As Far as The Eye Can See

            We are bombarded with information. All the time. Yet humans can only see so much. We cannot help it. For focusing on everything around us is impossible. This is what Alexandra Horowitz explains in her book On Looking. We tend to focus on the things right in front of our very noses. Not only that. We also miss out more information because of how we perceive this information. Throughout my reflection of this book, I will relate my personal experience with this concept.

              I have lived only in cities all my life. So, for the most part, my life has been grey. The sounds I would hear ranged from loud police sirens, barking dogs, and the collective chatter of pedestrians outside my apartment. Occasionally though, the chatter would die down, the dogs would get tired, and criminals would pull their heist elsewhere. It is ironic that with less things going on you can notice more things. The silence was surreal and sometimes I would bask in this silence. I could hear the water drops of the bathroom sink from my bedroom, the sound of my cat scurrying about, the humming of electricity passing through my light bulb. So many sounds that all the hustle and bustle of urban life would hide.

From Horowitz’s novel, it talks about how limited our vision is. She said, “Our sensory system has a limited capacity, both in range and in speed of processing” (Horowitz 11) I remember one time when I was reading The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. I loved that book to death. I read in as little as 5 hours. It was a really good book. I was sitting on a chair, reading on a dining table. My dining table is right besides my front door. Today me and my family where going to the mall. My whole family would walk right pass me and through the front door. They waited for me for 10 whole minutes before calling me on my cellphone, telling me to get in the car. I could only focus on the pages before me. At that moment, I could only see paper.

When we do something of interest, our mind immediately sets up the brain to focus on the object. This is called attention. Attention is the act of discarding all other visual and auditory stimuli except towards the object. Horowitz said, “Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now and gears us up to notice only that.”  This could not be truer. I was very busy on my camping trip with the Boy Scouts. We went for a swim, played dodgeball, shot some arrows, canoed, etc. My senses were so overwhelmed by all the moving and the bright colors worn by all the boy scouts. At the end of all the excitement, I went towards my hammock. When I laid down, I was finally able to see the beautiful mountain in the distance. There was very little else to see besides the mountain. I was awestruck. How did I miss something so big?

This was a very interesting read. It encourages readers to occasionally stop what they are doing and look at your surroundings. We do not even take have of the information surrounding us. Who knows what we might miss. That is my interpretational of the author’s premise. Thanks to the reading, my mind might become a little bit more scatterbrained. I really do not want to miss out.