The Art of Looking: What 11 Experts Teach Us about Seeing Our Familiar City Block with New Eyes

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/12/on-looking-eleven-walks-with-experteyes/ Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that. Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.

How we spend our days, Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, is, of course, how we spend our lives. And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. And yet: The art of seeing has to be learned, Marguerite Duras reverberates and it can be learned, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz invites us to believe in her breathlessly wonderful On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes (public library) a record of her quest to walk around a city block with eleven different experts, from an artist to a geologist to a dog, and emerge with fresh eyes mesmerized by the previously unseen fascinations of a familiar world. It is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating books of the year, if not the decade, and the most enchanting thing Ive read in ages. In a way, its the opposite but equally delightful mirror image of Christoph Niemanns Abstract City a concrete, immersive examination of urbanity blending the mindfulness of Sherlock Holmes with the expansive sensitivity of Thoreau. Horowitz begins by pointing our attention to the incompleteness of our experience of what we conveniently call reality:

Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance. This adaptive ignorance, she argues, is there for a reason we celebrate it as concentration and welcome its way of easing our cognitive overload by allowing us to conserve our precious mental resources only for the stimuli of immediate and vital importance, and to dismiss or entirely miss all else. (Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator, Horowitz tells us. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.) But while this might make us more efficient in our goal-oriented day-to-day, it also makes us inhabit a largely unlived and unremembered life, day in and day out. For Horowitz, the awakening to this incredible, invisible backdrop of life came thanks to Pumpernickel, her curly haired, sage mixed breed (who also inspired Horowitzs first book, the excellent Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know), as she found herself taking countless walks around the block, becoming more and more aware of the dramatically different experiences she and her canine companion were having along the exact same route: Minor clashes between my dogs preferences as to where and how a walk should proceed and my own indicated that I was experiencing almost an entirely different block than my dog. I was paying so little attention to most of what was right before us that I had become a sleepwalker on the sidewalk. What I saw and attended to was exactly what I expected to see; what my dog showed me was that my attention invited along attentions companion: inattention to everything else. The book was her answer to the disconnect, an effort to attend to that inattention. It is not, she warns us, about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy or how to listen more carefully to your spouse. Rather, it is an invitation to the art of observation: Together, we became investigators of the ordinary, considering the block the street and everything on itas a living being that could be observed. In this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the old the new.

Her approach is based on two osmotic human tendencies: our shared capacity to truly see what is in front of us, despite our conditioned concentration that obscures it, and the power of individual bias in perception or what we call expertise, acquired by passion or training or both in bringing attention to elements that elude the rest of us. What follows is a whirlwind of endlessly captivating exercises in attentive bias as Horowitz, with her archetypal New Yorkers special fascination with the humming life-form that is an urban street, and her diverse companions take to the city. First, she takes a walk all by herself, trying to note everything observable, and we quickly realize that besides her deliciously ravenous intellectual curiosity, Horowitz is a rare magician with language. (The walkers trod silently; the dogs said nothing. The only sound was the hum of air conditioners, she beholds her own block; passing a pile of trash bags graced by a stray Q-tip, she ponders parenthetically, how does a Q-tip escape?; turning her final corner, she gazes at the entrance of a mansion and its pair of stone lions waiting patiently for royalty that never arrives. Stunning.) But as soon as she joins her experts, Horowitz is faced with the grimacing awareness that despite her best, most Sherlockian efforts, she was missing pretty much everything. She arrives at a newfound, profound understanding of what William James meant when he wrote, My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.: 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. These blinders, despite psychologists concentrated efforts to dissect this strange phenomenon we call attention, remain largely a mystery or, at best, a series of misconstrued hypotheses: Though paying attention seems simple, there are numerous forms of payment. To concentrate, to pay attention, is viewed as a brow-furrowing exercise. Sit still, dont blink, and attend. [] 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 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 ones 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. Thus, evolutions problem-solving left us modern humans with two kinds of attention: vigilance, which allows us to have a quick and life-saving fight-or-flight response to an immediate threat, be it a leaping lion or a deranged boss, and selective attention, which unconsciously curates the few stimuli to attend to amidst the flurry bombarding us, enabling us to block out everything except what were interested in ingesting. (Selective attention, of course, can mutate to dangerous degrees, producing such cultural atrocities as the filter bubble.) Much like French polymath Henri Poincar argued that to invent is simply to choose ideas, to attend, it turns out, is simply to choose stimuli but what sounds so deceptively simple turns out to be marvelously complex. In her walks with expert companions, Horowitz tickles this latter type of attention to unravel all the unseen, unsmelled, and unheard miracles of a city block, the wonderlands of sensation and awareness that bloom behind the looking glass of our evolutionarily primed everyday inattention. The first expert Horowitz walks with is her very own toddler, from whom we learn that a walk is not necessarily the purposeful and linear transfer of a body from point A to point B, but rather an exploratory exercise in touching and eek! tasting textures and surfaces, pointing at sights, pausing to absorb the tickling brush of the breeze: A walk is, instead, an investigatory exercise that begins with energy and ends when (and only when) exhausted. Much of what makes the story so compelling is Horowitzs ability to swiftly weave scientific insight into the details of these anecdotal experiences. Here, she notes: The perceptions of infants are remarkable. That infants reliably develop into adults, who for all their wisdom or kindness are often unremarkable, blinds us to this fact. The infants world is a case study in confused attention. The world is not yet organized into discrete objects for these new eyes: it is all light and dark, shadow and brightness. Infants, in fact, seem to experience syneshtesia as a baseline sensory given. (Perhaps

MoMAs Juliet Kinchin touched on a bigger cognitive truth when she reflected that children help us to mediate between the ideal and the real.) But, eventually, they grow out of this wondrous multidimensional awareness, which William James called aboriginal sensible muchness, and we, the sensible and selectively attentive adults, emerge: Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, sound but to function, we have to ignore some of it. The world still holds these details. Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them. Part of toddlers extraordinary capacity for noticing has to do with their hard-wired neophilia the allure of the new and unfamiliar, which for them includes just about everything that we, old and jaded, have deemed familiar and thus uninteresting. (Horowitz points to one systematic exception for us adults vacations which brim with enough novelty to produce such fascinating, reality-warping psychological phenomena as the holiday paradox. The reason, Horowitz argues, lies in two factors: We actually do see new places and second, we bother to look.) In a way, experts have a toddlers ability to zoom in on the details, the very fabric of experience, that most of us glide adaptively by.

