the bennymay story: chapter 7

Analysis of the Analyst’s Analytics

Standing on an airstrip, looking at the dirt. That will sound boring to some people—including the sort of people who describe the sky as blue, and the ground as brown. When children begin drawing, they show lines, and strokes, curves, patches, scratches, and all sorts of interesting details. After a few years of adults telling them to colour in between the lines, they stop noticing that the light of the sunset spills over the horizon, and that God doesn’t always colour in between the lines. After a few years of adults telling the child the sky is blue, eventually the child starts to see the sky as blue. But it’s not blue.

Right now I don’t mean to introduce particle and wave properties of light, diffraction, refraction, nor talk about the nonsensical nature of attributing colours to invisible substances, nor quarks, spin, nor anything technical, really—as interesting as such topics are. I’m merely saying, look!

Concrete is grey. Dirt is brown. Sky is blue. If that is what you see, it’s no wonder why I keep picking up coins off the sidewalk, and I see aircraft miles away, and others miss them. Next time you can see the sky, pick a chunk of it, and look at that chunk. In that chunk you selected, is one side darker than the other? Is there more red, or yellow, or grey, or fuzz on one side than there is in the other? Don’t even wait to look outside. Look at an area of the surface of the desk, and check for variations. You will not see only what is there. In this unrepeatable instant, light is hitting that surface in a certain way. Light is bouncing off you in a way that it will not in another five minutes (if not from the Earth’s rotation, then because in that period you will shift posture and position).

My school teachers noted that my sister and I knew colours and their names before most kids. My mother, the gregarious artist (being quite the opposite of my scientific father), taught me to attend to hues, shades, tones, contrasts, colours, variations, mixes, beauty. Nature is wonderful. She constantly displays vast valley-fulls of information to us—in every seascape, and every fingerprint. The information is vast. There is so much information, most of us choose to ignore it, or to over-simplify it so absurdly—such as ‘the sky is blue’—that by thinking we captured and conquered it so easily, we trick ourselves into being forever lazy and inattentive. We find a parallel in music where some ignorant person roughly categorises music as either chilled-out-slow, or electronica-fast, classical (as his girlfriend admires), old-school (as his parents enjoy), or bluesy / folky. What would you call someone so ignorant about music that he or she sorts it into such broad genres? bennymay?

So, in the way I whitewash what I hear, some others whitewash what they see, and feel. When training in kung fu, I push one arm straight toward my opponent’s chest and he blocks it. He pushes his free hand toward my neck and I block it. There is an instant where I begin to notice a change: he is moving, and probably attacking. At the very bottom of my peripheral vision I can see something happening. In the pressure between the floor and my heel I feel some changes. In the noises behind me I notice something. In the skin, and the pressure on my bones and flesh in my arms I feel something.

My brain is taking in thousands of pieces of information, and very quickly. The expert musician, the expert pilot, the expert fighter may all have brains that can process no more information per second than you or me, but they are selecting the important pieces. The fighter feels the direction and acceleration of his opponent’s movement, and can predict, very accurately, where the opponent will soon be. With ten thousand hours of practice, the brain of the expert chess player sends signals of feelings, based on thousands of patterns of locations of chess pieces. Likewise, the expert fighter knows thousands of patterns of movements, and instead of controlling his finger, or his arm, the expert manages huge chunks of data, and strategies, and responses, and has so automated all the simple techniques and motor skills, they take nearly no working memory, and nearly no time to execute.

The expert pilot has put in the long, long, long hours attending to much information. The novice looks around from instrument to instrument, plucking out tiny details and pieces of information, and then thinks about them. The expert drinks in all the information, but swallows only the important items. A single indicator winks, and though a novice (if he saw it) would register that wink as a tiny event, the expert immediately sheds his perception of a safe environment, and adopts a perception of an unsafe pattern and effectively acknowledges he now exists in a different situation, wherein different behaviour is required and he will behave accordingly.

So, how do you see a dirty nail in dirt? Spend time looking at small areas (squares, or circles, or chunks, or patches) of dirt. Learn what dirt looks like in small chunks. Learn what two visual chunks look like together. Learn to look at a few chunks. That will take many, many hours to do well. The shadows and the colours, the grains and the structures will begin to show themselves to you. Perhaps you have done this, and perhaps you know. Many false targets will introduce themselves to you. Obvious false targets, such as a green blade of wheat piercing the soil’s surface, will tell you they are not worth looking at, and will try to get you to miss real targets next to them. Less obvious targets, such as a rusty red coloured twig will pull your attention in, and tell you they are nails. And the general noise of the hundreds of shades and tones and colours in the dust will try to overload your senses so you’ll never find what you seek. On a basic level, this sort of information processing is as true for music, kung fu, flying, and many other tasks. The main difference is the rules and structures that make it more complex.

Once you know the rules, the patterns, the structures, and you gain familiarity in applying them, you back down to information processing again. Whether your task is sensing which way your opponent is moving, or how the airmass has nudged your aircraft offtrack, so you can execute your best attack as soon as possible, the primary part of your job is quickly sensing what is occurring. From there, you make your decision—one which you studied and prepared in advance; so you actually decided hours, days, or years previously what you would do in such a situation. Or, at the very least, you narrowed down your options long ago. And then you execute your action, which you have practiced—at least in part—thousands of times.

Small aside. Here is something else that makes me smile. If you’re like most humans, you can turn your body to focus your attention on something. Likewise, you can attend by moving your neck, or just your eyes. In a similar way, after seeing something, you can further focus your attention on some part of the picture you saw. (If you’re super interested ask me for me.) This is similar to the echoic memory (memory like an echo) with your hearing. You’re at a party, listening to a friend. You think you heard something. You think harder (as it were) as to what you just heard. You listen to your memory play you back a recording of the past few seconds. Sure enough, you had heard someone call your name, but you hadn’t really noticed it (consciously) the first time. Well, in a similar way, you can do that with what you see. I think that’s awesome.

Looking and seeing blue is not looking. Looking, and seeing a rich pattern—one of thousands of distinct non-verbal memories—is something quite different. You can train yourself to look, and to attend. Such training takes time. I found, when I was living in Europe in 1998, that it is good to do it in various environments and with different types of thinking and investigation. I did it in art galleries with exquisite paintings. I did it in my imagination and transferring that to oil paintings. I did it in the garden, and translating visible objects into oil paintings. I did that while cycling. I did it in kung fu training. I did it in a busy workplace, around sharp knives, hot stoves and ovens, and high demands on time.

Sometime the impossibly large amounts of information worry us. Sometimes they stress and disquiet us. Most information is just noise (okay, sorry, I did begin introducing technical terms). So much flashes across the internet, the TV, the news, the winds that pulls at the hairs on our arms, the sounds of the street with its toy cars and chattering puppets, the buzz from the computer, the millions of letters in all those pages on the shelves, and all of it jumps into our senses.

Noise, images, smells, feelings can bombard us; can overwhelm us. Or, we can choose what we will select. That is, we can choose to be smart about how we accept information and, rather than stumbling into the incapacitating waterfall, we can decide how and what we will select from the buffet, and have peace. So-called ‘stress’ is so often the feeling of that waterfall, where the victim is not prioritising and choosing from the buffet of information.

After many months of observing my observing and thinking about thinking, I was ready to recommence flying training.

© Benjamin May 2009

Go to chapter 8.