On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes Audiobook (Free)

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog, this “elegant and entertaining” (The Boston Globe) explanation of how humans perceive their environments “does a lot more than open up our eyes…opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a world-in fact, many worlds-we’ve been lacking” (USA TODAY).

Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle from the ordinary-to practice, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series about On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes of eleven strolls the author will take, mainly in her Manhattan community, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of topics, including an metropolitan sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a puppy to see the world because they perceive it. What they observe, how they view it, and why most of us never see the same issues reveal the startling power of human attention as well as the cognitive areas of what it means to be a specialist observer.

Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see-if only we would really look. Trained being a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of exciting detail, all explained with her generous laughter and self-deprecating build. So turn off the phone and other electronic devices and be in the real world-where strangers communicate by geometry as they walk toward one another, where noises reveal shadows, where position can display humility, and the underside of the leaf unveils a Lilliputian universe-where, certainly, a couple of worlds within worlds within worlds.