Author: James Vornov

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand

Perfect Practice

Creative pursuit, whether art or science, is a method for improving the brain. If “Deciding Better” means developing more accurate models of reality to guide choices, then the getting better must involve more than just acquisition and reflection.

The best practice for an activity is the activity itself. You don’t expect to become a better tennis player by playing the tuba. You become better at tennis either by practicing the game or breaking the skills and capacities of the game into components and improving each. There’s then practice to put the components back together into an improved tennis game.

Simply playing the game over and over will get you only so far. At some point there’s more to be gained by breaking down the activity into component parts and spending focused time on each one. Jogging is nothing like tennis, but ithelps a tennis player by building endurance for long games. Jogging avoids the risk of injury from fatigue that would come from playing long sessions of the game over and over.

The Practice of Art

If you’re a photographer, you have probably heard the advice that you should always carry a camera. Usually the reason given is that without a camera, you can’t do what a photographer does, thus you can’t be a photographer. I’ve heard similar directives to always carry a pen and a notebook in order to be a writer.

The advice is fair enough. But I believe it’s backwards. Rather than bringing a camera in order to be a photographer, you first must to decide to be a photographer and therefore need a camera. Always going out with a camera easily becomes just a habit. After all, I have nice cell phone camera capable of taking higher quality images than my first DSLR of a decade ago. I pull up the photo roll on the phone and mostly see images of food I’ve prepared or been served in restaurants plus snapshots of friends and family. I don’t see photographs

I take out my notebook and create hastily scribbled thoughts and half formed concepts. That’s not the art of writing and it’s not even practicing.

I wasn’t practicing to be a photographer when I captured images of my bread last week. I wasn’t practicing to be a writer when I wrote, “Scientists ask why. Science is a long term project to understand a problem or phenomenon.” in my notebook last week. I was cooking, eating, socializing and reflecting. Capturing ideas is not practicing. I was more the tennis player with a tuba.

The Nature of Practice

What did Winogrand mean when he said that he took photographs in order to find out what something will look like photographed?

I believe he was making the simple point that his intention was to be a photographer and learn what reality looked like reduced to a photographic print. And he learned through his career. Since he shared the images with us, we can look at them and also learn what the world looks like in a photograph. We too can learn how the world that Gary Winogrand saw looks in a photograph by looking at his work.

If he meant that he was after some simple transformation of reality into photograph, his photos would be of little interest to anyone, to Winogrand himself or to me. I believe that he meant to say that he took photographs to help him perceive the world in a way he couldn’t just by looking. Image capture is nothing more than framing and isolating a particular angle of view. You and I know there are tons of technical details, but they are all secondary to where you stand and where you point the camera. The first step is seeing and the second step is finding out what the world looks like in a photograph.

Can you learn to see without taking photographs or creating some kind of record, visual or written? Of course you can, but the feedback of creating is an enormous aid to learning. Without a camera the image never exists independently to see if you were right. It’s too easy to fool yourself into thinking you have the clear insight without the evidence of the art.

To learn to see as a photographer requires a decision to practice seeing. You have to put on the tennis shoes, choose the tennis racket and get to the court. It’s deciding to decide to learn what the world looks like in a photograph.

Perfect Practice

Vincent Versace, the photographer and teacher quoted Vince Lombardi in his Welcome to Oz : “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. You first have to practice at practicing.”"

We’ve learned from cognitive neuroscience that we can only do one thing at a time with our brains. Intention and planning rule the sensory and motor systems and squeezes everything else out. I recognize this as choosing to be present and active in the task. I’m not going to be photographing or writing while driving to the mall or surfing the web. Seeing with intention is a focused brain activity. I must choose to look..

More than this, to be a photographer, you have to choose to see what things might look like in a photograph. In addition to choosing to see, you have to choose the camera and you have to choose what to see. The two go together. If I choose to see African wildlife since I did after all book a safari and travel to Kenya, then I’ll need some quality telephoto lenses. If I choose to see what the streets of Florence look like on a rainy day, then a light and flexible camera is going to be my choice.

Searching for Questions

Occasionally, very rarely, I know what I’m after. I’m not on assignment for Geographic. I have no gallery looking for my characteristic work to place with clients. I’m just practicing to learn what things look like in photographs. I’m no different from Winogrand in the aim of photographing.

