Notice, Then Name: Where the Habit of Looking Closely Came From

A neighbour who knows her trees once asked me, over the fence, whether the leaves on the gum outside my kitchen window hang straight down or stick out sideways. I had looked at that tree every morning for years. I couldn't tell her. I went inside, stood at the sink, and found that I had been carrying around a label ("tree") instead of a picture. The practice I want to describe is that small embarrassment turned into a habit. Look at one ordinary thing for a minute, then put into words three details you had not seen before. It works because a word has to point at something particular, and finding that particular thing makes you look again.

What is the "notice, then name" practice?

It has two steps, and the order matters.

First you notice. You choose one thing, such as a tree through the window, a mug on the desk or the back of your own hand, and you look at it without trying to do anything clever. You are not judging it or trying to feel anything about it.

Then you name. You say or write three details you had not seen before, in plain words. "The leaves hang almost straight down" counts. So does "the bark comes away in long strips near the bottom, and it's paler underneath than on top." A good detail is one that someone else could walk up to the tree and check.

That is the whole exercise. It needs no equipment, and it costs nothing but a minute.

How to try it for one minute

Set a timer for one minute. Choose the thing before you start, so the first ten seconds aren't spent deciding.

1. Look quietly for about twenty seconds. Let your eyes move around the thing, and don't speak yet.
2. Ask where you haven't looked. Check the edges, the parts underneath or behind, the place where one part meets another, and the shape of the gaps between things.
3. Name three details. Say them aloud or jot them in a notebook. If you catch yourself writing "green" or "big", ask what kind of green or big compared with what.
4. Stop when the timer stops. A short session you finish is worth more than a long one you dread.

When I first did this, my three details about the gum were: the leaves hang down, there is a fork in the trunk about head height, and one low branch has a crook in it like an elbow. None of that is remarkable. But I had walked past all of it for years without seeing it.

Why does putting words to what you see sharpen attention?

There are a few reasons, and I'll start with the one that surprised me.

We tend to assume that looking is passive: if our eyes are open and pointed at something, we are seeing it. In fact only a small patch at the centre of our vision is sharp, and the eyes jump around to build up a picture. The brain fills in the rest from what it expects. Once we have a label such as "tree", "mug" or "kettle", the label does much of the filling-in, and we stop collecting evidence. The label stands in for the looking.

Naming a detail gets round this. To say "the leaves hang down", you first have to find out which way the leaves hang. A word is a small claim that can be wrong, and the possibility of being wrong sends you back to the thing to check. The words are only the visible end of the effort. What does the work is the looking that has to happen before you can say anything.

There is a second benefit. A detail that has words attached is easier to hold on to. I'll remember "elbow-shaped branch" next week, where I wouldn't remember an unlabelled impression of one. I can't point you to a study that measures how much this helps, so I'll say only that it matches my own experience.

A common worry is that naming kills wonder, that once you've pinned a thing down with words you stop looking at it. I think this happens when the name is a conclusion. "Gum tree" is a conclusion, and it closes the door. "Bark in long strips, grey above and paler below" is a record of looking, and it leaves the door open for the next detail.

Where did this habit of looking come from?

I should say plainly that no one person invented it. Historians of ideas are usually wary of tidy origin stories, and I am too. What I can do is point to a few well-documented moments where the habit shows up clearly, written down by people who were trying to solve a real problem.

A fish on a tray

The clearest is a story told by Samuel Scudder, an American naturalist, in an essay published in 1874. He was looking back on his time as a young student of the Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. As Scudder tells it, Agassiz handed him a preserved fish and asked him to look at it, with the promise that he'd be asked later what he had seen. Scudder thought he had seen everything within minutes. He had not. Agassiz, returning, sent him back to look again.

The turning point in Scudder's account is that he began to draw the fish, and drawing showed him features he had missed. Among other things, he realised that parts of the fish came in matching pairs. Agassiz's remark, in Scudder's telling, was that a pencil is one of the best of eyes.

Because this is one man's memory written down years after the events, the details have probably been smoothed by time. The lesson is hard to argue with, though. Putting something into marks or words, whether a drawing or a sentence, forces you to ask what is actually there.

Counting stamens

The second moment comes from the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. The problem he faced was practical and a bit chaotic: plants were known by long, inconsistent descriptive names, and two writers might not be talking about the same plant. His plant classification leaned heavily on small parts of the flower, especially counting the stamens and pistils. To use his system you could not just glance at a plant. You had to look closely and count.

In Species Plantarum (1753) he also used a short two-part name for each plant consistently, which became the basis of the scientific naming we still use. He didn't invent two-word names from nothing, because earlier writers had used them here and there. His contribution was consistency. A name had to point to one thing that anyone else could find, and to be sure of the name you had to look hard first.

A walker's notebooks

The third is Henry David Thoreau, the American writer, who kept journals of what he noticed around his home town of Concord. In his later years he recorded dates for when plants leafed and flowered. His notes were detailed enough that modern researchers have since consulted them. Nobody asked him to be exact. The habit of writing down what he saw seems to have trained him to see more of it.

From science to the drawing room

This way of looking was not confined to scientists. The English writer John Ruskin, in his 1857 book The Elements of Drawing, said in effect that he wanted his readers to learn to look at nature, not necessarily to become artists. Drawing was his tool for seeing. It is the same lesson Scudder took from the fish, aimed at an ordinary reader.

So the idea travelled from the natural historian's tray and the botanist's lens into notebooks and art lessons, picking up a new purpose at each stop. What we have in "notice, then name" is a very small, domestic version of a habit that naturalists treated as a discipline.

What should I do when my mind wanders?

It will wander. Mine did within about fifteen seconds the first time, on to what to cook for dinner and whether I'd answered an email.

The wandering isn't a failure. Noticing that you've wandered and coming back to the tree is the practice itself, much as a bicep curl is the lifting and putting down of the weight. If you are gentle about it, each return becomes a little easier. If you scold yourself, the minute becomes something to dread, and then you'll skip it.

A few small things that helped me:

• Start with one minute, no more. Add time only when it feels easy.
• Pick the same thing for a few days. The tree gave me a fresh detail every morning, because there is always more there than three details' worth.
• Write or sketch if words won't come. Scudder's pencil is allowed. A bad drawing still sends you back to the thing.
• Let "I don't know" count. "I can't tell whether the leaves are shiny or dull" is a good observation, and an honest one.

Can this help me learn something hard?

I think so, with a caution. The caution is that I don't know how far the skill carries over from trees to other subjects. All I can offer is what happened for me.

When I read a hard paragraph, I now try a version of the same thing. After one slow read, I ask for three details I hadn't noticed: a word the author uses oddly, a place where the argument turns, something the paragraph assumes without saying so. With a diagram or a worked sum, I look for the step I skimmed past. It's the fish again, in a different tray.

Hard subjects tend to be hard because we have labelled them as "too difficult" before looking at them properly. Looking at one small piece, naming what is actually there, and asking where I haven't looked yet has made some of them feel a little less like fog.

I'm still learning how well this works on difficult material, and some days it doesn't. Thank you for reading this far. I'd be glad to hear which ordinary thing you picked.

A question to carry to the window

I've been wondering about something since the tree. If a minute of looking turned up three details I'd missed in a thing I see every day, how many other familiar things around me am I seeing only as labels? And what would the first person who ever described a plant carefully, before anyone had written it down, have noticed that we've long since stopped seeing?

I don't have an answer. I do have a tree outside the window, and a minute to spare.