7 Favorite Reads

8/13/2019 7 Favorite Reads

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he Art of Looking: What 11 Experts Teach Us about Seeing Ou

amiliar City Block with New Eyes

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es/

ttention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now

d gears us up to notice only that.

ttention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right no

d gears us up to notice only that.

How we spend our days,Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly

autiful meditation on presence over productivity, is, of course, how we spend our liv

d nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than ban life in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other,

e buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from

eathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. And yet: The art of seeing ha

learned, Marguerite Duras reverberates and it canbe learned, as cognitive scien

exandra Horowitzinvites us to believe in her breathlessly wonderful On Looking:

even Walks with Expert Eyes(public library) a record of her quest to walk arou

y block with eleven different experts, from an artist to a geologist to a dog, and eme

h fresh eyes mesmerized by the previously unseen fascinations of a familiar world. Itdoubtedly one of the most stimulating books of the year, if not the decade, and the m

chanting thing Ive read in ages. In a way, its the opposite but equally delightful mirro

age of Christoph NiemannsAbstract City a concrete, immersive examination of

banity blending the mindfulness of Sherlock Holmeswith the expansive sensitivity o

oreau.

rowitz begins by pointing our attention to the incompleteness of our experience of wh

e conveniently call reality:
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Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You a

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

arge 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 adistant 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.

is adaptive ignorance, she argues, is there for a reason we celebrate it as

oncentration and welcome its way of easing our cognitive overload by allowing us to

nserve our precious mental resources only for the stimuli of immediate and vital

portance, and to dismiss or entirely miss all else. (Attention is an intentional,

apologetic discriminator, Horowitz tells us. It asks what is relevant right now, and g

up to notice only that.) But while this might make us more efficient in our goal-orient

y-to-day, it also makes us inhabit a largely unlived and unremembered life, day

d day out.

r Horowitz, the awakening to this incredible, invisible backdrop of life came thanks to

mpernickel, her curly haired, sage mixed breed (who also inspired Horowitzs first b

e excellent Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know), as she found herself

king countless walks around the block, becoming more and more aware of the

amatically different experiences she and her canine companion were having along theact 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 u

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 invite

along attentions companion: inattention to everything else.

e book was her answer to the disconnect, an effort to attend to that inattention. It is

t, she warns us, about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy or how to

en 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 stree

and everything on itas a living being that could be observed.

n this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the old the new.
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er approach is based on two osmotic human tendencies: our shared capacity to truly

at is in front of us, despite our conditioned concentration that obscures it, and the po

individual bias in perception or what we call expertise, acquired by passion or

ining or both in bringing attention to elements that elude the rest of us. What follow

whirlwind of endlessly captivating exercises in attentive bias as Horowitz, with her

chetypal New Yorkers special fascination with the humming life-form that is an urban

eet, and her diverse companions take to the city.

st, she takes a walk all by herself, trying to note everything observable, and we quickalize that besides her deliciously ravenous intellectual curiosity, Horowitz is a rare

agician with language. (The walkers trod silently; the dogs said nothing. The only sou

as the hum of air conditioners, she beholds her own block; passing a pile of trash ba

aced by a stray Q-tip, she ponders parenthetically, how does a Q-tip escape?; turn

r final corner, she gazes at the entrance of a mansion and its pair of stone lions wait

tiently for royalty that never arrives. Stunning.)

t as soon as she joins her experts, Horowitz is faced with the grimacing awareness t

spite her best, most Sherlockian efforts, she was missing pretty much everything. S

ives at a newfound, profound understanding of what William James meant when he

ote, My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice sha

y mind.:

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 se

but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering

object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we haveblinders.

ese blinders, despite psychologists concentrated effortsto dissect this strange

enomenon we call attention, remain largely a mystery or, at best, a series of

sconstrued hypotheses:

Thoughpaying attentionseems simple, there are numerous forms of payment. To

concentrate, topay 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.

t 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
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particular items of interest to examine, bringing some things into focus and awarenes

while leaving other things in the dim, dusty sidelines. The metaphor makes me feel lik

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 mighave 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.