The tool can dictate the subject of the lesson. I have too many cameras. My excuse to my wife? “They do different things.” If I go out to see what things look like with my DSLR, tripod and macro lens, I’m going to see small things. And I’ll find out what small things look like in a photograph. If I drive downtown with my compact mirrorless camera that has the flip up, waist level screen and put a vintage Leica lens on it, I’m out to see what’s interesting at a human scale in a city. Like a runner who competes in both long and short distance events, I’m limiting myself by not focusing on seeing in a particular way. I respond to contexts, seeing where I am rather than going where I can see.

Artists and scientists like to set themselves problems to aid with this goal of focused learning. You should take Winogrand’s approach and find out what a thing looks like photographed. Keep in mind that it’s easier to get going when the question is more specific than “What does the world look like when photographed?” If you try to learn about a particular thing: a mountain, people in the city, or the suburban landscape, then the direction is clear and the components that need work become more obvious.

Wall Painting, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Florence, Italy

I think of these images as “recompositions”. I love the color and form that the graffiti artist has left. I come along and capture it in context, bringing the environment itself into a relationship to the graffitti.

I trust my instincts when it comes to these captures. The wall is visually interesting so it’s worth recomposing into an image.

Not Through Here, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

In late October when I was in Italy on business, I brought the Nikon D7000 and Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 zoom. I hadn’t brought the Nikon on a trip in some time. My travel kit was the Sigma D1 for a while and the Sony NEX-5 most recently. Both have large sensors but are small mirorless cameras. The LCD screen on the back of Sony was scratched so I took the Nikon.

Interestingly, I captured more images that were probably better overall than other recent trips. It’s not that I think quality is really different across these cameras. In fact the NEX-5 and D7000 have more or less the same sensor.

I think its the seeing. Walking the streets of Florence with a larger, highly controllable DSLR just made me see more. I’m in the same place with a camera or without a camera. But with the camera in hand, my tool brings the focus.

If you’re a photographer, go out with a camera not so that you can capture images. No, an iPhone is now good enough to capture images to record life. Carry the tool to decide to see and capture images. If you’re a writer, go out with a pen and notebook. Don’t carry the tool in case you have an idea, go out with the goal of getting an idea.

I was a curious and excitable child, quiet but intense. I’m still that little kid; I hear something cool and burst with energy to tell someone about it. Its a good thing that I have these outlets on the Internet to report back on what I’ve learned. Maybe you’re reading this looking for similar discoveries.

As much as I see, I imagine that there must be even more. What I’m looking for may or may not exist. I have no real idea of the question. I have vague thoughts and conceptions that I can just imagine but can’t express.

All my life I’ve marveled at how the brain provides us with this rich internal experience. How do we become these infinitely varied and unique individuals? Our brains all look the same and work the same, but each of us is a complete universe looking out from behind a pair of eyes. I’ve learned from great thinkers like William James and John Searles. Years have been spent in concentrated and focused pursuit of answers. I’m an amateur. I know they learned things I need to know. Some of what I’ve read and understood, I agree with. Some common mistakes arise again and again.

When I read, I’m in dialog. I imagine I have something important to add to the conversation. The problem is that my thoughts are not yet fully formed. I see connections and possibilities that are easily dismissed. Uncertainty, free will and cognitive neuroscience combine in a stew, flavoring each other but not yet agreeing to be one.

Annie Dillard asked “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

I don’t write to curate my personal “brand”. I have a really good job at a great company. It pays me well to do things that I continue to be enthusiastic about even decades into my career as a Neurologist and drug developer. I almost never write about such things here. I’ve tried a few times, but it feels like work. I already know what I think and crafting the writing is not rewarding. If anything I confuse the world by having an online presence focused not on science but on art.

I do write at work to support and build the business. I take notes at meetings to assimilate and synthesize what I’ve heard. My scholarly output has a few highlights over the years: the vulnerability of neurons to injury demonstrated in the dish, the biological relevance of NAAG and GCP II, the development of a water soluble prodrug of propofol. I’ve done a lot of different things professionally and I don’t expect that I’m done yet.

The business writing is public. Those words have been set out to perform a task for me to talk to my collegues or my company’s customers. Drug development is an expensive, complicated undertaking and I contribute from my fund of knowledge or experience. Generally once I’ve organized my thoughts, the process of structuring prose and constructing arguments is straightfoward. Prose can be polished and tightened, but all to the end of expression and communication.

All art is secret. It springs from personal need and private thought. Eventually I put this grasping into physical form in words or image as search for what I believe I must know but can’t yet express.

