On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes Audiobook

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 more than open our eyes...opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a world—in fact, many worlds—we’ve been missing” (USA TODAY).

Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.

Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see—if only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. 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 sounds reveal shadows, where posture can display humility, and the underside of a leaf unveils a Lilliputian universe—where, indeed, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.

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“These eleven exquisite, clever, and tenderlyrecounted small adventures remind me of something I learned back when I livedin India: the need to perceive ‘the scent behind the smell.’ Alexandra Horowitzhas attempted much the same thing with her eyes—much aided by the seeing ofothers—and has in consequence become increasingly successful in perceiving whatone might call ‘the sight behind the scene.’ Her resulting epiphanies areavailable to us all, if we take care to learn from her, in this lovely book,just how it is done.”

— Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Map That Changed the World