On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (3 page)

 • • • 

This is not to say that everyone I walked with saw everything. Moments into my walk with one of the world’s foremost researchers on the science of paying attention, she stepped over sixty dollars lying in her path on the street.

She simply did not notice it.

A half-step behind her, I, and my eyebrows, expressed surprise. For this, an early walk for this project, I had headed out of town by train to walk with a psychologist who thinks a great deal about attention. We had just been talking about the psychological idea of being “mindful”—aiming to bring active attention to our daily lives by noticing new things. And we were on one of
the prototypical elements of daily life, a neighborhood jaunt with dogs.

But the mindful psychologist walked mindlessly by the cash.

It was her dog and I who saw it (well, I am guessing the dog smelled it). One twenty-dollar bill, bereft of owner. A footstep later, another twenty. I goggled at seeing a third bill lying forlornly to the side of the first two. They bore the creases of having been folded with the same hand, in possessive quarter-folds, though they were now unfurling with their freedom. They must have leapt from a pocket together, parachuted to the ground at different speeds, and landed a stride apart. I stopped, reached down, grabbed the loot, and managed to mutter,
“Look!”

She smiled broadly as she registered the money resting on my outstretched palms. The dog stood beside me, proudly quiet, nose pointed at the ground. But then I thought,
Wait, did I miss another one?

 • • • 

In this book, I am looking for what it is that I miss, every day, right in front of me, while walking around the block. “The block” includes the physical elements of the street—from the sidewalks to the buildings—and their history. My first four walks attend to this
inanimate city
. The block includes who (or what) is on it now and who (or what) has passed before; the next three chapters attend to this
animate city
. The block is full of things we miss seeing, smelling, or hearing—and it holds untold stories of the things we
do
see, smell, or hear. The final three chapters attend to the
sensory city
.

The result of all this walking is not a master’s degree in the details of any one city or any single block. It is a tale about what there is to see in any environment, urban or rural. These walks re-awakened in me a sense of perpetual wonder in my surroundings—a
perceptual skill typically available only to experts and to the very young (not yet expert in being people). Perhaps they will awaken wonder in you, too.

William James suggested that my experience will be “what I agree to attend to.” And so I headed agreeably to my first walk around the block, mind in my hand.

¹
 Before I had a child and the floor of our home became an in-progress canvas of wooden toys, squeaking balls, and plush animals, I could drop the single item I needed to remember to take with me the next day by the front door. There it would wait for me, utterly forgotten, until I spied it on my way out and stashed it in my rucksack.

“You can observe a lot by watching.”

(Yogi Berra)

“There was no decoration in front of the building save two pipes—one a humble pipe, the other a mysterious two-headed gnome. I did not investigate.”

By taking in my hand the small, soft curled fingers, and a good chunk of frayed wool jacket hem, both belonging to my nineteen-month-old son, I came to learn about the acute isosceles triangles on my block.

Before we even met the triangles, I was to have the conceptual foundations of my world rocked. When I headed out for a “walk” with my son, I was already being presumptuous. For me, to go for a walk is a simple matter, almost too simple to describe. But because my understanding of a walk was upended by a toddler, I’ll try. I thought a walk was a navigation of a path—sidewalk, street, or dirt—from point A to point B. I suppose that, if pushed, I would relent on “path”: it needn’t even be a true path, just a route along which to place my feet, one after the other, in going from somewhere to somewhere else.

How wrong I turned out to be. On a late afternoon on a late-spring day, we prepared to go for a walk around our block. At this age, my son had been walking on his own for seven months, but a walk outside—where he would be doing the walking, not being walked—was an unusual outing. He was still small and young enough that many expeditions were undertaken attached to Mama’s belly with an infant carrier, or to Daddy’s back in a retrofitted backpack. But today he was to lead
me
on a walk. Even more, I was going to ask him to tell me what he saw.

His response would, of course, require some amount of translation. Although he was a prodigious collector of vocabulary words—besides
ma-ma, peek-boo, daddy,
and
apple,
he was very fond of
belly button, helicopter,
and, after witnessing an impressive collapse of our liquor cabinet,
catastrophe—
he was not yet a conversationalist in the way that could be recorded on audiotape. On the other hand, he communicated all the time—with elaborate gestures, with expressions that spanned his face, with rudimentary sign language, and with emotion. On our walk, I would be listening to him reporting on what he saw by following his interests—and trying to imagine being in his six-inch-long shoes.

Buttons were buttoned, zips zipped, knots tied and double-tied. With no small amount of excitement, we headed down the elevator to “Outside!” as he exclaimed. My son ran through the lobby to our apartment building’s front door, weighted heavily in glass and iron—and gigantic relative to his small body. Together, we peeled it open slowly, as though to admire its solidity. Hand in hand, we turned left and started our walk.

Then we stopped. We had not even turned fully to our left. Poised half off the bottom step and half onto the sidewalk, my son squatted—a young weight lifter’s pose, or the spring-loading of an infant rocket. There he crouched. And stayed there.

“Let’s go for a walk!” I prompted.

Nothing.

“Okey-doke!” I said, in my best
off-we-go!
voice.

Maybe an eyelash batted.

Eventually he reached out his hand again and I grabbed it with mine.

This was the beginning of my realization: to him, we
were already
“taking a walk.” As we proceeded, I began to get the details of his definition. A “walk,” according to my toddler, is regularly about not walking. It has nothing to do with points A, B, or the getting from one to the other. It barely has anything to do with planting one’s feet in a straight line. A walk is, instead, an investigatory exercise that begins with energy and ends when (and only when) exhausted. It began in the elevator, continued with running through the building, opening the door, and then being poised on the step. It began before the elevator, tying shoes—and before that, doing a going-to-tie-our-shoes march down the hall. To him, we were miles into our walk.

