On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes - by Alexandra Horowitz

This book is the record of eleven walks around the block I took with expert seers, who told me what they saw. The best way to find out that no two world-views are the same is to have yourself led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it.

Ignorance is useful. Indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration.

Time spent is forgotten because we failed to pay attention to the journey.

Though paying attention seems simple, there are numerous forms of payment.

Selective attention: We try to offload this work on the world.
Bringing attention by changing something:
* circling the key words of a book’s pages
* marking with bright color anything to be noticed
* orange construction cones
* advertising that blinks

Your own internal monologue about what you are doing in any given moment actually affects what you will see in that moment.

Paying attention is simply making a selection among all the stimuli.
Selective enhancement of some area of your perceptual field and suppression of other areas.

Synesthetes experience things from one sense - say, vision - overlaid with experiences from another, such as taste.
Synesthetes experience numbers and letters with distinctive overlays:
a “gloomy” number 3; the letter h as a “drab shoelace”; an a reminiscent of “weathered wood.”
They sense the world with crossed wires.
Few persons talk about the green-apple sourness of a triangle, and so the individual who experiences it may eventually stop attending to it.

Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are able to.

Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive.

Every rock has distinctive characteristics: minerals, grain size, the overall look.

He spied more than sixty different kinds of rocks on the face and interior of his stately museum.
Red granite from Missouri sits next to Rhode Island granite, which is next to stone from the Thousand Islands, a result of quarries closing during the extended construction of the museum building.

Ginkgo biloba is known as a “living fossil” because it is mostly unchanged from possibly two hundred million years ago.

Geology terminology: Schist, gneiss, phyllite; metamorphic, sedimentary; siliciclastic, schistosity. It can be dizzying.

Glaciers move slowly and powerfully over rock, pushing along smaller rocks and rasping the surface.
The stripes of the rock showed the direction of the ice’s movement, in a southeasterly (advancing) or northwesterly (retreating) way.

Every stone has a parent - for the limestone, it is the creatures of the sea.

Quarries, created to pull stone out of the earth by the tonful, each have distinctive characters, and the people who know stones come to know the quarries from which they have been sourced.

A brownstone building whose first-story stone face was textured with pocks.
These were the marks of the tools of the stone mason: hammers and chisels used not just to break apart the stone but to decorate it.

Literaphilia: Afflicted with the disorder of knowing too much about the design of letters.

Words are the ample cleavage of the urban environment: impossible not to look at.

The thing you are doing now affects the thing you see next.

If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour.

She looked him in the eyes. Empathy begins with a shared gaze.

Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.

Arborists use a leaf to identify a tree.
The holes of a leaf can be used to identify the hole-maker.

A gall is a growth, a plant tumor, caused by a critter burrowing into the tissue of the plant when it is developing.
The small lump, fold, or pouch that results serves as shelter and often food for the nymphs that the midge, sawfly, moth, aphid, wasp, or mite that lay in it.
Galls: Concentrating the damage to one spot. It gives the insect shelter and food.
The tree gets less damage.
Most galls do no serious harm.

Leaves that have no sign, no holes, no smattering of excrement, are themselves sign of something else.
They indicate that the tree is probably not from around here.

Bugs can be extremely plant-specific.

Non-native invasive plants are often new enough to the area that no native bug has yet evolved to specialize in them.
As a result, the invasive plants do not need to put any of their resources into defense chemicals or strategies.
They can put all their energy into growing and reproducing.

Cities are not unnatural so much as they are concentrated.

Where there is just a little scrap of nature, life is more condensed.

Once the birds found a food they liked, they began to look just for that food, ignoring all others.

Search image: the efficiency many predators have in finding their prey.
Dogs, skunks, and spiders have been found to have olfactory search images:
They are the way we find our car keys, spot our friends in a crowd.
A mechanism to select what, out of all the things in the world, they should both look for and at, and what they should ignore.
His own search for a pitcher of water, which he expected to find at his table at lunch.
Though he was assured that the pitcher was in its usual place, he could not see it right in front of his face - for the clay pitcher he had expected had been replaced by a glass pitcher.
The “clay pitcher search image” obliterated the perceptual image of the glass pitcher.

In cities, some animals have become more crepuscular - active at dawn or dusk - to avoid us.
And more have become entirely nocturnal, even if the same species in rural areas is out and about in the day.

Starlings are an ecological disaster.
They were brought to the U.S. by a fellow named Eugene Schieffelin who wanted to bring to North America every bird that was mentioned in Shakespeare.