us, evolutions problem-solving left us modern humans with two kinds of attention:

gilance, which allows us to have a quick and life-saving fight-or-flight response to an

mediate threat, be it a leaping lion or a deranged boss, and selective attention, which

consciously curates the few stimuli to attend to amidst the flurry bombarding us, enab

to block out everything except what were interested in ingesting. (Selective attention

urse, can mutate to dangerous degrees, producing such cultural atrocities as the filte

bble.) Much like French polymath Henri Poincar argued that to invent is simply to ch

eas, to attend, it turns out, is simply to choose stimuli but what sounds so deceptiv

mple turns out to be marvelously complex. In her walks with expert companions, Horo

kles this latter type of attention to unravel all the unseen, unsmelled, and unheard

racles of a city block, the wonderlands of sensation and awareness that bloom behin

oking glass of our evolutionarily primed everyday inattention.

e first expert Horowitz walks with is her very own toddler, from whom we learn that

alk is not necessarily the purposeful and linear transfer of a body from point A to poin

t rather an exploratory exercise in touching and eek! tasting textures and surfac

inting 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.

uch of what makes the story so compelling is Horowitzs ability to swiftly weave scien

ight 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. Th

nfants world is a case study in confused attention. The world is not yet organized

nto discrete objects for these new eyes: it is all light and dark, shadow and brightnes

ants, in fact, seem to experience syneshtesiaas a baseline sensory given. (Perhaps
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oMAs Juliet Kinchin touched on a bigger cognitive truth when she reflected that child

lp us to mediate between the ideal and the real.) But, eventually, they grow out of th

ndrous multidimensional awareness, which William James called aboriginal sensible

uchness, 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 havedismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.

rt of toddlers extraordinary capacity for noticing has to do with their hard-wired neop

the allure of the new and unfamiliar, which for them includes just about everything tha

, old and jaded, have deemed familiar and thus uninteresting. (Horowitz points to one

stematic exception for us adults vacations which brim with enough novelty to

oduce such fascinating, reality-warping psychological phenomena as the holiday para

e reason, Horowitz argues, lies in two factors: We actually do see new places and

cond, we bother to look.)

a way, experts have a toddlers ability to zoom in on the details, the very fabric of

perience, that most of us glide adaptively by.

t by Maira Kalman from 'On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes'

om beloved artist and reconstructionist Maira Kalman a woman of boundless wisd

lifeand unrelenting faith in walking as a creative device, whom Horowitz aptly descri

a hoarder, in the finest sense of that word, of both experience and image we le

at looking at the ordinary, looking and really seeingit, seeing its extraordinary wonde
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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 whe

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 objec

with an unprejudiced equivalence: the plastic truck is of no more intrinsic worth to thechild 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 a

any of the menus, mail, flyers, or trash that concern the adults.

hoing Anas Nins timeless words on the shared magic of the child and the artist,

orowitz 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.

t Kalmans singular spirit came to life not in the purposeful stride of a destination-wal

the creative digression of an amble:

With Kalman, walking around the block entered a fourth dimension. Eventually, wemade 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.

lman gently nudges Horowitz to remove the invisibility cloak so familiar to us urbanit

we shield ourselves from strangers, and the two do something city dwellers

pecially New Yorkers never do: They talk to policemen, movers, a mailman,

urchgoers, and the social workers tending to a halfway house. In other words, theyase to simply coexist with their fellow citizens and, for the duration of the walk, livew

em instead, attend to them with presence and curiosity, seethem; they slow their

dence, now tourists in their native fast-paced New York; they amble. Horowitz once a

urns to her potent blend of philosophical reflection and scientific substance:

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
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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

nvolvement as our loved ones can broach the closest zone and get nearer tha

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 hav

a social distance up to twelve feet from our bodies for more formal transactions, or fo

those we dont know well. Beyond that is a kind of public distance in which we use ou

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.
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t by Maira Kalman from 'On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes'

entually, Horowitz realizes that Kalman has a wholly different way not only of looking,

o of seeing she challenges the normative expectations of where one is allowed to

the city and experiences space not as defined by an edge, but as an infinitely explor

enness and so she wonders what it is about the artists brain that enables that

itless perception of possibility. Though she is careful to insure against any phrenolog

e pseudoscience of the creative brain, Horowitz does point to a curious study that

ggests 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

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 t

box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box, the researchers wrote

or more on this research by Stanfords Carol Dweck, see this.)

typographic storefront from James and Karla Murray's 'Store Front: The Disappearin

ce of New York.' Click image for details.