Art by Maira Kalman from 'On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes' From beloved artist and reconstructionist Maira Kalman a woman of boundless wisdom on life and unrelenting faith in walking as a creative device, whom Horowitz aptly describes as a hoarder, in the finest sense of that word, of both experience and image we learn that looking at the ordinary, looking and really seeing it, seeing its extraordinary wonder, is

a special talent that takes patient cultivation. Horowitz writes: One perceptual constraint that I knowingly labor under is the constraint that we all create for ourselves: we summarize and generalize, stop looking at particulars and start taking in scenes at a glanceall in an effort to not be overwhelmed visually when we just need to make it through the day. The artist seems to retain something of the childs visual strategy: how to look at the world before knowing (or without thinking about) the name or function of everything that catches the eye. An infant treats objects with an unprejudiced equivalence: the plastic truck is of no more intrinsic worth to the child than an empty box is, until the former is called a toy and the latter is called garbage. My son was as entranced by the ubiquitous elm seeds near our doorstep as any of the menus, mail, flyers, or trash that concern the adults. Echoing Anas Nins timeless words on the shared magic of the child and the artist, Horowitz writes: To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant; little is unseen. Once you look at what seems ordinary long enough, though, it often turns odd and unfamiliar, as any child repeatedly saying his own name aloud learns. I had the suspicion that walking with Kalman would be the ambulatory equivalent of saying my own name aloud a hundred times. But Kalmans singular spirit came to life not in the purposeful stride of a destination-walk but in the creative digression of an amble: With Kalman, walking around the block entered a fourth dimension. Eventually, we made it from A to B, but not before visiting all of the later letters of the alphabet. Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as the urban pedestrian might define them. Kalman gently nudges Horowitz to remove the invisibility cloak so familiar to us urbanites as we shield ourselves from strangers, and the two do something city dwellers especially New Yorkers never do: They talk to policemen, movers, a mailman, churchgoers, and the social workers tending to a halfway house. In other words, they cease to simply coexist with their fellow citizens and, for the duration of the walk, live with them instead, attend to them with presence and curiosity, see them; they slow their cadence, now tourists in their native fast-paced New York; they amble. Horowitz once again returns to her potent blend of philosophical reflection and scientific substance: I had not noticed, until forced to by Kalmans sociability, how I was engaging in a fundamentally social activity by walking out in public. Still, we all have a sense of the appropriate personal space around us a kind of

zone of privacy that we wear, even on the social sidewalk. Indeed, we have many coencentric circles of personal spaces, plural. The Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger, elaborating from studies of animal behavior, proposed that the personal zones around us fall into a few categories. Those with whom we do not mind inescapable involvement as our loved ones can broach the closest zone and get nearer than eighteen inches to us. At that proximity, we can smell them, feel the heat of their bodies, their breath, hear the small sounds they mutter or emit. We can whisper together. Most social interactions take place in a comfortable zone about one and a half to four feet away closer in some cultures (Latin American) than others (North American). Friends can waltz through; acquaintances can hover on the edge. We have a social distance up to twelve feet from our bodies for more formal transactions, or for those we dont know well. Beyond that is a kind of public distance in which we use our outdoor voice. All of these zones are artificial, varying with differing relationships, based on context and the physical setting but we have a bodily sense of the reality of these spaces. Violate them, and we may feel stressed and anxious.

Art by Maira Kalman from 'On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes' Eventually, Horowitz realizes that Kalman has a wholly different way not only of looking, but also of seeing she challenges the normative expectations of where one is allowed to go in the city and experiences space not as defined by an edge, but as an infinitely explorable openness and so she wonders what it is about the artists brain that enables that limitless perception of possibility. Though she is careful to insure against any phrenologylike pseudoscience of the creative brain, Horowitz does point to a curious study that suggests brains like Kalmans might, in fact, be wired differently: One research team, though, reported a correspondence between the brains of those who seem to be especially creative thinkers. Certain people, they found, have fewer of one kind of dopamine receptor in the thalamus of the brain. These people also performed well on tests of divergent thinking, in which people are asked to concoct more and more elaborate uses for ordinary objects, for instance. The reduction in receptors might actually increase information flow to various parts of the brain, essentially allowing them to think up new and interesting solutions. Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box, the researchers wrote. (For more on this research by Stanfords Carol Dweck, see this.)

A typographic storefront from James and Karla Murray's 'Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York.' Click image for details. From typography nerd Paul Shaw, who brought us the almost true story of New Yorks subway Helvetica, we learn that our minds are constantly coerced into reading the dull, tedious words that bombard us from storefronts, billboards, and computer screens nearly every waking moment but besides the linguistic burden, embedded in each letter we

ingest is also a design one, for typography can quietly convey an unwritten message, set a mood, create an ineffable sense of something being either terribly wrong or terribly wonderful. A letter, Horowitz reminds us as she discovers the humanistic quality of words while touring New Yorks type-smothered streets with Shaw, can be jaunty or uncomfortable amidst awkward kerning, an ampersand can be pregnant and an S complacent. She encapsulates: Three hours of walking with Shaw later, I felt relieved, for the moment, of my compulsion to read what was readable, to parse text when I saw it. Surprisingly, this relief came not from avoiding text, but from seeking it out only to zoom in on the details held within. It was a vision that let me miss the forest and see the trees. Rather than words, I saw the components of words. Some small part of my brain (the linguistic part) rested; the shape-identifying part hummed with activity. [] The thing you are doing now affects the thing you see next. From geologist Sidney Horenstein of the American Museum of Natural History we learn that our entire world consists of only two types of things: minerals and the biomass of plants and animals. A city suddenly becomes not a sterile man-made object but a thriving ecosystem of living and once-living landscapes, an ersatz natural landscape writ small on every single block, a place suddenly brimming with reminders of its own impermanence: 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 strongestlooking behemoth of an apartment tower is gradually deteriorating under the persistent, patient forces of wind, water, and time.

Organisms inhabiting a single cubic foot of space from 'One Cubic Foot' by photographer David Liittschwager. Click image for details.

