Watching Things Intently
Newborn sight and focusing on the irregular
Today, we will talk about exercising our ability to look at things, see things (not in the woo-ish sense though), and stare at things for a long time.
Pondering the orb
First of all, it’s essential to develop the skill of looking at objects for a long time with no stray thoughts. It’s basically a form of meditation practiced with your eyes open and your gaze fixed on a single item.
Pick something, anything, to look at. Sit comfortably, and allow your gaze to fall upon that item. Let your eyes relax and allow your gaze to be a bit unfocused as you stare at it. Observe the object in as much detail as you can. And now, try not to think about anything else for the next minute or so. Don’t think about your to-do list, what you had for dinner, or what you have to work on. Just focus on the object in front of you and on the act of looking at it.
After a while, the object will start to exhibit weird properties: it may start to change shape or size, jiggle, or even disappear. This is all your vision engine glitching from unfamiliar input. It is perfectly normal.
You can do this exercise for as long as you want, but I recommend starting with just a minute or two. Once you get comfortable with it, you can increase the amount of time you spend staring at your chosen object.
The benefits of this exercise are twofold. First, it helps to train your attention span and improve your focus. Second, it allows you to really see the object in front of you and to get a better understanding of how your visual parsing machinery works.
Decomposing vision
The next skill in line is to forget what elements of the scene you are looking at. If you see a building, for instance, your mind implicitly maps everything to a concept: the building itself, its walls, windows, the material all these are made of, etc. Even if you make yourself “forget” those properties, most of the lower-level stuff still gets to you: shapes, colors, sizes. Our brain does this constantly without us usually noticing. This image from the previous post shows how that “semantic segmentation” works.
What we want is to suppress as much of that semantic markup language as possible. See, it’s more or less akin to the idea of internal monologue, happening all the time without us being aware of it and having its set of tokens that acts as a language.
This technique is more difficult than simply staring at an item and, probably, cannot be exercised to its fullest extent (which would mean us seeing splashes of color with no sense of depth or shape whatsoever). Still, we can try to achieve at least some of it and see how cool it might be to see the world through the eyes of a newborn. The idea here is to push your perception to be closer to that of a newborn. Babies don’t have a library of visual patterns when they are born, and that’s what we want to emulate.
One (and so far, the only) method I know of is to extend the staring technique from the previous section. There, we have pondered a specific item. Here, we will ponder our entire visual field.
For the first few times, it’s better to find a space with little movement happening. A quiet room with closed windows (so that the wind couldn’t sway the curtains) would suit perfectly. Sit comfortably… and all that. Look at the space in front of you, taking all of it into your attention scope. Now just continue to sustain that state of occupied attention and wait. The glitches not unlike you’ve had with one item will show up here, too. Now, the instructions will become fuzzier, somewhat poetic even.
Try to ride the wave of these glitches. Catch and use them to shift your perception so that you lose the sense of depth or the sense of how colors are different from each other. It can only be achieved with practice, however. Probably you will come up with a nice list of dos and don’ts to get to this state of mind. Right now I cannot make it more legible than this so, if you come up with a better description, please tell me.
Advanced targets
Finally, we’ve come to a point where our staring skills are mastered to some degree, and we are eager to apply them to decompose some complex, interesting objects. What to look at with our new magical eyes? Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of things that will be a joy to experiment with:
Shadows, especially moving ones;
Trees, when you focus on the space in-between the leaves;
Animals, mostly when they play;
Yourself, looking in the mirror;
Whatever else you come up with — please share your ideas in comments!
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