Rethinking Thinking

Observation

By David Jiles, Ph.D.

All knowledge begins in observation. We must be able to perceive the world accurately to be able to discern patterns of action, abstract their principles, make analogies between properties of things, create models of behaviors, and innovate differently.

The difference between passively looking and actively observing continues to yield surprises in the hands of modern artists. The objects that American master Jasper Johns paints — everyday things such as flashlights, light bulbs, and American flags — are chosen precisely because it is so hard to see them. “What interested me was that a certain point I realized that certain things that were around me were things that I did not look at, but recognized; and recognized without looking at. So you recognize a flag is a flag. This aspect of things interested me and I began to work with it, to see how I could look at things that I was accustomed to looking at, but not seeing.” (1)

Johns’s American flag series consists of various ghost-like apparitions and highly textured surfaces. By reiterating and altering an object we know so well, he forces us to look again, to think about what we see.

Observing is almost entirely an acquired skill. It is true that certain individuals are born with an aptitude for concentrated attention, and for the eye-and-hand co-ordination involved in the act or recording what is observed. But in most cases the eye (and other organs of sensation) have to be trained, both in observation (direct perception) and in notation. Such training can take the patience of a yogi.

The patience to look and look again is therefore a trait that characterizes great artists. Pablo Picasso, renown for his artistic abstractions, first learned as a young boy to draw realistically what he observed meticulously. “I recall my father saying to me, ‘I am quite willing for you to become a painter, but first you must not begin to paint until you are able to draw well, and that is very difficult.’ Then he gave me a pigeon’s foot to practice on. He came around later to look at my work and criticize it.” His father, an art teacher who specialized in drawing pigeons, made his son draw the foot over and over.

At last the day came,” Picasso continued, “when he gave me permission to go ahead and draw whatever I liked. …By the time I was fifteen I could do faces and figures and very large compositions — often without models — because, simply by practicing on pigeons’ feet, I had learned how to capture the mystery of lines, even of nudes.” (2) Having learned to observe one thing, he had learned the keys to observing and describing everything.

Artists past and present understand that manual facility is inextricably bound to observational prowess — and vice versa. In fact, many believe that what the eye cannot see, the hand cannot draw.

Writing also requires acute observational skills. Novelist W. Somerset Maugham believed similarly that “it is essential for the writer unceasingly to study men,” and he meant not only their physical appearance but their conversation and their behavior. “You must be ready to listen for hours to the retailing of second-hand information in order at last to catch the hint or casual remark that betrays.”

The importance of such observational powers in a writer should not surprise us. The development of a “true-seeming” plot depends upon a wide knowledge of how others respond to words, gestures, and deeds. The stimulation of sensation in the reader also depends upon an awareness of sensation in oneself.

Observation is equally the bedrock of the sciences. Many scientists believe that the secret to it lies in time and patience. Nobelist Karl von Frisch, who decoded the dance language of bees, wrote that his ability to observe came from simply lying for hours between the cliffs, motionless, watching living things. “I could see on between the slimy green stones just below the surface of the water. I discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all,” he said. (3) Other scientists, such as geologist Nathaniel Schaler, at Harvard, were given exercises, much as Picasso was, that forced them to look at a specimen over and over until non-obvious facts, for example, that in some fish the scale pattern differs on the two sides, became obvious.

However, simply looking, even patiently, is not sufficient. Part of seeing is knowing what to look at or for. Thus, the real skill in hunting for fossils, according to paleontologist Elwyn Simons, is prompt and penetrating visual discrimination: “It’s seeing order in a random background. … In the Egyptian desert where we hunt fossils, the desert surface is all covered with stones of all sorts and colours that have survived from wind erosion. It’s called desert pavement or serir in Arabic …and if there’s a bone with a tooth in it in that background it’s not easy to see that in the pattern. I guess it’s kind of comparable to some people who, if they’re given a book in which some word occurs only once, can flip through and find it.”

But observation, scientific and otherwise, goes well beyond the visual. Most people learn to distinguish by sound at least fifty-seven different types of musical instruments and can identify all of their friends merely by their voice on the telephone. Professional musicians can even identify the “voices” of different examples of the same instrument. People who are deprived of sight often do better. The eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding had a sightless half-brother named John who, as a magistrate in London, was said to be able to identify more than three thousand criminals by their voices alone.

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© David Jiles, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

About the Author | More by David Jiles
David Jiles, Ph.D. latest book is Creativity and the Secret Language of the Mind (LuLu Press, 2007). In an effort to re-think thinking, he has examined the best creative thinkers e.g. Einstein, Hemingway, Picasso, Tesla, Beethoven and countless others to find common secrets towards creative thinking.

03/19/08