From field naturalist and insects advocate Charlie Eiseman, we learn that on every square inch of surface, entire microcosms oscillate between vibrant life and violent death. (If a driveway holds an ecosystem, Horowitz ponders, what of a parking lot? Perchance a universe.) Over the next few hours, the two proceed to discover traces of just about every kind of insect from spider egg cases to discarded fly exoskeletons lacing the most ordinary of city blocks. What emerges is a keen awareness that the negative space of the unseen is itself a source of rich information: Surprisingly, those 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. Once again, Horowitz explores what enables Eisenmans brain to function so differently from her own and pops the cognitive hood of his singular selective attention, tracing it to the work of notable early twentieth-century bird-watcher Luunk Tinbergen: Tinbergen noticed that songbirds did not prey on just any insect that had recently hatched in the vicinity; instead, they tended to prefer one kind of bug say, a particular species of beetle at a time. As the numbers of young beetles rose through a season, the birds gorged on these beetlettes, ignoring any other available young insects nearby. Tinbergen suggested that, once the birds found a food they liked, they began to look just for that food, ignoring all others. He called this a search image: a mental image of a beetlewith its characteristic beetly shape, size, and colorswith which the bird scans her environment. This search image, it turns out, is something all of us employ when we need to narrow our attention in a goal-oriented task, like spotting a friend across the crowded street or finding the brand of salsa we went looking for amidst the overwhelmingly well-stocked shelves at Whole Foods. But this search aid, Horowitz soon realizes, is only helpful or even possible if we know what to look for, and most of us wont have the luxury of being escorted along our familiar walks by some of the worlds most fascinating brains. Horowitz shares this melancholy thought with Eiseman as they conclude their walk: Eiseman reflected for a moment, and then quoted one of his tracking teachers, Susan Morse: Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking. If you understand even the most superficial elements of the life histories of different animals such as what kinds of things they are attracted to once you start looking, you are going to find them everywhere. A small bit of knowledge goes a long way when thinking about where to look. Once you have an eye for these things, even when youre not looking for them, they just jump out at you. Everything is a sign of something. Next, from Humane Society senior wildlife scientist John Hadidian we learn that the main distinction in the citys life is that between day and night, and a remarkable amount of wildlife floods the seemingly humdrum city streets once the sun averts its gaze pigeons,

sparrows, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons. (And, lest we forget, the bountiful wild cats Gay Talese so poetically described.) High above, falcons, eagles, and hawks haunt the urban skies. Down below, rats who spend most of their waking hours preening and who use their sensitive whiskers to navigate along walls and orient themselves run their ceaseless races. (Of the latter, Hadidian says that from a strictly natural history perspective, theyre one of the most poorly understood animals out there.) We also learn that every animal you can think of is drawn to the persimmon tree a useful factlet should you ever find yourself lonely in your backyard. But most humbling of all is the sudden awareness that nearly every single crack, hole, and slit between buildings is part of a vast and elaborate transit system of urban wildlife passageways, with which comes the equally humbling reminder that maybe, just maybe, we arent the complacent kings of our own city we go about fancying ourselves to be: This is what makes the urban animal so elusive. He is actually attempting to elude us, and our imaginations do not seem to account for animals (aside from pets) in cities. Even our sense of scale is distorted when considering urban wildlife corridors and passageways. Remembering, perhaps, a childhood inability to scale a fence or shimmy through a gate, we find it incredible that urban animals are not thwarted by the seemingly impenetrable stone walls and chain-linked barbed-wire fencing we present to them. But the descriptions of nearly all urban animals include an impressive dimension: the size hole the animal can squeeze into, through, or out of. Raccoons, even as adults, can fit in a four-inch space between grates, flattening themselves and taking advantage of their broad, short skulls. Squirrels fit through a hole the size of a quarter; mice, through dime-sized holes. Look around you on your next walk. See any holes at all? Gaps between stair and building? Between sidewalk and curb? An animal goes there (after you have passed). And so we return to the straitjackets of our perception, that disconnect between seeing and knowing what to look for, filtered through the uncompromising sieve of our attention something most memorably demonstrated in the famous invisible gorilla experiment. Horowitz writes: Part of what restricts us seeing things is that we have an expectation about what we will see, and we are actually perceptually restricted by that expectation. In a sense, expectation is the lost cousin of attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process of the world out there. Attention is the more charismatic member, packaged and sold more effectively, but expectation is also a crucial part of what we see. Together they allow us to be functional, reducing the sensory chaos of the world into unbothersome and understandable units. As intriguing as the citys non-human dwellers are, its human ones brim with a deluge of data that something as seemingly simple as observing their bodies and movement can reveal. Thats precisely what Horowitz learns from her walk with Dr. Bennett Lorber,

president-elect of the countrys oldest medical institution, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia: Simply by being outside on the street, people are inadvertently revealing their life histories in their bodies, in their steps, in the hunch of their shoulders or set of their jaw. Indeed, we learn that a mans gait can reveal anything from his medical pathology to his occupation to, even, his religion. (Enter another curious factlet: the average step is divided into 62% stance, meaning contact with ground, and 38% swing, meaning no contact with ground.) We also realize that the extraordinary act of walking a miracle of motion and alignment that propels us forward despite the awkward balance of our bodies bipedalism, a rarity in the animal kingdom is an exquisite metaphor for the human spirit as one becomes aware of how many different but successful ways there are to propel oneself around ones day. Still, there is such a thing as an ideal walker: Their gaits had few asymmetries, were smooth and loose, and wasted no energy doing anything but going forward. From an evolutionary perspective, efficiency is the key. Our ancestors may have been easily outrun by any potential predator we are not a particularly fast species but we have endurance: those proto-humans who could keep running won their lives. And they could do that if their gait was efficient. Horowitz once again considers the difference between her brain and the experts: While I had a vague sense of Hmm, somethings amiss . . . , they could diagnose. It is not only the diagnosis that I valued; it is the way that knowledge orients their looking an ability to see what they see, as it were. But partway through her experiment, Horowitz is befallen by a medical curveball of her own a herniated disk in her back paralyzes her foot and renders her barely able to walk, which presents an obvious challenge to her walking exploration of city blocks. She writes: The street changed for me during those months, as it certainly changes for anyone who is temporarily or permanently injured, or suffers the ultimate injury of simply aging. Still, she perseveres and brings even greater awareness to the next portion of her urban anatomy the sensory landscape of the city. She meets Arlene Gordon, a remarkable woman who has traveled the world and shares enchanting stories of the souvenirs filling her apartment. And this is where the gift of Horowitzs narrative comes most viscerally alive: as she talks to Gordon and notes the subtle details of her dimly lit apartment and her too-blue eyes, you the reader (or at least I, the reader), already primed for this art of observation, realize before Horowitz reveals it that Gordon is completely blind and oh how sweetly gratifying this earned micro-mastery is, and oh what plump promise it holds for the possibility of similarly broadening our everyday awareness as we follow Horowitzs experiment.

