Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 17

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 17 - A Tree at Lyman Lake

I drove diagonally up the southwest corner of New Mexico into Arizona and over mountains to arrive at the austere and picturesque reservoir called Lyman Lake, formed on the (very) Little Colorado River. My friend was waiting, a professor of science education from Flagstaff. A dirt road took us to a “primitive” campsite set on a low bluff on the lake’s southern side. After successfully fighting afternoon gusts during setting-up the campsite, we took a hike to pueblo ruins, had a swim, and then settled into dinner and conversation. I was more than a bit starved for company.

At one point our attention turned to a nearby young cottonwood tree. A question arose about the human visual field and consciousness. Could we see the tree as it is, in a purer sense, without overlaying our thoughts on it? My friend suggested the following: If you think too much, you are distracted and thus cannot really appreciate the tree as it is. We were both able to cite injunctions along these lines from various traditions, particularly the Eastern ones, in which wisdom comes about by reducing thought, a classical path to enlightenment. But today such ideas also find support from experiments in cognitive science. While experiencing a beautiful sunset, for instance, mentally labeling it a “beautiful sunset” usually decreases the intensity of the reaction. As social psychologist Matthew Lieberman puts it, “Words can suck life out of experience.” Thus it could be that one’s stream of inner dialogue can interfere with seeing.

In putting a brake to thought, however, where does one stop? You might want to dampen the stream of the inner voice, to intensify your visual experience. But might you reduce the internal dialogue to such a degree that you would not even know what you are looking at? That could be a problem.

The famous psychologist of vision, Rudolf Arnheim, was clear where he stood. According to his book, Visual Thinking, vision itself is cognitive activity. Here’s Arnheim: “I see no way of withholding the name of thinking from what goes on in perception.”

In the case of the tree, as we looked and pondered we knew that if we wanted to we could walk around it. To see and know a three-dimensional object requires that the brain interpret the two-dimensional patterns, which allows us humans to implicitly construct in our minds the other sides of the tree we cannot see. Simply seeing the tree as tree assumes much about the tree we must fabricate. This is dynamic cognition. Vision creates the world we live in by not just transferring patterns from retina to brain to mind but by interpreting, every minute, every second, all without our awareness. Vision is always solving problems. How big is the object? Indeed, what is it? Where is it? Is it ordinary or surprising? Do I need to remember something specific about it? Of course I’m not implying that these questions are asked consciously during most of our seeing. They are not asked by the inner dialogue. But they are asked and answered in the very action of seeing.

If we follow Arnheim’s reasoning, it is impossible not to overlay thoughts on the tree because just seeing the tree is a form of thinking. Perhaps vision is a stream of thought. A tree without interpretation would be patterns on the retina, smudges of color, the tree that we do not even know, the failure of perception that I feared above. Indeed, Arnheim was so bold to say: “Vision is the primary medium of thought.”

Overlaying the verbal flow of thinking on this stream of visual interpretation can potentially, of course, lessen the experience, even suck the life from it. So if you just glance at the tree, and say “tree—seen one before,” or “yet another cottonwood tree,” and thereby categorize it and in so doing box, simplify, and shut it out and move on, well, this probably does not enhance the experience of the perceiving the tree. Or you might spin off into thoughts about tonight’s dinner, or, even worse, yesterday’s dinner. That’s why often not labeling and in general denying internal speech does enhance the experience, because this tree here is complex with a unique arrangement of leaves and branches. We require some degree of inner stillness to appreciate how amazing it is without even mentally saying how amazing it is.

On the other hand, actual thoughts—either verbal or imaginative—themselves can help to enhance the experience. The tree can be used as a doorway to take you into thinking about mud cracks or blood vessels in our body, what mathematicians call fractal geometries. And the tree’s shape is related to its unique site. Here in the open air this one is growing in all directions. In a forest it would shoot more straight up into the sky, its branches corseted from competition with other trees. This tree might remind me of a memory of a past cottonwood tree and that memory improves the seeing of this one in more detail because of the positive emotion associated with the memory. The raw sensory experience itself would just be a pattern, a pure pattern with no meaning. So real seeing involves making connections and bringing meaning, processes that provide (in their best forms) a variety of ecstatic attractors that can entice one to remain with the perceptual experience, going deeper and deeper.

There are many ways to enhance the tree. Beyond mere perception, one can engage with poetry, science, images, and emotions; these can happen quietly within one’s mind. These enhancements require that we think not less but more. It’s like adding knowledge about gravity to the experience of a stream, or repeating Galileo’s observation of the moons of Jupiter; these pathways of being turn observation into a creative adventure. The tree becomes you and you enlarge so that the tree becomes part of a total cognitive system. Thinking with the one’s multiple streams of consciousness can engender new glories of this tree in its infinite detail, luxurious complexity, and unique individual presence, not elsewhere or later but here and now, in a shared universe of being.

My friend and I played with these thoughts as we pondered the tree. In fact, we have the tree to thank for these musings, which stayed with us.

Notes & References

My friend in this essay was Jeffrey Bloom, the creator and editor of this online magazine. And still an inspiring friend!

Lieberman, Matthew. I was unable to find the quote, but here is some information I gained in looking him up now. He is currently a professor in the field of social and affective neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research gets cited several thousands of times each year (Google Scholar).

Rudolf Arnheim. 1974 (University of California Press, Third Printing) Visual Thinking, p. 18. I still love this book, and it took only seconds to locate it in my library. It continues to provide me with ideas for my ongoing work originally published as a book, Metapatterns Across Space, Time, and Mind (1995, Columbia University Press). Here is another quote relevant to this essay, from Arnheim (page 32), which concludes the chapter titled Concepts Take Shape: “What we need to acknowledge is that perceptual and pictorial shapes are not only translations of thought products but the very flesh and blood of thinking itself and that an unbroken range of visual interpretation leads from the humble gestures of daily communication to the statements of great art.”

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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