om typography nerd Paul Shaw, who brought us the almost true story of New Yorks

bway Helvetica, we learn that our minds are constantly coerced into reading the dull

dious words that bombard us from storefronts, billboards, and computer screens nea

ery waking moment but besides the linguistic burden, embedded in each letter we
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gest is also a design one, for typography can quietly convey an unwritten message, se

ood, create an ineffable sense of something being either terribly wrong or terribly

onderful. A letter, Horowitz reminds us as she discovers the humanistic quality of word

ile touring New Yorks type-smothered streets with Shaw, can be jaunty or

ncomfortable amidst awkward kerning, an ampersand can be pregnant and an S

omplacent. 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, thisrelief 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. Rath

than words, I saw the components of words. Some small part of my brain (the linguis

part) rested; the shape-identifying part hummed with activity.

[]

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

om geologist Sidney Horenstein of the American Museum of Natural History we learn

r entire world consists of only two types of things: minerals and the biomass of plants

d animals. A city suddenly becomes not a sterile man-made object but a thriving

osystem of living and once-living landscapes, an ersatz natural landscape writ small

every single block, a place suddenly brimming with reminders of its own impermane

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 strongest

ooking behemoth of an apartment tower is gradually deteriorating under the persiste

patient forces of wind, water, and time.

ganisms inhabiting a single cubic foot of space from 'One Cubic Foot' by photograp

avid Liittschwager. Click image for details.
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om field naturalist and insects advocate Charlie Eiseman, we learn that on every squa

ch of surface, entire microcosmsoscillate between vibrant life and violent death. (If a

veway holds an ecosystem, Horowitz ponders, what of a parking lot? Perchance a

iverse.) Over the next few hours, the two proceed to discover traces of just about ev

d of insect from spider egg cases to discarded fly exoskeletons lacing the mos

dinary of city blocks. What emerges is a keen awareness that the negative space of t

seen is itself a source of rich information:

Surprisingly, those leaves that have no sign, no holes, no smattering of excrement, athemselves sign of something else. They indicate that the tree is probably not from

around here.

nce again, Horowitz explores what enables Eisenmans brain to function so differently

m her own and pops the cognitive hood of his singular selective attention, tracing it to

ork 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, aparticular species of beetle at a time. As the numbers of young beetles rose throu

a season, the birds gorged on these beetlettes, ignoring any other available young

nsects nearby. Tinbergen suggested that, once the birds found a food they liked, the

began to lookjust 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.

is search image, it turns out, is something all of us employ when we need to narrow ention in a goal-oriented task, like spotting a friend across the crowded street or find

e brand of salsa we went looking for amidst the overwhelmingly well-stocked shelves

hole Foods. But this search aid, Horowitz soon realizes, is only helpful or even possib

e know what to look for, and most of us wont have the luxury of being escorted along

miliar walks by some of the worlds most fascinating brains. Horowitz shares this

elancholy thought with Eiseman as they conclude their walk:

Eiseman reflected for a moment, and then quoted one of his tracking teachers, Susa

Morse: Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking. If younderstand 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 a

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 somethin

xt, from Humane Society senior wildlife scientist John Hadidian we learn that the main

tinction in the citys life is that between day and night, and a remarkable amount of

dlife floods the seemingly humdrum city streets once the sun averts its gaze pigeo
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arrows, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons. (And, lest we forget, the bountiful wild cats

ay Talese so poetically described.) High above, falcons, eagles, and hawks haunt the

ban skies. Down below, rats who spend most of their waking hours preening and w

e their sensitive whiskers to navigate along walls and orient themselves run their

aseless races. (Of the latter, Hadidian says that from a strictly natural history

rspective, theyre one of the most poorly understood animals out there.)

e also learn that every animal you can think of is drawn to the persimmon tree a

eful factlet should you ever find yourself lonely in your backyard. But most humbling othe sudden awareness that nearly every single crack, hole, and slit between buildings

rt of a vast and elaborate transit system of urban wildlife passageways, with which

mes the equally humbling reminder that maybe, just maybe, we arent the complacen

gs 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 shimm

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

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 adu

can fit in a four-inch space between grates, flattening themselves and taking advanta

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).

d so we return to the straitjackets of our perception, that disconnect between seeing

owing what to look for, filtered through the uncompromising sieve of our attention

mething most memorably demonstrated in the famous invisible gorilla experiment.