As the two stroll together, their walk becomes a powerful revelation: After a handful of city walks I realized that what many of them were missing was any experience other than a visual experience. This was not terribly surprising. After all, humans are visual creatures. Our eyes have prime positioning on our faces. We have trichromatic vision, which is sufficient to paint a Technicolor, million-colored landscape of the world. Our brains visual areas, with hundreds of millions of neurons designed to make sense of what we see, takes up a full fifth of each of our cortices. The resplendent scene our eyes carry to us is entrancing. As a result, we humans generally do not bother paying attention to much other than the visual. What we wear, where we live, where we visit, even whom we love is based in large part on appearance visual appearance. But the world around us is not entirely or even mostly defined by its light-reflective qualities. What of the odors of the molecules making up every object, and those loosened odors wafting in the space around us? Or the perturbations of air that we can hear as sound and the frequencies higher or lower than we can hear? I imagined that someone who has lost her sense of sight could lead me, however superficially, into the invisible block that I miss with my wide open eyes. And lead she does: Gordon navigates swiftly along the sidewalk, masterfully using her cane a sort of sensory extension of herself and the peripersonal space, that bubble of space defined by our bodies and their immediate surroundings and Horowitz marvels at our brains magnificent plasticity, the same adaptability behind the limbic revision of love. Our brains are changed by experience in a way directly related to the details of that experience. If we have enough experience doing an action, viewing a scene, or smelling an odor to become an expert in a field, then our brains are functionally and visibly different from nonexperts. And yet: The brain is plastic, and can creatively adapt to a new situation, but it changes right back when it no longer needs to be creative. From the walk with Gordon, we learn about the physics of wind, which moves according to the Bernoulli principle and the Venturi effect, creating a whole new layer of aerial flux over the citys landscape: Winds over the rivers flanking Manhattan Island speed down side streets on land. Tall buildings create other wind effects: winds that hit high on a building rush down its face, sometimes creating enough pressure to make passage in and out of the doorway difficult. Sheer glass towers can pull air not just down, but also up from below (the Bernoulli principle) as well as lift any skirts being worn in the vicinity.

But most poignant of all are Gordons parting words, emblematic of the books broader underpinning message: In front of her building she turned to shake my hand. Nice to see you, she said. And then, as if noticing my smile in response, she added: Theres someone in my building who asked me, How come you use that word, see? How can you say I see it? Well, I do see it. I said, see has many definitions. Next, from sound designer and vocal engineer Scott Lehrer we learn that the urban soundscape is often a violent cacophony on which Dickens and Babbage were right to wage war, and our ability to tune it out is among the most fascinating manifestations of our selective attention though our ears are always open, we only attend to a fraction of what is audible, and even to that we append our intellectual interpretations: Simply giving a name to a sound can change the experience of it: when we see the thing that clatters or moans or sighs, we hear it differently. (In fact, Horowitz herself employs, perhaps unwittingly, this emotional soundscape in a previous chapter: limping awkwardly and painfully with her paralyzed leg to meet Gordon, she encounters a door that sighs open for her.) But with Lehrer she sets out to to listen to the sounds in and of themselves, to hear beyond their names. She learns that the tires of a car sound different when it rains and that sounds can reverberate with various levels of wetness in different spaces, depending on the size of the space, the objects filling it, and the distance of the sound source from the walls. She learns how the fact that even temperature alters sound perception explains why birds sing at dusk and dawn. She then ponders the man-made distinction between sound and noise as she considers legendary avant-garde composer John Cages legacy: What makes that noise and not just neutral sound is another question. The avantgarde composer John Cage famously declared that music is sounds, and thus appropriated ordinary sounds to be his music. In one of his compositions, the orchestra is silent for four minutes and thirty-three seconds; whatever sounds come in through the window of the concert hall or emerge from the increasingly restless and puzzled audience constitute his music. Still, if Cage was right, it need not follow that all sounds are music(al). Any sound we do not like we call noise, thereby introducing a subjective assessment to the din. That subjectivity is always there in talking about noise. But Horowitz finds a certain reassurance in the relativity of noise as she realizes that sound resonates with what we bring to it and our experience of the citys soundscape can change dramatically with exposure. (Cue in E. B. White, who embraced the hustle-and-bustle of New York with such memorable poeticism.) But one of her most chilling realizations has to do with the biology of our ear itself a magnificent machine and violent ways in which the city assaults it daily:

Decibels are the subjective experience of the intensity of a sound.4 Zero decibels marks the threshold for hearing a soundand in a modern city, there is never a moment of zero decibel silence. We mostly reside in the 6080 decibel range, which includes sounds from normal conversation across the dinner table, vacuum cleaners, and traffic noise. Once a sound gets to 85 decibels, it begins to damage the mechanism of our ears irreparably. The reason lies in the mechanism itself. Cilia, tiny hair cells that stand upright in the cochlea, sway and jiggle when the vibration of airthe rush of air that is sound wends its way into the inner ear. So stimulated, the cilia trigger nerves to fire, translating that vibration into electrical signals that give us the experience of hearing something. If those vibrations are strong enough, the hair cells bend deeply under their force. Air pressure can mow, crush, or sever the hairs until they are splayed, fused, floppy, or fractured an earful of well-trodden grass. Bent and damaged enough because of exposure to loud sounds for prolonged periods, the hair cells do not grow back; the ears lose their neural downiness. The world becomes progressively quieter for the person attached to those ears, until there are no sounds, no music, no noise. Cities are crowded with sources of sound regularly approaching this threshold of hearing loss. Enormous numbers of man-made sounds occur in those same frequencies. We often find high pure tones the most irritating: the screech of a subway turning a tight corner or braking, at 3,000 or 4,000 hertz, or the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, between 2,000 and 4,000 hertz. These sounds clobber us because of the shape of the human ear, which allows high frequencies to find their way efficiently to the cochlea. The very design of the ear amplifies these vibrations for waiting hair cells. But it is not just our ears that find the sound distressing; it is our brains. If we know that we are hearing what we have already deemed an annoying sound, our bodies react to it as though it is: we have a sympathetic nervous system response, usually reserved for final exams, suddenly appearing lions, and the sight of our beloved. We sweat, and then we notice that we are sweating, and we sweat some more.

