how encouraging family photographers to persuade other people (not just family members) to take photographs adds so much more to family photo & story albums. But ‘On Looking’ is more about really seeing what is in front of us and looking at it from multiple perspectives.
This is most easily done when you go on holiday and have different experiences, with the time to take notice of what is happening around you. But you can also increase your experiences at home - by widening your knowledge of your home turf. Here are some ideas:
Talk to locals who will have different experiences than you, or have lived in the area for longer.
Read books written about your area - about the local history, fauna & flora, and local architecture. There may be travel writing about your area, showing an ‘outsider’s’ point of view.
There are apps (of course), that identify stones, animals and the night sky.
When you go on holiday, do you find that time goes more slowly, and that you observe more?
There are two reasons for this; you are in a new place with no established routines (even getting breakfast is different), and you are building many new memories every day.
The slowing of time is called the ‘holiday paradox’, which is linked to our perception of time, because it is affected by the number of memories we form. If we have a lot of new experiences in a day (causing the brain to save a lot of new memories) time will pass more slowly, while the opposite is true. Towards the end of the holiday, when we have established a routine and have got used to our surroundings, time speeds up.
Days seem long in childhood because a child has so many new experiences creating totally new memories, which gives the perception that their days are long. But the elderly have fewer new experiences. They usually encounter experiences that their brains have already processed, and this familiar information takes a shortcut to the memory bank, providing a feeling that time is speeding up1.
How will you increase the experiences you attend to?
While I am not advocating spending your holiday looking through a camera (it may even reduce the memories you retain), I recently found that looking through my daughter’s eyes while on holiday increased my enjoyment at the time. It made me look for different things, that I would not have looked at on my own account, and it was fun to share the photos and experiences with her when I returned.
On my return I made a small slideshow to show my daughter2. As always it was lovely to recall the holiday, and adding the extra perspective added to our enjoyment.
What will you look out for today, that is different from your usual interest?
If you are interested in art, these 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictorial, are based on the 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing, which examined how we view art.
Obviously, I am not an expert, so the information ins article comes from my research around this subject. Please let me know if I have made any mistakes. There are also other factors that affect how a person sees time passing, for instance if they are anxious or depressed. If you want to know more about the mysteries of time perception, read Time Warped by Claudia Hammond.
I made a slideshow in Photos on a MacBook Pro. I am going to see how easy it is to make a wee book from the photos. If you are interested in how I make the photo book please add a comment, and I will write a post about it.
@saribotton has published an excerpt of Alain de Botton's excellent "A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from the School of Life" https://oldster.substack.com/p/how-to-lengthen-your-life
Delightful, Kate. As someone trained in anthropology and art history who then wandered into tech... that insight about how we each "see" differently has gnawed at me as well. I'm reminded of the Rashomon effect, a reference to a 1950 Kurosawa film that captures the same event from the perspective of four contradictory witnesses.
It's funny you start out with the dog walker. My husband and I have often mused about a mystery series that has yet to be written where the protagonist and sleuth is a dog walker and gardener who is always observing the same paths and invariably notices things no one else does. What a wonderful perspective to take into family history.