"Another barrier to seeing is the mass of stimuli surrounding us. . . . we must block out most of them in order to cope. . . . we select a few stimuli and organize these. . . . we stick with the realities we have established. We seldom try to rediscover the possible value of ignored stimuli. . . . a tunnel vision, which gives us a clear view of the rut ahead of us.
A third major sight barrier is the labelling that results from familiarity. It was Monety . . . who said that in order to see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at. When we are children we think primarily in pictures, not in words. . . . The basic analytical skills (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are impressed upon us as being more important than the appreciation of direct sensory experience, so we come to depend less and less on the part of the brain that encourages visual thinking. . . . we stop visualizing things freely, and put word labels on them instead. . . . We rule out visual exploration, and seldom discover the myriad facets of each object. As Frederick Franck so aptly expresses it, "By these labels we recognize everything, and no longer see anything. We know the labels on the bottles, but never taste the wine."
If you look at a fern and merely say, "Yes, that's a fern," you may not be seeing past the old, familiar label of its name. But if you really see a fern, you will notice triangularity, individual leaf fibres, various shades of green, its sway and dance before the wind. If you put your eyes close to the fern, so close that you cannot focus on the plant at all, but only on the objects beyond it, the fern will become a nebulous green haze which drifts across the background scene. You will have found dimentsions and hidden beauty not included in the usual definition of a fern, while learning for yourself the difference between looking and seeing."
pp. 10-11
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