From Christoph Niemann's 'Abstract City' (click image for details): 'To describe different phenomena, physicists use various units. PASCALS, for example, measure the pressure applied to a certain area. COULOMBS measure electric charge (that can occur if said area is a synthetic carpet). DECIBELS measure the intensity of the trouble the physicist gets into because he didn't take off his shoes first.' And still, her walk with Lehrer yields a celebration rather than a lament of the citys sounds an invitation to know and love the city in yet another dimension: What I heard had morphed from noxious urban noise into being the characteristic, flavorful clatter of my city. I enjoyed the roar of traffic and the buzz of flies; I looked at pigeons hoping they would coo; I stared down passersby, silently egging them on to hum or cough. I counted squeals and squeaks and squawks and measured them against whines and whistles. Each sound felt invited, a pleasure. Horowitzs final walking companion is fittingly, given the original inspiration for the project her new dog, the playfully curious Finnegan. (That a cognitive scientist would name her dog with a nod to James Joyce is only further evidence of Horowitzs remarkably wellrounded mind.) And if you thought the human ear was a marvel, just wait for the dogs nose: The inside of the nose is a labyrinth of tunnels lined with specialized olfactory receptors waiting for an odorant molecule a smell to land on them. In the back of the nose is an olfactory recess separated from the main respiratory pathway by a bony plate, allowing smelling to be distinct from breathing, and letting odors loiter for a long time to be considered. Though we tend to think that only some things are smelly a spring bloom, a trash can, a new car, a buss exhaust just about everything has a scent. Anything with molecules that can be volatile, that can evaporate into the air and travel

toward a receptor in someones nose, smells. The dog nose has hundreds of millions of receptors in that nose; they even have a second kind of nose above the hard palate of their mouth, called a vomeronasal or Jacobsons organ. Molecules such as hormones that do not stir the receptors of the nose to fire may find a rousing welcome here. All animals house hormones, which are involved in bodily and brain activities, and those hormones we emit, called pheromones, are detected by the vomeronasal organ. This is how a dog could detect another dogs stress or sexual readiness in a spray of her urine left on the ground. Dogs are called macrosomatic, or keen-scented, while humans are called microsomatic, or feeble-scented.

Drawing by Wendy MacNaughton based on a proposed (and, sadly, rejected) cover for a Print magazine issue themed Communication. How humbling it is and how hard to maintain the typical human god-complex when the layman language describing our natural givens contains the word feeble. In fact, our feebleness is not due to software but to hardware its not that we dont know how to use our noses like a dog does, its that we lack the dogs extravagant number of cells to detect and decode smells, which theyre able to do at the unimaginably low concentration of one or two parts per trillion. (As Horowitz puts it, One part mustard, one trillion parts hot dog: dogs can detect the mustard.) Even more remarkably, a dogs nose is wired to detect the

half-life of smells, with each noseful of the same smell delivering different information a sort of stereo olfaction that gives them astounding precision in tracing where the smell has come from and where its carrier has gone next. Horowitz reflects: To see a scene is not to stare fixedly at one point; it is to open our eyes to everything in front of us, looking to and fro. Similarly, to smell a scene, Finn approached it from the side, from above, sniffing the air to see if the artist who concocted this particular odor splotch was anywhere nearby. A dog can smell something different in each noseful and there is something different there to smell. This taught me something about smells: they are not at fixed points, nor are they static and unchanging. They are a haze, a cloud, spreading out from their source. Viewed as odors, the street is a mishmash of overlapping object identities, each crowding into the nexts odorous scene. After her olfactory adventure with Finn, Horowitz takes one final walk by herself as she attempts to implement all her new learnings in experiencing her city block with new layers of awareness. And she does: A simple walk had become unrecognizably richer. Part of seeing what is on an ordinary block is seeing that everything visible has a history. It arrived at the spot where you found it at some time, was crafted or whittled or forged at some time, filled a certain role or existed for a particular function. It was touched by someone (or no one), and touches someone (or no one) now. It is evidence. The other part of seeing what is on the block is appreciating how limited our own view is. We are limited by our sensory abilities, by our species membership, by our narrow attention at least the last of which can be overcome. But the greatest learning is that our ability to see is a factor of two complementary forces attention and intention as the choices we make in what we attend to shape our entire experience of reality. And expertise is nothing but the carefully orchestrated osmotic balance of the two: What allowed me to see the bits that I would have otherwise missed was not the expertise of my walkers, per se; it was their simple interest in attending. I selected these walkers for their ability to boost my own selective attention. An expert can only indicate what she sees; it is up to your own head to tune your senses and your brain to see it. Once you catch that melody, and keep humming, you are forever changed. Indeed, one of Horowitzs most piercing insights arrives during her walk with Paul Shaw: One trouble with being human with the human condition is that, as with many conditions, you cannot turn it off. Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the

ways we learn to see the world. But the greatest promise of On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes which, it cant be stressed enough, is a rare and necessary soul-expander for any city-dweller appears as a poetic aside Horowitz drops during her walk with the geologist: Follow me here: your brain will begin to change as you do. She notes that he can never walk down a block and not see its geology. And thats precisely the point: The art of seeing might have to be learned, but it can never be unlearned, just as the seen itself can never be unseen a realization at once immensely demanding in its immutability and endlessly liberating in the possibilities it invites. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up. Share on Tumblr

Fail Safe: Debbie Millmans Advice on Courage and the Creative Life
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/15/debbie-millman-look-both-ways-failsafe/ Imagine immensities, dont compromise, and dont waste time. Imagine immensities, dont compromise, and dont waste time.

The seasonal trope of the commencement address is upon us as wisdom on life is being dispensed from graduation podiums around the world. After Greil Marcuss meditation on the essence of art and Neil Gaimans counsel on the creative life, here comes a heartening speech by artist, strategist, and interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman, delivered to the graduating class at San Jose State University. The talk is based on an essay titled Fail Safe from her fantastic 2009 anthology Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design (public library) and which has previously appeared on Literary Jukebox. The essay, which explores such existential skills as living with uncertainty, embracing the unfamiliar, allowing for not knowing, and cultivating what John Keats has famously termed negative capability, is reproduced below with the artists permission.

If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and dont stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, dont compromise, and dont waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now. Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design is an absolute treasure in its entirety, the kind of read you revisit again and again, only to discover new meaning and new access to yourself each time. It was preceded by How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer and followed by the recent Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, both excellent in very different but invariably stimulating ways. Images and audio courtesy Debbie Millman Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Lost Cat: An Illustrated Meditation on Love, Loss, and What It Means To Be Human
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/09/lost-cat-wendy-macnaughton-carolinepaul/ You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But thats okay, love is better. You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But thats okay, love is better.

Dogs are not about something else. Dogs are about dogs, Malcolm Gladwell indignated in the introduction to The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. Though hailed as memetic rulers of the internet, cats too have enjoyed an admirable run as creative devices and literary muses in Joyces childrens books, T. S. Eliots poetry, Hemingways letters, and various verses. But hardly ever have cats been at once more about cats and more about something else than in Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology (public library) by writer Caroline Paul and illustrator extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton, she of many wonderful collaborations a tender, imaginative memoir infused with equal parts humor and humanity. (You might recall a subtle teaser for this gem in Wendys wonderful recent illustration of Gay Taleses taxonomy of cats.) Though about a cat, this heartwarming and heartbreaking tale is really about what it means to be human about the osmosis of hollowing loneliness and profound attachment, the oscillation between boundless affection and paralyzing fear of abandonment, the unfair promise of loss implicit to every possibility of love.

