Rethinking Thinking

Observation

By David Jiles, Ph.D.

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Being deprived of one sense can indeed sharpen our reliance on other senses, though not their actual acuity. We learn to use sensory stimuli that we usually ignore, and sometimes such heightened attention results in original insights. Biologist Geerat Vermeij’s entire career is testimony to this fact. When Vermeiji lost his sight as a very young boy, he was forced to rely upon his remaining senses. “The information they [his other senses] conveyed now meant something,” he has written, “whereas previously I could afford to ignore it. My world was not black, and hopeless. It sparkled as it did before, but now with sounds, odors, shapes, and textures. …Indeed, it is all these sensations that together provide a vivid, if non-visual, picture of the world around me.” Encouraged by family and teachers, Vermeij became particularly enamored of seashells and decided to become a professional conchologist.

From the outset, Vermeij realized that his choice of profession required strong observational skills. “Much can be learned from books,” he has noted, “but the knowledge thus gained is inevitably filtered through someone else’s faculties. There simply is no substitute from making one’s own observations in the wild.” Vermeij replaced visual observation with tactile. “Observation by hand is particularly well suited to objects the size of most shells,” he has noted, and it often leads to insights that can’t be gained visually.

Vermeij found that seashells hold secrets that only tactile observation can reveal. A sighted person will immediately observe that tropical shells tend to have bright coloration and intricate patterns, whereas shells from cold waters are chalky in texture while their cold-water cousins are hard and smooth. Vermeij’s colleague Alfred Fischer says that Vermeij actually experiences shells differently than the rest of us: “Our eyes see mainly in two dimensions. Gary experiences form palpably in three dimensions, which provided him with a different, often advantageous, perspective. Examples such as this should warn us against relying on any single sense as a basis for observation.

Many disciplines train non-visual observation skills. Russian composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky argued that music itself, and modern music in particular, forces us to distinguish between hearing and listening in much the same way that modern art makes us look rather than simply see. “It obliges the hearer to become the listener, summons him to active relations in music.” The hearing mind, like the seeing mind, must participate actively in observing.

Actor-directors Konstantin Stanislavsky and Richard Boleslavsky argued similarly that the student of theater must, in Boleslavsky’s words, learn “to notice everything unusual and out of the ordinary in every-day life. It builds…his sensory and muscular memory…. The only thing which can stimulate inspiration in an actor is constant and keen observation every day of his life.” (4)

Even smell and taste can have important roles in observation, as is clear in the cases or perfumers, aromatherapists, wine tasters, brewmasters, and chefs. Ecologist Tom Eisner has made several dozen discoveries by sniffing out the sometimes attractive, sometimes pungent chemical communication and defense systems of insects. “I’m essentially a nose with a human being attached,” he jokes. Eisner even admits that as a child he would sniff strangers on meeting them, a habit some physicians, such as those at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, also use for diagnostic purposes. Odors are clues to medical conditions as various as stress, which increases body odor; yeast infections; diabetic ketosis, in which the breath smells like acetone; and kidney disease, in which a person’s breath may smell fishy from the buildup of ammonia-like compounds. We ignore such information at our peril.

Taste, too, can be diagnostic. Ancient physicians made a practice of tasting patients; pus and urine, which led to the discovery thousands of years ago that the urine of diabetics is sweet. Doctors nowadays verify this symptom with simple chemical tests, but bacteriologist W. E. B. Beveridge recounted in The Art of Scientific Investigation, the old way still works: “A Manchester physician, while teaching a ward class of students, took a sample of diabetic urine and dipped a finger in it to taste it. He then asked all the students to repeat the action. This they reluctantly did, making grimaces, but agreeing that it tasted sweet. ’I did this,’ said the physician with a smile, ‘to teach you the importance of observing detail. If you had watched me carefully would have noticed that I put my first finger in the urine but licked my second finger!’”

Of course, no physician today would dare put a body fluid of another individual in his or her mouth for diagnostic purposes, but taste is still sometimes used, purposefully or accidentally, in the laboratory and out in the field. One archeologist claims to be able to “date and Roman aqueduct by flavor on her tongue of its crumbling masonry — she had tasted them all.” Chemists discovered both saccharin and aspartame when they accidentally splashed these substances into their mouth or licked their fingers and realized how sweet their work really was.

The keenest observer makes use of every kind of sensory information. In fact, the greatest insights often come to individuals who are able to appreciate the sublimity of the mundane, the deeply surprising and meaningful beauty of everyday things.

How many times have you looked at the sky and wondered why it is blue? This question led the eighteenth-century physicist John Tyndall to discover that the color of the sky is caused by light scattering caused by dust and other particles. He developed some of the techniques we use today to measure air pollution and water purity.

Biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi discovered vitamin C by means of equally mundane observations: “I suppose I was led by my fascination by colors. I still like colors; they give me a childish pleasure. I started with the question, ‘Why does a banana turn brown when I hurt it?’” It turns out that plants have compounds called polyphenols that interact with oxygen to create the brown or black color — their equivalent of a scab. This observation led Szent-Györgyi to his next: “There are two categories of plants, you see — those that turn black on being damaged and those in which there is no color change…. Why no color in some damaged plants?” (5) The answer was that those plants contained vitamin C, a sugar-like compound that prevents oxygen from oxygen from oxidizing the polyphenols into brown or black protective compounds. You can actually gauge the vitamin C content of different fruits fairly accurately by noting which ones turn brown when damaged (for example, bananas) and which do not (oranges, say).

Observing, and rendering what we observe in some way, is indeed a function of the mind. We cannot focus our attention unless we know what to look at and how to look at it. As Harvard psychologist Rudolf Arnheim said in this book Visual Thinking, “The cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself.” Consider an example. One day, preparing to go jogging, one of us went to our closet for his typical name-brand white running shoes. On the closet floor he saw black dress shoes, brown shoes, sandals, pumps, slippers — everything except the running shoes. Then, just as he was about to ransack other closets, search under the beds, and crawl under the couch, the answer struck him. He was searching for something white, but the soles of his shoes were black! Instantly the shoes appeared, right where he had left them, invisible to a mind looking for something white. What he thought his shoes “looked like” influenced his ability to observe.

Observing is a form of thinking, and thinking is a form of observing. In consequence, the purpose in practicing observation is to link sensory experience and mental awareness as closely as possible. Biochemist Szent-Györgyi argued, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” (6) Observing is simply making sense of sensation. •

Observation
1. Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960's, The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974 ISBN 0-87982-007-1
2. Op. Cit. Ashton
3. von Frisch, Karl, Decoding the Language of the Bee, Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1973
4. Stanislavski, Constantin, An Actor Prepares, 1936, London: Methuen, 1988. ISBN 0413461904.
5. Interview. BBC – Science & Nature, 1965
6. Ibid.

© 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