Do you have any useful methods for seeing?

If you half close your eyes (squint) on a pixelated image, the picture becomes clearer.
So much so that the subject can be readily identified.

Now that I own a sneaky, silent and onmipresent animal, over whom I often trip, I pay close attention to what’s going on in my peripheral vision, including reflections in my many glass windows and sliders.

When I walk outside mindfully, I notice the small world of mosses, insects, new green things sprouting, and the bird life, particularly at this time of year, with the rebirth.

I heard that your peripheral vision is better at seeing low light objects so when I look at the stars I try to look at the ones in that part of my vision and ignore the stuff that’s in front of me. Quite difficult, but if I see something interesting and then focus my view on it, it just disappears. So it does work…

^^^ Very good point regarding spotting the dimmer stars and planets.

I did this with my Cub Scouts. While out on a field trip to a nature preserve we stood on a hill overlooking a prairie and a forest. I asked the scouts what do you see. The quick answers were a prairie and the forest in the distance. I again asked them what do you see. One scout said I see a Burr Oak, another said I see a hawk in the sky, another said I see a milk weed plant. I said that was better and asked what else do you see…and bit by bit they named off more plants, then leaves some got down on their hands and knees and started identifying insects and stones and ultimately they identified well over a 100 items.

@Cruiser – Reminds me of a watercolor class I took in college. One of the first classes was a field trip up to the top of a hill in western MA. We stood there and just discussed color. “What color are those hills?” Most people answered “green”, because they knew they were looking at tree-covered hills. The guy was furious, and kept telling us to look. Finally, it clicked – the tree-covered hills were grayish blue, with the furthest hills being the most gray and the closest ones being somewhat green.

@hominid I did a similar thing with my boys one night we were laying on a raft in our pool and I asked them to be very quiet and then tell me what they are hear. Cars and air conditioners were the obvious but after being quiet it was very cool to realize just how many different sounds we were able to identify that normally do not register amongst the drone of the cars and A/C units but they are there.

This may be a different tack, but to keep my focus in the present at times and not always in my head, I will look out for a particular color and note all the instances of that. Let’s say I’m looking for red, I will seek out all red objects while I am driving. It clears out some of the buzzbrain for a short time.

^ I like that. I’ll give this a try during lunch.

I find it really helpful if I remember to do it. A friend taught me it.

I watched my autistic son draw. He is fast and it is amazing and enlightening to watch. He taught me more about drawing than my high school art teachers and they were really good. Being able to look through his eyes while he drew was absolutely amazing.

My vision is far from perfect, so this question is easy to answer for me: When I want to see something differently, I simply take off my glasses. It’s a whole new world. The best part is, of course, ending the exercise. When I put my glasses back on, everything becomes clear-cut and I notice minute details. I love doing this when looking at the night sky, never fails to make me marvel.

Drawing only the empty space around an object allows the subject to magically materialize. Great painting/drawing exercise.

I like to cross my eyes and twist my head back and forth to make patterns with the images. Hm, describing it just made me realize this must look very odd to other people.