After Caroline crashes an experimental plane she was piloting, she finds herself severely injured and spiraling into the depths of depression. It both helps and doesnt that Caroline and Wendy have just fallen in love, soaring in the butterfly heights of new romance, the phase of love that didnt obey any known rules of physics, until the crash pulls them into a place that would challenge even the most seasoned and grounded of relationships. And yet they persevere as Wendy patiently and lovingly takes care of Caroline.

When Caroline returns from the hospital with a shattered ankle, her two thirteen-year-old tabbies the shy, anxious Tibby (short for Tibia, affectionately and, in these circumstances, ironically named after the shinbone) and the sociable, amicable Fibby (short for Fibula, after the calf bone on the lateral side of the tibia) are, short of Wendy, her only joy and comfort: Tibia and Fibula meowed happily when I arrived. They were undaunted by my ensuing stupor. In fact they were delighted; suddenly I had become a human who didnt shout into a small rectangle of lights and plastic in her hand, peer at a computer, or get up and disappear from the vicinity, only to reappear through the front door hours later.

Instead, I was completely available to them at all times. Amazed by their good luck, they took full feline advantage. They asked for ear scratches and chin rubs. They rubbed their whiskers along my face. They purred in response to my slurred, affectionate baby talk. But mostly they just settled in and went to sleep. Fibby snored into my neck. Tibby snored on the rug nearby. Meanwhile I lay awake, circling the deep dark hole of depression. Without my cats, I would have fallen right in.

And then, one day, Tibby disappears.

Wendy and Caroline proceed to flyer the neighborhood, visit every animal shelter in the vicinity, and even, in their desperation, enlist the help of a psychic who specializes in lost pets but to no avail. Heartbroken, they begin to mourn Tibbys loss.

And then, one day five weeks later, Tibby reappears.

Once the initial elation of the recovery has worn off, however, Caroline begins to wonder where hed been and why hed left. He is now no longer eating at home and regularly leaves the house for extended periods of time Tibby clearly has a secret place he now returns to. Even more worrisomely, hes no longer the shy, anxious tabby hed been for thirteen years instead, hes a half pound heavier, chirpy, with a youthful spring in his step. But why would a happy cat abandon his loving lifelong companion and find comfort find himself, even elsewhere? When the relief that my cat was safe began to fade, and the joy of his prone, snoring form sprawled like an athlete after a celebratory night of boozing started to wear thin, I was left with darker emotions. Confusion. Jealousy. Betrayal. I thought Id known my cat of thirteen years. But that cat had been anxious and shy. This cat was a swashbuckling adventurer back from the high seas. What siren call could have lured him away? Was he still going to this gilded place, with its overflowing food bowls and endless treats?

There only one obvious thing left to do: Track Tibby on his escapades. So Caroline, despite Wendys lovingly suppressed skepticism, heads to a spy store yes, those exist and purchases a real-time GPS tracker, complete with a camera that they program to take snapshots every few minutes, which they then attach to Tibbys collar.

What follows is a wild, hilarious, and sweet tale of tinkering, tracking, and tenderness. Underpinning the obsessive quest is the subtle yet palpable subplot of Wendy and Carolines growing love for each other, the deepening of trust and affection that happens when two people share in a special kind of insanity.

Evert quest is a journey, every journey a story. Every story, in turn, has a moral, writes Caroline in the final chapter, then offers several possible morals for the story, the last of which embody everything that makes Lost Cat an absolute treat from cover to cover: 6. You can never know your cat. In fact, you can never know anyone as completely as you want. 7. But thats okay, love is better. Images courtesy Wendy MacNaughton

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Advice to Little Girls: Young Mark Twains Little-Known, Lovely 1865 Childrens Book
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/03/advice-to-little-girls-mark-twain/ A labor of love nearly two years in the making.

In the summer of 2011, I chanced upon a lovely Italian edition of a little-known, playful short story young Mark Twain had written in 1865 at age of 30, with Victorian-scrapbook-inspired artwork by celebrated Russian-born childrens book illustrator Vladimir Radunsky. I was instantly in love. So I approached my friend Claudia Zoe Bedrick of Brooklyns Enchanted Lion Books, whom Id befriended through her beautiful books and with whom Id already begun collaborating on another side project, to see if shed be willing to take a leap of faith and help bring this gem to life in America. It took a bit of convincing, but we eventually joined forced, pooled our lunch money to pay Vladimir his advance, and found a printer capable of reflecting the mesmerism of the Twain/Radunsky story in the books physicality rich colors, crisp text, thick beautiful paper with a red fabric spine. Im enormously delighted to announce that Advice to Little Girls (public library) is officially out this week a true labor of love nearly two years in the making. (You might recall a sneak peek from my TED Bookstore selections earlier this year.) Grab a copy, enjoy, and share!

While frolicsome in tone and full of wink, the story like the most timeless of childrens books is colored with subtle hues of grown-up philosophy on the human condition, exploring all the deft ways in which we creatively rationalize our wrongdoing and reconcile the good and evil we each embody.

Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.

If you have nothing but a rag-doll stuffed with sawdust, while one of your more fortunate little playmates has a costly China one, you should treat her with a show of kindness nevertheless. And you ought not to attempt to make a forcible swap with her unless your conscience would justify you in it, and you know you are able to do it.

One cant help but wonder whether this particular bit may have in part inspired the irreverent 1964 anthology Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls and its mischievous advice on brothersister relations: If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes. It is better to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results. You secure his immediate attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time your hot water will

have a tendency to move impurities from his person, and possibly the skin, in spots.

If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you wont. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment.

Good little girls always show marked deference for the aged. You ought never to sass old people unless they sass you first.

There are no words to describe how much Advice to Little Girls makes my heart sing lets make a choir. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.

100 Diagrams That Changed the World

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/21/100-diagrams-that-changed-the-world/ A visual history of human sensemaking, from cave paintings to the world wide web. A visual history of human sensemaking, from cave paintings to the world wide web.