orowitz 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, package

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.

intriguing as the citys non-human dwellers are, its human ones brim with a deluge o

ta that something as seemingly simple as observing their bodies and movement can

veal. Thats precisely what Horowitz learns from her walk with Dr. Bennett Lorber,
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esident-elect of the countrys oldest medical institution, the College of Physicians of

iladelphia:

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 ja

deed, we learn that a mans gait can reveal anything from his medical pathology to his

cupation to, even, his religion. (Enter another curious factlet: the average step is divid

o 62% stance, meaning contact with ground, and 38% swing, meaning no contact witound.) We also realize that the extraordinary act of walking a miracle of motion an

gnment that propels us forward despite the awkward balance of our bodies bipedalis

ity in the animal kingdom is an exquisite metaphor for the human spirit as one

comes aware of how many different but successful ways there are to propel oneself

ound 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 doi

anything but going forward. From an evolutionary perspective, efficiency is the key. O

ancestors may have been easily outrun by any potential predator we are not aparticularly 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.

rowitz 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

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.

t partway through her experiment, Horowitz is befallen by a medical curveball of her

a herniated disk in her back paralyzes her foot and renders her barely able to walk,

ich presents an obvious challenge to her walking exploration of city blocks. She write

The street changed for me during those months, as it certainly changes for anyone w

s temporarily or permanently injured, or suffers the ultimate injury of simply aging.

ll, she perseveres and brings even greater awareness to the next portion of her urba

atomy the sensory landscape of the city. She meets Arlene Gordon, a remarkable

man who has traveled the world and shares enchanting stories of the souvenirs filling

artment. And this is where the gift of Horowitzs narrative comes most viscerally alive

e talks to Gordon and notes the subtle details of her dimly lit apartment and her too-b

es, you the reader (or at least I, the reader), already primed for this art of observatio

alize before Horowitz reveals it that Gordon is completely blind and oh how sweetl

atifying this earned micro-mastery is, and oh what plump promise it holds for the

ssibility of similarly broadening our everyday awareness as we follow Horowitzs

periment.


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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 t

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 generado not bother paying attention to much other than the visual. What we wear, where w

ive, where we visit, even whom we love is based in large part on appearance visu

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

oosened odors wafting in the space around us? Or the perturbations of air that we c

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, in

the invisible block that I miss with my wide open eyes.

d lead she does: Gordon navigates swiftly along the sidewalk, masterfully using her c

a sort of sensory extension of herself and the peripersonal space, that bubble of sp

fined by our bodies and their immediate surroundings and Horowitz marvels at our

ains 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 thexperience. If we have enough experience doing an action, viewing a scene, or smell

an odor to become an expert in a field, then our brains are functionally and visibly

different from nonexperts.

d 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.

om the walk with Gordon, we learn about the physics of wind, which moves according

e Bernoulli principle and the Venturi effect, creating a whole new layer of aerial flux ov

e 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 doorw

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.
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t most poignant of all are Gordons parting words, emblematic of the books broader

derpinning message:

n 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.

xt, from sound designer and vocal engineer Scott Lehrer we learn that the urbanundscape is often a violent cacophony on which Dickens and Babbage were right to

age war, and our ability to tune it out is among the most fascinating manifestations of

ective attention though our ears are always open, we only attend to a fraction of w

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.

fact, Horowitz herself employs, perhaps unwittingly, this emotional soundscape in aevious chapter: limping awkwardly and painfully with her paralyzed leg to meet Gordo

e encounters a door that sighs open for her.)

t with Lehrer she sets out to to listen to the sounds in and of themselves, to hear be

eir names. She learns that the tires of a car sound different when it rains and that so

n reverberate with various levels of wetness in different spaces, depending on the s

the space, the objects filling it, and the distance of the sound source from the walls. S

arns how the fact that even temperature alters sound perception explains why birds s

dusk and dawn. She then ponders the man-made distinction between sound and n

she considers legendary avant-garde composer John Cages legacy:

What makes that noise and not just neutral sound is another question. The avant-

garde composer John Cage famously declared that music is sounds, and thus

appropriated ordinary sounds to be his music. In one of his compositions, the orchest

s 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 soundare music(al). Any sound we do not like we call noise, thereby introducing a subjectiv

assessment to the din. That subjectivity is always there in talking about noise.