Expectation is the lost cousin of attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process.
We think of expectation as a cognitive experience, the process actually operates on a single-cell level, and even within the sensory organ.

One of the ways to find wildlife - or the traces of wildlife - in the city:
Look for the traps, barriers, or other munitions set up to deter them or ward them off.

Rats are thigmotaxic: an animal who likes to walk along walls, touching something as it goes.
Thigmotaxic, or thigmophilic - touch-loving - animals scurry along at the edges of the spaces we make.
Whiskers want to touch - to get information about the world through contact.
So if you are looking for a whiskered animal, use places that allow for lots of touching.
Squeezed-into spaces. Too-small holes. Leafy areas. Chewed-out corridors. Pipes, gutters. Curbs.

Buildings - man-made cliffs - show “striking similarities” with those of natural cliffs.
Humans still live in “concrete and glass versions of their ancestral cliffs, caves, and talus slopes.

Vendor’s huge food cart:
Vendors add a lot to the city, because they tend to slow you down.

View slowing down as positive.
It’s social; it’s kind of getting a sense of something. That’s what a city is.
A good urban experience is one that encourages us to slow down and loiter.

Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) characterizes six stages of sidewalk traffic from “fancy-free walking” to “feeling oppressed in a crowd.”
Level A: movement is open and unimpeded. You have whole blocks of sidewalk to yourself.
Level B: there are others in sight.
Level C: constrained: minor conflicts might occur.
Level D: from constrained to crowded: you can no longer walk at the speed you want or pass people with ease.
Level E: Everyone slows to a shuffle.
Level F: You are packed in tight. Essentially, you are waiting in a queue.

Jaywalking: You’re actually safer because you’re making judgments based on eye contact between driver and walker.

By holding someone’s gaze, you actually control his movement to some extent, obliging him to move around you.
Mind-control game she used to play with unsuspecting fellow bus riders:
She would try to “seat” people on the bus by making eye contact.
“Nobody likes to be looked at, so they keep walking” as long as they noticed her looking at them.
When she turned away, that’s when they sat.

Walkers spend one-third of the walk fixated on looking at the ground a step ahead of their toes.

Gait is like the poker player’s tell: revealing of all faults.
Our legs as radii and the journey of our hipbones drawing an arc on the circle that is ours alone.
It is as easy as identifying features on a face to identify a normal gait.
The “gait test,” a classic, simple test of function, is widely used among physical therapists, and is surprisingly good at revealing disorder.

Empathy neurons fired both when doing an act and when seeing it done by others.
Mirror neurons: cells that fire at doing something and seeing it done.

Rain colors the landscape (for listening).
With its “tapping” on everything in sight, it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things.
Instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once.
The lawn, the hill, the fence, the path, the bush are articulated by the pitter-patter of rain.
Distances, variation, height, material, and curves all appear in splashes and drips.
This is how the cane does its canely magic.
She described to me what she was hearing of the landscape from its echo off her cane tap.
She heard when an alleyway appeared between buildings lining our route.
She heard the height of buildings and noticed when we had arrived in front of a school (quieted in summertime) set back more deeply from the street.

Peripersonal space: our brain extends that bubble when we extend ourselves.
After using chopsticks regularly, the brain begins to consider them extensions of your fingers.

Connections in the brain that already exist but lie dormant are simply unmasked with visual deprivation.

A subtle but noticeable current of air traveling along with the traffic.
Buildings act on those winds in reliable ways.
Urban microclimates are created largely by the changes in airflow induced by the man-made environment.
In a city, full of right angles between streets, a turned corner almost always brings with it a change in the flow of air.

Those who regularly walk in the forest may come to know each tree by its characteristic sound, be it a sob and moan (fir), whistle (holly), hiss (ash), or rustle (beech).

Count the number of cricket chirps in order to determine the temperature outside.

In capturing a street scene, foleys, in charge of sound, do not try to record it all.
Instead, “they look for someone that people might want to visually focus on” - and capture the sounds, say, of just that one person’s footsteps.
You see three or four people walking and you only hear one person’s footsteps.
The sound has created a visual focus.

Why you will hear the most birds singing at dusk and dawn.
After a cold night, when the earth is chilled, the ground layer is cool and the layers above the treetops are warmer: a temperature inversion from the ordinary ground feeling warmer than the air.
A bird singing at dawn can send his tuneful song traveling much farther along the treetops than it otherwise would.
This is good news for singing birds, who are hoping to reach as many other bird ears as possible.

Sneezing is a dog’s way of clearing everything out of the nose, so the next good stench can be inhaled.
Similarly, by licking his nose, he was readying it to catch things to be smelled.