free as a bird.

A really interesting article. It reminds me of a hike I took with a friend recently and how I told her that I wish I could identify all the plants we passed in the forest (working on it!). It discusses how most of the U.S. lacks a basic understanding of plant science and fails to identify the flora in their surrounding environment. It offers an answer as to why this is and how we can fix it. Also, it talks about the way we see, like this:

Why do people tend to overlook the plants in their own environment? There is no simple scientific answer. First of all, most of us think that we see all of our surroundings simply by opening our eyelids and looking outward. Alas, there is much scientific evidence to reject that view. Norretranders has calculated that during visual perception, the human eye generates in excess of 10 million bits of data per second as input for visual processing, yet our brain ultimately extracts about 40 bits of data per second from that immense data stream for our conscious vision to consider—of which about 16 bits per second is ultimately fully processed. This means that our sensory bandwidth “…is far lower than the bandwidth of our sensory preceptors.” Only .0000016 of the data our eyes produce are actually considered consciously; it is assumed that the rest must somehow subliminally affect our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and this means that most of our mental life must take place subconsciously. It seems that visual consciousness is like a spotlight, not a floodlight. And if that is not shocking enough, we do not see events in real time. The computation time involved in processing the visual data we receive has been shown by experiment to take approximately .5 second, making the present a self-delusion. Perhaps the most important take-home message we have gleaned from Norretranders’ analysis is that, although large amounts of visual data are discard, “…what is presented [to our conscious attention] is precisely that which is relevant.” 

A must read by the brilliant bell hooks. 

tabla-toy:

I remember you saying to me once that when you flew over the United States for the first time, you couldn’t believe how square everything was. That stuck with me because you were right in more ways than one. Soon you will be in an airplane again, clutching a one-way ticket with pockets full of…