t Horowitz finds a certain reassurance in the relativity of noise as she realizes that so

sonates with what we bring to it and our experience of the citys soundscape can cha

amatically with exposure. (Cue in E. B. White, who embraced the hustle-and-bustle o

ew York with such memorable poeticism.) But one of her most chilling realizations ha

with the biology of our ear itself a magnificent machine and violent ways in wh

e city assaults it daily:
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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

ncludes 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 vibratio

of airthe rush of air that is sound wends its way into the inner ear. So stimulatedthe cilia trigger nerves to fire, translating that vibration into electrical signals that give

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 period

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

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 subwa

turning a tight corner or braking, at 3,000 or 4,000 hertz, or the sound of fingernails o

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 weknow 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.


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om Christoph Niemann's 'Abstract City' (click image for details): 'To describe differeenomena, physicists use various units. PASCALS, for example, measure the press

plied to a certain area. COULOMBS measure electric charge (that can occur if said

ea is a synthetic carpet). DECIBELS measure the intensity of the trouble the physici

ts into because he didn't take off his shoes first.'

d still, her walk with Lehrer yields a celebration rather than a lament of the citys sou

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 a

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.

rowitzs final walking companion is fittingly, given the original inspiration for the pro

her new dog, the playfully curious Finnegan. (That a cognitive scientist would name h

g with a nod to James Joyce is only further evidence of Horowitzs remarkably well-unded mind.) And if you thought the human ear was a marvel, just wait for the dogs n

The inside of the nose is a labyrinth of tunnels lined with specialized olfactory recepto

waiting for an odorant molecule a smell to land on them. In the back of the nos

s 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

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 trav
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lf-life of smells, with each noseful of the same smell delivering different information

rt of stereo olfaction that gives them astounding precision in tracing where the smell h

me 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

n front of us, looking to and fro. Similarly, to smella 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 issomething different there to smell. This taught me somethingabout smells: they are not at fixed points, nor are they static and unchanging. They a

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.

er her olfactory adventure with Finn, Horowitz takes one final walk by herself as she

empts to implement all her new learnings in experiencing her city block with new laye

wareness. 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, fille

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

s. We are limited by our sensory abilities, by our species membership, by our narrowattention at least the last of which can be overcome.

t the greatest learning is that our ability to see is a factor of two complementary forc

attention and intention as the choices we make in what we attend to shape our en

perience of reality. And expertise is nothing but the carefully orchestrated osmotic

lance 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 selectedthese walkers for their ability to boost my own selective attention. An expert can only

ndicate what she sees; it is up to your own head to tune your senses and your brain

see it. Once you catch that melody, and keep humming, you are forever changed.

deed, 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, helple

nfants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the


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ways we learn to see the world.

t the greatest promise of On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes which, i

nt be stressed enough, is a rare and necessary soul-expander for any city-dweller

pears as a poetic aside Horowitz drops during her walk with the geologist:

Follow me here: your brain will begin to change as you do.

e notes that he can never walk down a block and not see its geology. And thatsecisely the point: The art of seeing might have to be learned, but it can never be

learned, just as the seen itself can never be unseen a realization at once immense

manding in its immutability and endlessly liberating in the possibilities it invites.

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are on Tumblr
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ail Safe: Debbie Millmans Advice on Courage and the Creativ

ife

p://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/15/debbie-millman-look-both-ways-fail-

fe/

magine immensities, dont compromise, and dont waste time.

magine immensities, dont compromise, and dont waste time.

The seasonal trope of the commencement address is upon us as

sdom on life is being dispensed from graduation podiums around the world. After Gre

arcuss meditation on the essence of artand Neil Gaimans counsel on the creative lif

re comes a heartening speech by artist, strategist, and interviewer extraordinaireDelman, delivered to the graduating class at San Jose State University. The talk is base

an essay titled Fail Safefrom her fantastic 2009 anthology Look Both Ways:

ustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design(public library) and which

eviously appeared on Literary Jukebox. The essay, which explores such existential sk

living with uncertainty, embracing the unfamiliar, allowing for not knowing, and cultiva

at John Keats has famously termed negative capability,is reproduced below with t

ists permission.
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f 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.

