Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Before we look at your five book choices, I want to put them in context. You are currently working on a project that involves this theme.
Yes, I am writing a book that is about observation – in particular, observations done in an “ordinary” context. I am taking a series of walks, through the city of New York and other cities as well, with people whose expertise or in some cases physical condition allows them to see something about the city that I might not see. I am very interested in getting different perspectives on what we consider to be an ordinary, well-known landscape.
In the course of your research, what unexpected observations have you made about some well-known places?
Mostly I have seen that when we bother to stop and look, there is an enormous amount of surprising material right under our noses. For example, I live in New York and I have been seeing things like geodetic survey marks – small brass discs that are planted at a particular latitude and longitude. They are set in concrete or embedded in soil. I would never have noticed these before, but they are actually part of a large network across the US of these little topographic landmarks.
Your first choice is How to Use Your Eyes by James Elkins, which looks at how we can use our eyes more efficiently.
Elkins is a writer on art and art history. This book is really not about art per se – instead it is really about the act of observation. I adore his approach. He takes things that we are familiar with but have never looked at closely. He has 31 examples, which include things like x-rays and stamps and maps and the winter ice halo around the sun.
One of my favourites is pavements. He is not discussing what the stuff is that pavements are made up of. Instead he is looking at what the movement of pavement tells us about who has driven on that road. For instance he describes “shoving”, which is when warm pavements, over time, create a little crevice and then a hill after it – the pavement has been moved by the starting and stopping of a large force. If you begin to look for this shoved part of the pavement as you cross the street you will see it here and there. What it represents is where a lot of cars, or in New York a very large bus, might have stopped and started repeatedly. At bus stops you will see shoving. I love the idea that you can look at something so familiar that you have never really examined, and see this additional dimension – in this case, of who has passed by before.
It sounds like he is doing observational detective work.
Yes, it is like a forensic vision. He has another example, which encourages you to look at the inside of your own eye. And that is not through some strange microscopic mechanism. It is through becoming attentive to the blood vessels that run across the front of our eyes. If you look at a diagram of your eye in a biology textbook you see that they are there. We never see them because the brain has learnt to ignore them, so we need to trick ourselves into seeing them again. Then you see the vessels and you can see lots of little floater objects sashaying across your visual field. But for the most part we never see these things even though they are plastered to our eyes.
The problem being, that once you have worked out how to see them you might not be able to stop seeing them!
Yes. We have adapted to not see the inside of the eye because you don’t want to be focusing on it all the time. I find it entrancing that you can bring into mind something that through force of habit we have come to ignore.
Your next book is Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist On Mars, stories of people with different medical conditions who see things differently.
Really, all Sacks’s books are an inspiration to me in bringing together scientific and philosophical reflections on various human conditions. In all his books he uses case histories where something is going wrong neurologically. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat he talks about prosopagnosia, which is an inability to recognise a face, and then it turns out later in his life he actually has that condition himself. I find that kind of symmetry interesting.
In this book he has some fascinating stories, including a well-known one about Temple Grandin, who was the high-functioning autistic who wrote the book Thinking in Pictures. He describes her ability to ostensibly see the world of animals that are being led to a slaughterhouse in a way that other people, especially those who designed slaughterhouses, could not. That represents the idea of being able to see for someone else.
And her work on this led her to be able to make improvements for animals in slaughterhouses in terms of their experiences there.
Yes, she helped the animals not to be so fearful of approaching their death. There is something paradoxical in that, of course. But putting that aside, it is interesting to me that she was able to realise that something shiny, like light reflecting off a puddle or a swinging chain, might disturb or alarm an animal that has a visual sensitivity to that type of thing. Most people wouldn’t think of that because we just go about with our heads and eyes and experiences.
So this book explores some of the other different visions of the world there might be.
That’s right.
Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology at Columbia University and is author of Inside of a Dog, a book on the psychology of dogs. Before her scientific career, Horowitz worked as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and was on the staff of The New Yorker. She and her husband live in New York City with Finnegan, a dog of “indeterminate parentage and determinate character”
Chemist investigates the nature of "interest". An unusual but satisfying combination. Some etymology, a little history and an evaluation of the theory that "scientific interest springs from stimuli that are novel but understandable"
At last, a decent overview of rationality research. Tough read but rewarding. How human reasoning works and why it produces false beliefs, biases and mistaken judgements. From "corrupted mindware" to "cognitive miserliness"
Fine roundup of latest neuroscience research from conference on nature of time. From how we form memories, to the evolution of consciousness and the infamous 80 millisecond rule. Enjoyable and informative throughout
Children with autism spectrum disorders often fascinated by trains, buses. They like the detail, repetition. New York Transit Museum runs field trips. "They clap politely when certain models of train cars come into the station"
Do you dream in colour, or black and white? Probably neither. Dreams are thoughts, and thoughts have no colour. But we use the language of TV or film when trying to describe them. Can we ever really know what we are thinking?