A walk is exploring surfaces and textures with finger, toe, and—
yuck
—tongue; standing still and seeing who or what comes by; trying out different forms of locomotion (among them running, marching, high-kicking, galloping, scooting, projectile falling, spinning, and noisy shuffling). It is archeology: exploring the bit of discarded candy wrapper; collecting a fistful of pebbles and a twig and a torn corner of a paperback; swishing dirt back and forth along the ground. It is stopping to admire the murmuring of the breeze in the trees; locating the source of the bird’s song; pointing.
Pointing!—
using the arm to extend one’s fallen gaze so someone else can see what you’ve seen. It is a time of sharing.

On our block, my son has shared his discovery of the repeating motif of lights under construction scaffolding (they come in fluorescent, yellow, red, and bare-bulb white, I am happy to share with you). Of the numerous intentional or unintentional letter
O
s—his
first spoken letter, enunciated carefully and long, lips pursed and eyes beaming with pleasure—on signs and walls (on the
STOP
sign, of course, but also on license plates and the zeros of no-parking signs—and by the way, nO parking, buster); on the circle-pocked grating of a window air-conditioner; in a round call button; in an egg-shaped sidewalk crack; on an iron gate with
O
filigree. He has shared the feature of our building that, to him, distinguished it from its neighbors: the lion’s head, mid-roar, above our entrance. I had never noticed it, over thousands of entrances and exits.

Was he fixated? Obsessed? A lightbulb, letter
O,
or lion savant? No. My son was but an infant. And 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 infant’s world is a case study in confused attention. A newborn, freshly plopped into the world, is unwittingly enrolled in a crash course in sensory experience. In some respects his biology takes care not to overwhelm him too much. Though all sensory organs—including those compellingly large, naive eyes; the ears the size of his hands; the perfectly soft, unblemished skin—are intact, the messages they receive from the world do not all get to the infant’s brain. At least not in an organized way. What the infant sees, for instance, is something quite fuzzier and more dazzling than what the normal adult sees: babies are very nearsighted and they lack the clouded filters that take bright light down a notch. Even more critically, the world is not yet organized into discrete objects for these new eyes: it is all light and dark, shadow and brightness. To the newborn infant, there is no “crib,” no “mama” and “daddy,” no floor no wall no window no sky. Much of this can be seen, but none can yet be made sense of.

Information taken in by the eyes might be processed in any part of the brain—it could be the visual cortex, leading to an
inchoate “seeing”; but it could also be the motor cortex, leading to a leg kicking; or the auditory cortex, in which case a nearby teddy bear may be experienced as a bang, or a ringing, or a whisper. There is good reason to believe that this kind of
synesthesia
is the normal experience for infants. Synesthesia—literally “joining of sensations”—is a somewhat rare and highly improbable form of perception in adults. Synesthetes experience things from one sense—say, vision—overlaid with experiences from another, such as taste. Of course we often experience two or more sensations at once—it is hard to eat near a spewing sewer; we can locate the person who is speaking to us by looking at lips.

In some people, though, sensory overlays are less functional and more extreme. The nineteenth-century Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria wrote about his encounter with a synesthete, introduced as “S,” in
The Mind of a Mnemonist
(the patient also, not coincidentally, had an extremely good memory). In asking him to memorize lists of words, Luria became aware that S. was visualizing the words in his head, and that this “seeing” was not straightforward. For if someone coughed or sneezed when a word was being read from the list, S. reported that a “puff of steam,” a “splash” or blur, appeared on the images he was forming in his mind. For S., sounds came in colors and flavors: pink, rough, or tasting like pickles. Many 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.”

While tasting sounds or smelling letters is viewed as aberrant (if conducive to creativity) among adults, those eminently creative infants may sense the world with crossed wires all the time. Heinz Werner, a German psychologist of the early twentieth century, called this the “sensorium commune”: a primordial way of experiencing the world, pre-knowledge and pre-categorization. Researchers have found remnants of this perceptual organization
in adults: on being shown drawings of curly lines, adults tend to characterize the lines as “happy”; descending lines, “sad”; sharp lines, “angry.” To
feel
a tone, as though one were inside a vibrating bell, is to see glimpses of your vestigial sensorium commune.

But mostly, we ignore that feeling; we do not label lines as being happy or vexed or gloomy. One theory of synesthesia holds that the synapses connecting neurons identifying shapes and those leading to the experience of taste get snipped sometime in the first few years of life. This may be the simple result of our lack of attention to the connection. Few persons talk about the green-apple sourness of a triangle, and so the individual who experiences it may eventually stop attending to it. Snip.

The possibility of this way of perceiving the world makes more sense when we remember that the brain is but a soup of specialized cells—neurons—that communicate with one another electrically. These cells’ communications form connections called synapses across the brothy gap between cells. It is not a stretch to say that at some level, every experience that we have—from feeling a stub of the toe, to trying to remember someone’s name, or uttering a sentence—is the result of the activity of certain neurons, communicating over certain synapses.
¹

Attention
—from “trying” to remember a name to “pondering” how to complete a sentence one is uttering—as well as sensory processing must be a kind of synaptic activity. To a brain without many synapses, like the newborn’s, there is, thus, not a lot of direct attention. As the synapses start forming—and
Bam!
the ringing telephone lights up a row of
Zap!
neurons in the visual area, and
Whoop!
tickles a motor neuron into prompting a leg to kick—we can see attention beginning. Confused, random, involuntary
attention, but attention. Visit that infant two months later, and watch as he looks you in (or near, or around) the eyes, and follows your head as it moves to his left and out of range. That is attention, visual attention, beginning to unconfuse itself. At nineteen months, my son was largely but as yet not entirely unconfused. Thank goodness.