ok Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Designis an

solute treasure in its entirety, the kind of read you revisit again and again, only to

scover new meaning and new access to yourself each time. It was preceded by Howink Like a Great Graphic Designerand followed by the recent Brand Thinking and O

oble Pursuits, both excellent in very different but invariably stimulating ways.

ages and audio courtesy Debbie Millman


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ost Cat: An Illustrated Meditation on Love, Loss, and What It

Means To Be Human

p://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/09/lost-cat-wendy-macnaughton-carolin

ul/

ou can never know anyone as completely as you want. But thats okay, love is better

ou can never know anyoneas completely as you want. But thats okay, love is better

Dogs are not about something else. Dogs are about dogs,Malc

adwell indignated in the introduction to The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. Though ha

memetic rulers of the internet, cats too have enjoyed an admirable run as creative

vicesand literary muses in Joyces childrens books, T. S. Eliots poetry, Hemingwayters, and various verses. But hardly ever have cats been at once more about cats an

ore about something else than in Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, an

PS Technology(public library) by writer Caroline Pauland illustrator extraordinaire

endy MacNaughton, she of many wonderful collaborations a tender, imaginative

emoir infused with equal parts humor and humanity. (You might recall a subtle teaser

s gem in Wendys wonderful recent illustration of Gay Taleses taxonomy of cats.)

ough about a cat, this heartwarming and heartbreaking tale is really about what it

eans to be human about the osmosis of hollowing loneliness and profound attachm

e oscillation between boundless affection and paralyzing fear of abandonment, the un

omise of loss implicit to every possibility of love.
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er Caroline crashes an experimental plane she was piloting, she finds herself severe

ured and spiraling into the depths of depression. It both helps and doesnt that Carolind Wendy have just fallen in love, soaring in the butterfly heights of new romance, the

ase of love that didnt obey any known rules of physics, until the crash pulls them int

ace that would challenge even the most seasoned and grounded of relationships. And

ey persevere as Wendy patiently and lovingly takes care of Caroline.
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hen Caroline returns from the hospital with a shattered ankle, her two thirteen-year-obbies the shy, anxious Tibby (short for Tibia, affectionately and, in these

cumstances, ironically named after the shinbone) and the sociable, amicable Fibby

hort for Fibula, after the calf bone on the lateral side of the tibia) are, short of Wen

r 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

nto a small rectangle of lights and plastic in her hand, peer at a computer, or get upand disappear from the vicinity, only to reappear through the front door hours later.


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nstead, 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

nto my neck. Tibby snored on the rug nearby. Meanwhile I lay awake, circling the de

dark hole of depression.

Without my cats, I would have fallen right in.

d then, one day, Tibby disappears.


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endy and Caroline proceed to flyer the neighborhood, visit every animal shelter in the

inity, and even, in their desperation, enlist the help of a psychic who specializes in los

ts but to no avail. Heartbroken, they begin to mourn Tibbys loss.


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d then, one day five weeks later, Tibby reappears.
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nce the initial elation of the recovery has worn off, however, Caroline begins to wonde

ere hed been and why hed left. He is now no longer eating at home and regularly le

e house for extended periods of time Tibby clearly has a secret place he now retur

Even more worrisomely, hes no longer the shy, anxious tabby hed been for thirteen

ars instead, hes a half pound heavier, chirpy, with a youthful spring in his step. B

y would a happy cat abandon his loving lifelong companion and find comfort find

mself, even elsewhere?

When the relief that my cat was safe began to fade, and the joy of his prone, snoringform sprawled like an athlete after a celebratory night of boozing started to we

thin, I was left with darker emotions. Confusion. Jealousy. Betrayal. I thought Id know

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?


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ere only one obvious thing left to do: Track Tibby on his escapades. So Caroline, des

endys lovingly suppressed skepticism, heads to a spy store yes, those exist an

rchases a real-time GPS tracker, complete with a camera that they program to take

apshots every few minutes, which they then attach to Tibbys collar.

hat follows is a wild, hilarious, and sweet tale of tinkering, tracking, and tenderness.

derpinning the obsessive quest is the subtle yet palpable subplot of Wendy and

rolines growing love for each other, the deepening of trust and affection that happen

en two people share in a special kind of insanity.


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vert quest is a journey, every journey a story. Every story, in turn, has a moral,writ

aroline in the final chapter, then offers several possible morals for the story, the lastich embody everything that makes Lost Catan absolute treat from cover to cover:

6. You can never know your cat. In fact, you can never know anyone as completely a

you want.

