On Looking - Alexandra Horowitz (3/?)
Feb. 13th, 2021 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8On Looking is an exploration of what the world looks like through different experts' eyes - the ability of one's perceptions and interests, training and background, shape how we see the same scene. Written by Alexandra Horowitz, an expert in dog cognition, she explores (mostly) the same block of NYC through many different people's eyes.
I picked up the book because I am also personally fascinated by how we perceive the world around us, and especially I am fascinated by the idea of the secret things lying in plain sight. It's not a question of the perception of our rods and cones and how wide you are physically keeping your eyelids - there's just too much visual (and other) information to appropriately or reasonably process it all, and we pick and choose, often completely unconsciously, what to actually perceive. It's a question of focus and conscious/unconscious attenuation to different things, and Horowitz shares this interest, and takes a walk with many different people - first, by herself; then with her young toddler, with a typographer, with a doctor, with an entomologist, a sound designer, with someone who went blind in middle age, with her dog, etc.
I pretty much found them all really interesting. Horowitz devotes a chapter to each person and writes engagingly, wrapping transcribed dialogue with her perception as it changed, description, and context, which is always valuable. I really enjoyed several chapters - the one that talked about how we walk on crowded sidewalks, the city animals that live among humans, with an illustrator (and an interesting diversion into meeting the gazes of strangers - one of the first things you learn to NOT do in a city). The most engagingly written, though, was the one with Horowitz's dog, which I guess is unsurprising. The conceit is always engaging for me to read (I like dogs!), they've become integrated with humans for thousands of years and dogs can do things like actually follow our gazes, and that's Horowitz's specialty. Maybe also because the other chapters are from other human's perception - with the exception of the woman who went blind, we're all really visual based, but dogs aren't. It
My main objection to the book is just the constant evocation of various savannah hypotheses - the one where we attempt to explain why our ability to concentrate or some other psychological phenomenon comes directly from avoiding lions trying to eat us for dinner. It's not that I have any specific objection, I think, yet - just that I've watched so many eg evo-psych theorists propound hypotheses that they have not tested, and nor do they ever think they might be fallible and steeped in their individual culture. Why, for example, do all the gender norms you propose originated from paleolithic living end up perfectly fitting into 1950's American middle-class roles? A lot of those questions about how our concentration work are still inadequately answered, as far as I know. I don't think Horowitz is necessarily going too far, I'm not qualified to judge that. But it's distracting and always kicks me out. There is also one walk with a doctor who specializes in diagnosing issues visually - contrasting with doctors who make an estimate based on symptoms, examination, and then order tests. I don't mean to downplay this skill but I think there are definitely a lot which cannot be easily visually identified, a lot of misdiagnosis that has happened in the past before we developed sensitive tests, and also, on these walks, it's hard to check the answer. So-and-so says they have this, and you can't just run up to that perfect stranger and ask (or have it found out). You just have to rely on reputation, and your perception rests on their authoritativeness and substitutes for truthful or accurate diagnoses. Maybe this is also driven by the knowledge that so many people go through so much effort to get their complex medical issue diagnosed properly. The doctor is compared explicitly to Sherlock Holmes and I can't say I like that much either. There were so many where I just wanted to then go and fact-check.
8/10
I picked up the book because I am also personally fascinated by how we perceive the world around us, and especially I am fascinated by the idea of the secret things lying in plain sight. It's not a question of the perception of our rods and cones and how wide you are physically keeping your eyelids - there's just too much visual (and other) information to appropriately or reasonably process it all, and we pick and choose, often completely unconsciously, what to actually perceive. It's a question of focus and conscious/unconscious attenuation to different things, and Horowitz shares this interest, and takes a walk with many different people - first, by herself; then with her young toddler, with a typographer, with a doctor, with an entomologist, a sound designer, with someone who went blind in middle age, with her dog, etc.
I pretty much found them all really interesting. Horowitz devotes a chapter to each person and writes engagingly, wrapping transcribed dialogue with her perception as it changed, description, and context, which is always valuable. I really enjoyed several chapters - the one that talked about how we walk on crowded sidewalks, the city animals that live among humans, with an illustrator (and an interesting diversion into meeting the gazes of strangers - one of the first things you learn to NOT do in a city). The most engagingly written, though, was the one with Horowitz's dog, which I guess is unsurprising. The conceit is always engaging for me to read (I like dogs!), they've become integrated with humans for thousands of years and dogs can do things like actually follow our gazes, and that's Horowitz's specialty. Maybe also because the other chapters are from other human's perception - with the exception of the woman who went blind, we're all really visual based, but dogs aren't. It
My main objection to the book is just the constant evocation of various savannah hypotheses - the one where we attempt to explain why our ability to concentrate or some other psychological phenomenon comes directly from avoiding lions trying to eat us for dinner. It's not that I have any specific objection, I think, yet - just that I've watched so many eg evo-psych theorists propound hypotheses that they have not tested, and nor do they ever think they might be fallible and steeped in their individual culture. Why, for example, do all the gender norms you propose originated from paleolithic living end up perfectly fitting into 1950's American middle-class roles? A lot of those questions about how our concentration work are still inadequately answered, as far as I know. I don't think Horowitz is necessarily going too far, I'm not qualified to judge that. But it's distracting and always kicks me out. There is also one walk with a doctor who specializes in diagnosing issues visually - contrasting with doctors who make an estimate based on symptoms, examination, and then order tests. I don't mean to downplay this skill but I think there are definitely a lot which cannot be easily visually identified, a lot of misdiagnosis that has happened in the past before we developed sensitive tests, and also, on these walks, it's hard to check the answer. So-and-so says they have this, and you can't just run up to that perfect stranger and ask (or have it found out). You just have to rely on reputation, and your perception rests on their authoritativeness and substitutes for truthful or accurate diagnoses. Maybe this is also driven by the knowledge that so many people go through so much effort to get their complex medical issue diagnosed properly. The doctor is compared explicitly to Sherlock Holmes and I can't say I like that much either. There were so many where I just wanted to then go and fact-check.
8/10
