From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog and The Year of the Puppy, this âelegant and entertainingâ (The Boston Globe) explanation of how humans perceive their environments âdoes more than open our eyes...opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a worldâin fact, many worldsâweâve been missingâ (USA TODAY).
Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinaryâto practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, âthe observation of trifles.â Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.
Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to seeâif only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. So turn off the phone and other electronic devices and be in the real worldâwhere strangers communicate by geometry as they walk toward one another, where sounds reveal shadows, where posture can display humility, and the underside of a leaf unveils a Lilliputian universeâwhere, indeed, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.
Emily
2023-08-09