On seeing
On seeing I had always wanted to be a scientist. I remember the primary school days, before the textbook of science underwent fission into a bagful of subjects. There was an introductory chapter: the scientific method. Going through it, "Keen observation" was a phrase that was imprinted on my mind. Now, with the experience of a few years in my practice of scientific method, I can definitely vouch for what was written in that book. Keen observation is the base on which hypotheses are built and also the crux of experimentation using which hypotheses are tested. As someone who wants to do their job well, keen observation is obviously something I would like to work on. As vision-predominant animals, more than quarter of whose brain is dedicated to processing visual information, keen observation to us is mostly seeing what is there to be seen. That, unfortunately, is way more challenging than it sounds. What is challenging about it!? We do see things unless we conscious...