Since the dawn of recorded history, weve been using visual depictions to map the Earth, order the heavens, make sense of time, dissect the human body, organize the natural world, perform music, and even concretize abstract concepts like consciousness and love. 100 Diagrams That Changed the World (UK; public library) by investigative journalist and documentarian Scott Christianson chronicles the history of our evolving understanding of the world through humanitys most groundbreaking sketches, illustrations, and drawings, ranging from cave paintings to The Rosetta Stone to Moses Harriss color wheel to Tim Berners-Lees flowchart for a mesh information management system, the original blueprint for the world wide web. But most noteworthy of all is the way in which these diagrams bespeak an essential part of culture the awareness that everything builds on what came before, that creativity is combinatorial, and that the most radical innovations harness the cross-pollination of disciplines. Christianson writes in the introduction: It appears that no great diagram is solely authored by its creator. Most of those described here were the culmination of centuries of accumulated knowledge. Most arose from collaboration (and oftentimes in competition) with others. Each was a product and a reflection of its unique cultural, historical and political environment. Each represented specific preoccupations, interests, and stake holders. [] The great diagrams depicted in the book form the basis for many fields art, astronomy, cartography, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, history, communications, particle physics, and space travel among others. More often than not, however, their creators mostly known, but many lost to time were polymaths who

are creating new technologies or breakthroughs by drawing from a potent combination of disciplines. By applying trigonometric methods to the heavens, or by harnessing the movement of the sun and the planets to keep time, they were forging powerful new tools; their diagrams were imbued with synergy.

Rosetta Stone (196 BC) Discovered in 1799, this granite block containing a decree written in three languages Allowed Egyptologists to interpret bieroglyphics for the first time -- a language that had been out of use since the fourth century AD.

The Ptolemaic System (Claudus Ptolemy, c. AD 140-150) This 1568 illuminated illustration of the Ptolemaic geocentric system, 'Figura dos Corpos Celestes' (Four Heavenly Bodies), is by the Portuguese cosmographer and cartographer Bartolomeu Velbo.

Ptolemy's World Map (Claudius Ptolemy, c. AD 150) In this 15th-century example of the Ptolemaic world map, the Indian Ocean is enclosed and there is no sea route around the Cape. The 'inhabited' (Old) World is massively inflated.

Lunar Eclipse (Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, 1019) An illustration showing the different phases of the moon from al-Biruni's manuscript copy of his Kitab al-Tafhim (Book of Instruction on the Principles of the Art of Astrology) Christianson offers a definition: diagram From the latin diagramma (figure) from Greek, a figure worked out b lines, plan, from diagraphein, from graphein to write. First known use of the word: 1619. 1. A plan, a sketch, drawing, outline, not necessarily representational, designed to demonstrate or explain something or clarify the relationship existing between the parts of the whole. 2. In mathematics, a graphic representation of an algebraic or geometric relationship. A chart or graph. 3. A drawing or plan that outlines and explains the parts, operation, etc. of something: a diagram of an engine.

Dante's Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-21) A 19th-century interpretation of Dante's map of Hell. The level of suffering and wickedness increases on the downward journey through the inferno's nine layers. No original copies of Dante's manuscript survive.

Vitruvian Man (Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1487 This sketch, and the notes that go with it, show how da Vinci understood the proportions of the human body. The head measured from the forehead to the chin was exactly one tenth of the total height, and the outstretched arms were always as wide as the body was tall.

Human Body (Andreas Vesalius, 1543) Vesalius's revolutionary anatomical treatise, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, shows the dissected body in unusually animated poses. These detailed diagrams are perhaps the most famous illustrations in all of medical history.

Heliocentric Universe (Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543)

Copernicus's revolutionary view of the universe was crystallized in this simple yet disconcerting line drawing. His heliocentric model -- which placed the Sun and not the Earth and the center of the universe -- contradicted 14th-century beliefs.

The Four Books of Architecture Palladio's country villas, urban palazzos, and churches combined modern features with classical Roman principles. His designs were bailed as 'the quintessence of High Renaissance calm and harmony.'

Flush Toilet (John Harington, 1596) The text accompanying Harington's diagram identified A as the 'Cesterne,' D as the 'seate boord,' H as the 'stoole pot,' and L as the 'sluce.' If used correctly, 'your worst privie may be as sweet as your best chamber.'

Moon Drawings (Galileo Galilei, 1610) Aided by his telescope, Galileo's drawings of the moon were a revelation. Until these illustrations were published, the moon was thought to be perfectly smooth and round. Galileo's sketches revealed it to be mountainous and pitted with craters.

Color Wheel (Moses Harris, 1766) Moses Harris's chart was the first full-color circle. The 18 colors of his wheel were derived from what be then called the three 'primitive' colors: red, yellow and blue. At the center of the wheel, Harris showed that black is formed by the superimposition of these colors.

A New Chart of History (Joseph Priestley, 1769) The regularized distribution of dates on Priestley's chart and its horizontal composition help to emphasize the continuous flow of time. This innovative, colorful timeline allowed students to survey the fates of 78 kingdoms in one chart.

Line Graph (William Playfair, 1786) William Playfair was the first person to display demographic and economic data in graph form. His clearly drawn, color-coded line graphs show time on the horizontal axis and economic data or quantities on the vertical axis.

Emoticons (Puck Magazine, 1881) Emoticons made a discreet entrance, arriving in print for the first time in this March 30, 1881 issue of Puck. The small item in the middle of this page gives four examples of 'typographical art' -- joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.

Treasure Island Map (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883) While there is no evidence or real pirates ever leaning a 'treasure map' showing where they had buried their stolen goods, with 'X' marking the spot, Stevenson's fictional device has continued to excite generations of children to this day.

Cubism and Abstract Art (Alfred Barr, 1936) Barr's striking diagram highlighted the role that cubism had played in the development of modernism. Like the exhibition and book that accompanied it, Barr's diagram was a watershed in the history of 20th-century modernism.

Intel 4004 CPU (Ted Hoff, Stanley Mazor, Masatoshi Shima, Federico Faggin, Philip Tai, and Wayne Pickette, 1971) Wayne Pickette suggested that Intel could use a 'computer on a board' for one of their projects with the Japanese company Busicom. Pickette drew this diagram with Philip Tai for the 4004 demonstration board. Complement 100 Diagrams That Changed the World with 17 equations that changed the world and the fantastic Cartographies of Time. Thanks, Kirstin Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say its cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Richard Feynman on the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/27/richard-feynman-on-the-role-ofscientific-culture-in-modern-society/ In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only.