7. But thats okay, love is better.

ages courtesy Wendy MacNaughton
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hile frolicsome in tone and full of wink, the story like the most timeless of childrens

oks is colored with subtle hues of grown-up philosophy on the human condition,ploring all the deft ways in which we creatively rationalize our wrongdoingand reconc

e 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
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f 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 ofkindness nevertheless. And you ought not to attempt to make a forcible swap with he

unless your conscience would justify you in it, and you know you are able to do it.

ne cant help but wonder whether this particular bit may have in part inspired the irrev

64 anthology Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girlsand its mischievous advice on brother-

ter relations:

f at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with m

never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes. It is bet

to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results. You secure his immediateattention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time your hot water will
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have a tendency to move impurities from his person, and possibly the skin, in spots.

f your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you wont. It is better an

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 sa

old people unless they sass you first.
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ere are no words to describe how muchAdvice to Little Girlsmakes my heart sing

s make a choir.


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00 Diagrams That Changed the World

p://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/21/100-diagrams-that-changed-the-wo

visual history of human sensemaking, from cave paintings to the world wide web.

visual history of human sensemaking, from cave paintings to the world wide web.

Since the dawn of recorded history, weve beenusing visual

pictions to map the Earth, order the heavens, make sense of time, dissect the human

dy, organize the natural world, perform music, and even concretize abstract concepts

nsciousnessand love. 100 Diagrams That Changed the World(UK;public library)

vestigative journalist and documentarian Scott Christiansonchronicles the history of

olving understanding of the world through humanitys most groundbreaking sketches,

strations, and drawings, ranging from cave paintings to The Rosetta Stone to Moses

arriss color wheel to Tim Berners-Lees flowchart for a mesh information manageme

stem, the original blueprint for the world wide web.

t most noteworthy of all is the way in which these diagrams bespeak an essential pa

ture the awareness that everything builds on what came before, that creativity is

mbinatorial, and that the most radical innovations harness the cross-pollination of

ciplines. Christianson writes in the introduction:

t appears that no great diagram is solely authored by its creator. Most of those

described here were the culmination of centuries of accumulated knowledge. Mostarose from collaboration (and oftentimes in competition) with others. Each was a

product and a reflection of its unique cultural, historical and political environment. Eac

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 nohowever, their creators mostly known, but many lost to time were polymaths w
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are creating new technologies or breakthroughs by drawing from a potent combinatio

of disciplines. By applying trigonometric methods to the heavens, or by harnessing th

movement of the sun and the planets to keep time, they were forging powerful new

tools; their diagrams were imbued with synergy.

osetta Stone (196 BC)

scovered in 1799, this granite block containing a decree written in three languages

owed Egyptologists to interpret bieroglyphics for the first time -- a language that had

en out of use since the fourth century AD.
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unar Eclipse (Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, 1019)

illustration showing the different phases of the moon from al-Biruni's manuscript co

his Kitab al-Tafhim (Book of Instruction on the Principles of the Art of Astrology)

ristianson offers a definition:

diagram

From the latin diagramma(figure) from Greek, a figure worked out b lines, plan, from

diagraphein, from grapheinto 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 relationsh

A chart or graph.

3. A drawing or plan that outlines and explains the parts, operation, etc. ofsomething: a diagram of an engine.


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ante's Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-21)

19th-century interpretation of Dante's map of Hell. The level of suffering and

ckedness increases on the downward journey through the inferno's nine layers. No

ginal copies of Dante's manuscript survive.


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truvian Man (Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1487

is sketch, and the notes that go with it, show how da Vinci understood the proportion

e human body. The head measured from the forehead to the chin was exactly one te

the total height, and the outstretched arms were always as wide as the body was tal


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uman Body (Andreas Vesalius, 1543)

salius's revolutionary anatomical treatise, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, shows the

ssected body in unusually animated poses. These detailed diagrams are perhaps th

ost famous illustrations in all of medical history.

eliocentric Universe (Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543)
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opernicus's revolutionary view of the universe was crystallized in this simple yet

sconcerting line drawing. His heliocentric model -- which placed the Sun and not the

rth and the center of the universe -- contradicted 14th-century beliefs.

e Four Books of Architecture

lladio's country villas, urban palazzos, and churches combined modern features wi

assical Roman principles. His designs were bailed as 'the quintessence of Highenaissance calm and harmony.'


