Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Lost dogs

These kinds of stories always fascinate me.  A dog is lost, 120 km from home, and eventually reappears in its home town, having apparently forded a major river and a mountain range to get there.  Everyone has heard accounts like this before, and they're immortalized in literature.  One of the best known tales, The Incredible Journey is a huge favourite with children, who seem to resonate strongly to accounts of critters surmounting incredible odds to find their way home.  Perhaps such stories speak to the deep human fear of losing home.  It's right up there as one of the archetypal forms of human suffering.  Just ask Ulysses.

But here's what's even more interesting to me.  If you read the story closely, you notice that the dog found its way over vast and difficult terrain back to its hometown, but then showed up at someone else's house in Ely, Nevada, the town where its owner lived.  Ely is not that big. The dog, according to the report, was not injured.  So why couldn't he find his way to his own house?  Is it possible that dogs sometimes get just as lost in the built environment as we do?

I've always wanted to find some way to study this problem.  Perhaps now with gadgets such as this, I'll be able to (though anyone who outfits their pooch with one of these things is not very likely to let it get lost in the first place).

The thing about lost dogs is that they don't often look lost to me.  They look as though they know exactly where they're going.  Perhaps we've lost them, but they know exactly where they are!

Epiphanies

It was a bit less than two years ago that I found myself trudging down a narrow road beside the sea in Nova Scotia, with a thought trapped inside my head that was so large that I found it almost impossible to continue walking until I had somehow found a way to get it out into words.  Some part of me thought it might be important while another part feared it might be one of those strange mystical moments that makes perfect sense at the time, but later, in the sober light of morning, makes no sense at all and even seems a little silly.

I stopped by the side of the road and dug out my wallet to look for a scrap of paper to write down my idea.  My dog looked up with a half-cocked look of inquisition.  Here's what I wrote:

"Much of modern life's invention is designed to free our attention from the minutiae of existence. But what masquerades as liberation robs us of the exquisite particularity of life, in the service of a supposedly greater agenda."

I still remember the moment when I got home, soaking wet from rain and sea spray, having raced along a gravel beach short cut to get back to the house to etch the words into print before they faded away.  Those words seemed like a kind of turning point for me.  All of the months of isolation from big city life,all of the lonely walks along the shore, the silent mornings of meditation spent trying to understand how I had come to be and where I wanted to go next seemed to boil down to these few words.

I read them aloud to my dog.  I listened to each phrase, testing it for worth.  It all felt true.  One of the main constraints on how we think and act has to do with the attentional bottleneck that forces us to plod through life with one event after another vying for it's intimate moment with our consciousness.  Moment by moment, one thing wins out and captures our attention.  All else falls away and remains unnoticed.  The modern built environment, with its roadways brimming with signs, the carefully carpentered corners of office corridors, and the well-marked trails through urban parks collectively conspire to influence where, how and when we pay attention to things.  All of this is supposed to make life tractable, even easy for us.  Our minds are steered from one place, one goal, one object to another. 

How different we are when lost in a dense thicket of woods or wandering aimlessly along a beachy trail beside the ocean.  With no signs, no human designs, no engineered markers, there's a shift in how we see things which is at first subtle and then can become such a loud roar that it can almost bring one to one's knees, as it did to me that day.  Unseen worlds open up to our awareness.   We think and feel differently and, allowed to unfold the full extent of consciousness on our surroundings, we even become healthier.  Literally, our physiology changes.

I've spent much of today with a sharp student trying to figure out how we can understand some of this in the laboratory.  Like a Heisenberg phenomenon, it may be impossible to do this.  It may be that what we want to understand will shatter in our hands when we reach out to grab it. 

But maybe not.

The Internet ate my brain

Unlike some of the people I know who share my intense concern about the future of our planet, I'm not particularly opposed to technology.  In fact, I've been known to raise the ire of an ecologist or two with my suggestion that we can actually use technology to understand why it is that contact with nature is so important to our health, well-being, and sanity.  I think we can.  In fact, I will be so bold as to say that in my laboratory, I think we have all the tools and brainpower we need to arrive at some preliminary answers to that question in the next few years.

In spite of my being soft on screens, microprocessors, and nice wide bandwidths of bits being pumped into my house and office at screaming speeds, I can't help sometimes thinking about the impact on my life, especially my working life, of having a big hose filled with information that is, literally, never out of my hand's reach at any time of the day or night.  Most of the time, I think this is a positive impact.  Because I know that any lapse in memory can be quickly patched up by a Google search, I can relax about what's in the knowledge bank and worry more about making the connections between things that I think constitute the real power of intelligence (on the other hand, I sometimes worry, especially late at night, that my mind is now IN the Internet or at least exists in some kind of bio-silicon hybrid form).

A bigger concern for me, though, is what's happening right now as I write these words.  I'm also, from time to time, peering over at another screen which displays my email.  Occasionally, I feel a small buzz at my hip which is a vibrating alert on my phone indicating that one or more of my children is reporting in on their whereabouts.  When I'm working on something dull, or something difficult, or one of those tasks for which I seem to have a daily threshold (I can only grade five papers per day -- after that my judgement wanders), I take frequent breaks to look around at other items on my screens.  My email program is set to harvest new messages at 20 minute intervals.  I can sometimes tell whether I'm utterly absorbed in a task when the full 20 minutes elapses and is not co-opted by a manual send/receive command shooting out of my finger.

In a way that never used to be true, my attention is distributed.  Though I can remember being so absorbed in a problem, a piece of computer programming, or a book to such an extent that I would look up and notice that it was 4 am and I hadn't eaten supper, I can now no longer remember the last time this happened.  Now there are just too many different inputs vying for my attention and it has become my normal mode of existence to shuffle my mind around from one thing to another on a fairly regular and frequent basis.  Some might say that I've evolved, but I'm pretty sure I've lost something as well.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be an examiner on a dissertation that included a clever set of studies on something called the "attentional bottleneck."  It can be very complicated, but the basic idea is that human attention is narrowly focused in a way that allows us to only actually attend to a small amount of information at one time.  The attentional bottleneck is why it is not a good idea to talk on a cellphone while driving, for example.  I remember commenting to the student that what I found most remarkable about this processing bottleneck was that everything we know about how brains work suggest that they're massive parallel processors -- they can do lots of things at the same time.  Given this, it seems strange that there is this fundamental limit on how much of these wondrous goings-on we can pay attention to -- very little it seems. 

Why does that bottleneck exist and what does it mean to us that we live in a rich informational environment that provides us with constant encouragement to try to widen it?  I think that without the bottleneck, we'd have an entirely different way of experiencing the world.  For one thing, it would be more difficult for us to figure out the temporal order in which things happened to us, so hard to put together the story of our lives. 

I wonder -- is our understanding of time worse now than before we allowed ourselves to be immersed in data soup?

Googles

If this invention comes to fruition and doesn't require us to carry around a computer the size of a refrigerator, it brings to mind lots of interesting ways of embedding added content into our wanderings through city and country.  Not only would we have to worry less about losing our keys, but we could also call up a large database of information related to everything that we might see.  Theoretically, we'd never be lost.

I've had this argument with my students about GPS and I'm not always sure I know where I stand.  Driving or walking with a GPS on hand more or less ensures that we don't get lost (though we might sometimes crash into things).  Surrendering ourselves to the instrument means that we can free our minds to wander, using a spatial crutch.  But when we detach the things that we see from the greater context in which we find them (whether that means the place where they reside or whether it means something else), then it encourages a kind of fractured, piecemeal understanding of the world, which is a part of what has gotten us into trouble in the first place.