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did, lamented original moonwalker Neil Armstrong, who passed away at the age of 82 last week. Implicit to his lament is the rather unsettling question of why what is it that has held mankind back? Thats precisely what the great Richard Feynman explored when he took the stage at the Galileo Symposium in Italy in 1964 and delivered a lecture titled What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society, published in the altogether excellent The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (public library), titled after the famous film of the same name. Feynman shares in Armstrongs dirge: We are all saddened when we look at the world and see what few accomplishments we have made, compared to what we feel are the potentialities of human beings. People in the past, in the nightmare of their times, had dreams for the future. And now that the future has materialized we see that in many ways the dreams have been surpassed, but in still more ways many of our dreams of today are very much the dreams of people of the past. He attributes much of this disconnect to a profound lack of mainstream understanding of and enthusiasm for science, making a case for the wonder of science:

 people I mean the average person, the great majority of people, the enormous majority of people are woefully, pitifully, absolutely ignorant of the science of the world that they live in, and they can stay that way And an interesting question of the relation of science to modern society is just that why is it possible for people to stay so woefully ignorant and yet reasonably happy in modern society when so much knowledge is unavailable to them? Incidentally, about knowledge and wonder, Mr. Bernardini* said we shouldnt teach wonders but knowledge. It may be a difference in the meaning of the words. I think we should teach them wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. And that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework the wonder that nature is.

He goes on to take a jab at just how unscientific pop culture is and how culturally condoned certain unscientific beliefs are: as Id like to show Galileo our world, I must show him something with a great deal of shame. If we look away from the science and look at the world around us, we find out something rather pitiful: that the environment that we live in is so actively, intensely unscientific. Galileo could say: I noticed that Jupiter was a ball with moons and not a god in the sky. Tell me, what happened to the astrologers? Well, they print their results in the newspapers, in the United States at least, in every daily paper every day. Why do we still have astrologers? []

I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view. Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are. And I believe that science has remained irrelevant because we wait until somebody asks us questions or until we are invited to give a speech on Einsteins theory to people who dont understand Newtonian mechanics, but we never are invited to give an attack on faith healing, or on astrology on what is the scientific view of astrology today. The solution he proposes pits good science writing and critical debate as the necessary prick in the filter bubble of public interest: I think that we must mainly write some articles. Now what would happen? The person who believes in astrology will have to learn some astronomy. The person who believes in faith healing might have to learn some medicine, because of the arguments going back and forth; and some biology. In other words, it will be necessary that science become relevant. [] And then we have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit. So I suggest, maybe incorrectly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite. There was in the past an era of conversation on these matters. It was felt by the church that Galileos views attacked the church. It is not felt by the church today that the scientific views attack the church. Nobody is worrying about it. Nobody attacks; I mean, nobody writes trying to explain the inconsistencies between the theological views and the scientific views held by different people today or even the inconsistencies sometimes held by the same scientist between his religious and scientific beliefs. (Granted, since 1964, weve seen the rise of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris who, along with countless scientists, consistently ensure a constructive lack of politeness in the debate.) Feynman also reiterates a crucial point about the nature and purpose of science and critical thinking the role of ignorance and the importance of embracing uncertainty, met with enormous resistance in a culture conditioned for grasping at answers:

A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. Does God exist? When put in the questional form, how likely is it? It makes such a terrifying transformation of the religious point of view, and that is why the religious point of view is unscientific. We must discuss each question within the uncertainties that are allowed. [] We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really dont know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know. Feynman concludes by doing what he does best, bridging science and philosophy to expand the specific question into a broader meditation on human existence: So today we are not very well off, we dont see that we have done too well. Men, philosophers of all ages, have tried to find the secret of existence, the meaning of it all. Because if they could find the real meaning of life, then all this human effort, all this wonderful potentiality of human beings, could then be moved in the correct direction and we would march forward with great success. So therefore we tried these different ideas. But the question of the meaning of the whole world, of life, and of human beings, and so on, has been answered very many times by very many people. Unfortunately all the answers are different; and the people with one answer look with horror at the actions and behavior of the people with another answer. Horror, because they see the terrible things that are done; the way man is being pushed into a blind alley by this rigid view of the meaning of the world. In fact, it is really perhaps by the fantastic size of the horror that it becomes clear how great are the potentialities of human beings, and it is possibly this which makes us hope that if we could move things in the right direction, things would be much better. What then is the meaning of the whole world? We do not know what the meaning of existence is. We say, as the result of studying all of the views that we have had before, we find that we do not know the meaning of existence; but in saying that we do not know the meaning of existence, we have probably found the open channel if we will allow only that, as we progress, we leave open opportunities for alternatives, that we do not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth, but remain always uncertain [that we] hazard it. The English, who have developed their government in this direction, call it muddling through, and although a rather silly, stupid sounding thing, it is the most scientific way

of progressing. To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only. We are only at the beginning of the development of the human race; of the development of the human mind, of intelligent life we have years and years in the future. It is our responsibility not to give the answer today as to what it is all about, to drive everybody down in that direction and to say: This is a solution to it all. Because we will be chained then to the limits of our present imagination. We will only be able to do those things that we think today are the things to do. Whereas, if we leave always some room for doubt, some room for discussion, and proceed in a way analogous to the sciences, then this difficulty will not arise. I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will be fully appreciated that the power of government should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that that is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the various descriptions of history or of economic theory or of philosophy. Only in this way can the real possibilities of the future human race be ultimately developed. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a treasure trove of genius in its entirety highly recommended. * Chairman of the conference Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say its cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/30/susan-sontag-on-art/ Art is a form of consciousness. Art is a form of consciousness.

Earlier this year, I asked artist extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton to illustrate Susan Sontags meditations on love, based on my collected highlights from the second volume of Sontags published diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library). Today, were thrilled to release our second collaboration, this time highlighting Sontags reflections on art adding to historys most timeless definitions which I culled from both the same volume and the one preceding it, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (public library). Enjoy.

The artwork is available on Etsy as an 1114 print on heavy cotton rag paper with razored edges in a limited edition of 300, signed and numbered, bearing a hand-stamped inscription on the back. Were donating a portion of the proceeds to A Room of Her Own, a foundation for women writers and artist. The excerpts: All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. (9/3/1956) All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. (9/10/1964) Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon the concept of beauty. As if art were about beautyas science is about truth! (9/10/1964) Art is a form of consciousness (11/1/1964) Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit) (11/25/1964)

Could get a new art movement every month just by reading Scientific American. (3/26/1965) Art is the production of mental events in / as a concrete sensuous form (12/4/1979) Why has there been no new international style in 50 years? Because the new ideas, the new needs are not yet clear. (Hence, we content ourselves with variations + refinements on Art Deco and, for refreshment + fusions, parodistic pop revivals of older styles.) (8/8/1975) The only interesting ideas are heresies (6/30/1975) Both volumes of Sontags diaries are unspeakably excellent. Sample them with her thoughts on writing, censorship, boredom, aphorisms, and freedom, her beliefs at age 14 vs. 24, her 10 rules for raising a child, and her list of rules and duties for being 24. See more of Wendys magnificent work on her site (designed by the inimitable Kelli Anderson), find her prints on Etsy and 20200, and follow her on Twitter. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say its cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.