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ush Toilet (John Harington, 1596)

e text accompanying Harington's diagram identified A as the 'Cesterne,' D as the 'se

ord,' H as the 'stoole pot,' and L as the 'sluce.' If used correctly, 'your worst privie m

as sweet as your best chamber.'

oon Drawings (Galileo Galilei, 1610)

ded by his telescope, Galileo's drawings of the moon were a revelation. Until these

strations were published, the moon was thought to be perfectly smooth and round.

alileo's sketches revealed it to be mountainous and pitted with craters.


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New Chart of History (Joseph Priestley, 1769)

e regularized distribution of dates on Priestley's chart and its horizontal compositionlp to emphasize the continuous flow of time. This innovative, colorful timeline allow

udents to survey the fates of 78 kingdoms in one chart.

ne Graph (William Playfair, 1786)

lliam Playfair was the first person to display demographic and economic data in gra

rm. His clearly drawn, color-coded line graphs show time on the horizontal axis and

onomic data or quantities on the vertical axis.


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moticons (Puck Magazine, 1881)

moticons made a discreet entrance, arriving in print for the first time in this March 30

81 issue of Puck. The small item in the middle of this page gives four examples of

pographical art' -- joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.


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easure Island Map (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883)

hile there is no evidence or real pirates ever leaning a 'treasure map' showing wher

ey had buried their stolen goods, with 'X' marking the spot, Stevenson's fictional dev

s continued to excite generations of children to this day.


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ubism and Abstract Art (Alfred Barr, 1936)

rr's striking diagram highlighted the role that cubism had played in the developmen

odernism. Like the exhibition and book that accompanied it, Barr's diagram was a

atershed in the history of 20th-century modernism.


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tel 4004 CPU (Ted Hoff, Stanley Mazor, Masatoshi Shima, Federico Faggin, Ph

i, and Wayne Pickette, 1971)

ayne Pickette suggested that Intel could use a 'computer on a board' for one of their

ojects with the Japanese company Busicom. Pickette drew this diagram with Philip T

r the 4004 demonstration board.

mplement 100 Diagrams That Changed the Worldwith 17 equations that changedorldand the fantastic Cartographies of Time.

anks, Kirstin

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say its cool. It comes ou

ndays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what to expect. Like? Sign up.
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ichard Feynman on the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern

ociety

p://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/27/richard-feynman-on-the-role-of-

entific-culture-in-modern-society/

order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar ajar only.

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

hieved substantially more than we actually did,lamentedoriginal moonwalker Neil

mstrong, who passed away at the age of 82 last week. Implicit to his lament is the

her unsettling question of why what is it that has held mankind back?

ats precisely what the great Richard Feynmanexplored when he took the stage at th

alileo Symposium in Italy in 1964 and delivered a lecture titled What Is and What

ould Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,published in the altoge

cellent The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P

ynman(public library), titled after the famous filmof the same name.

ynman 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.

attributes much of this disconnect to a profound lack of mainstream understanding o

d enthusiasm for science, making a case for the wonder of science:
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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 th

relation of science to modern society is just that why is it possible for people to st

so woefully ignorant and yet reasonably happy in modern society when so much

knowledge is unavailable to them?

ncidentally, about knowledge and wonder, Mr. Bernardini* said we shouldnt teach

wonders but knowledge.

t 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. An

that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework the wonder that nature is.

goes on to take a jab at just how unscientific pop culture is and how culturally

ndoned certain unscientific beliefs are:

as Id like to show Galileo our world, I must show him something with a great dea

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, intense

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 da

Why do we still have astrologers?

[]
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believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by t

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

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 ware. 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 invite

to give an attack on faith healing, or on astrology on what is the scientific view of

astrology today.

e solution he proposes pits good science writingand critical debate as the necessary

ck in the filter bubbleof public interest:

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 believe

n 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 thes

matters. It was felt by the church that Galileos views attacked the church. It is not fe

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 religiouand scientific beliefs.

ranted, since 1964, weve seen the rise of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism

chard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris who, along w

untlessscientists, consistently ensure a constructive lack of politeness in the debate

7 Favorite Reads

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