Once I think I’ve crystalized that elusive idea, the writing is a test. In order to prove that I’ve really assembled the notion, the only way I can be sure that it’s real is to write it down and get it clear. Certainly if I find the words wandering and fighting me, I have to concede that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

A long time ago, I came up with the revision strategy of reading a confused paragraph and saying to myself, “What am I trying to say here?” Sometime’s I’ll get up, walk around and speak it out, the act of forming the words driving the idea into reality. If I can’t say it, I haven’t created the thought yet.

It may turn out that I have nothing to say. That unformed idea may be just confusion made of crossed wires and misperception. I may be lacking the insight to be seeing this old world in a new way. My insight may be cliched or simply obvious.

Worst is when my words fail to communicate the ideas. If I’m misunderstood or misinterpreted, I’ve failed. I have to allow that you may see the world differently. You’ll bring your own experiences and mental models. Art needs ambiguity to allow others to enter where the creator has been. When I experience art, I want to feel like the artist is speaking to me and inviting me to join.

All art is public and its ultimate test is truth. Art needs to work in the world. Why does that excited kid that puts his art into the world? To test its truth. I want to know whether I’m making sense. If my writing is dismissed, ignored or argued with, then I’ll have to conclude that it doesn’t contain enough truth because it doesn’t work for anybody else. You may not read what I meant to say, but if it says what you want then I’ve succeeded.

These worlds go out to you as a validation. These ideas on deciding seem to help me understand myself and my relationship to the world. But I’ll be more sure that I’ve gotten it right if you read this and at least nod or smile with me. I’ll feel even better if you stop reading here and start putting your own ideas down so that I can share your astonishment with the world, with yourself, with me.

Establishing the Zone, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Glen, New Hampshire

I know that trees are curved surfaces, but I’m somehow surprised every time I register the fall of light across that dimension.

I start the same sentence over and over again. I struggle to get my ideas to behave on the page. I discover that what I thought was clear in my mind is complete nonsense when turned into words.

Yesterday I started reading some well reasoned arguments in a year old document at work. It was simple and clear. I started thinking that I really ought to find out who wrote it so I could delegate some work to them. I still can’t be sure that the words are mine. I don’t remember writing them, but it sounds like me. The voice is assured and more than a little pedantic. Those words seem to have escaped completely and are living on their own.

Professionally, words are my emmisaries. They string along like little agents spawned from my view of the world. I may get credit for them or I may not. They’re out there doing their work even without my knowledge or permission. I write more clearly now than during my academic career. My writing then was as convoluted as my theorizing.

While the writing produced can be useful to others, I generally no longer need the words I’ve written. I know what I think. It’s the act of writing that is useful to me personally. Simple prose demands clear ideas. Sometimes a thought distilled evaporates completely. More often the residue is true but unoriginal and can go off to do its work.

At this moment I am writing to learn to write. I’ve been reading books and essays on writing to hear what’s said about the process and craft. I’m writing to understand what I’ve been told.

Writing about writing is hard to pull off. An author talking about words on a printed page can’t avoid the self referential nature of writing about writing. The reader checks the writing itself to see whether what is there before them reflects the author’s views. a poorly written book about writing fails by defeating itself. Just as a parent loses authoritiy by screaming at their kid not to scream, a long sentence about writing short sentences is unconvincing even if perfectly lucid and coherent.

Many years ago I read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. The book is a classic, providing a simple and lucid account of how to write non-fiction simply and lucidly. Zinsser learned his craft as a journalist. I’m sympathetic to the style because most of my writing is for science and business, settings that are journalistic in their goals. My initial training came from journalists. In the late 1990’s, I was writing for The Motley Fool. The Fool had become one of the first big draws at America Online based on the active message boards and well written content that attracted novice investors like me. As they transitioned to the web and professionalized their writing staff, I left the orbit of the Gardner brothers, but the lessons I learned writing for them are with me still.

I’ve now been writing internet content for almost 15 years. The size of my audience has fluctuated as has the volume and quality of my output. For long stretches, I’ve written nothing, turning my attention to photography or life itself. The need to write comes back, asserting itself as it does right now.

I must need to learn something now. I’m reading about writing. I’ll read and write until I’ve had my full. Publishing is now easy and without cost. Instant access to so much material for free elevates the problems of learning to new levels. With so much to read, writing to learn is the way I’ll see it through.

My trips to the public library as a child also provided access to more books than I could read in a lifetime. The university libraries I had access to in college and medical school were even larger collections of content. Researching the scientific literature consumed weeks of my attention at a time during my faculty years.

For the information to be used and not just consumed, some output is required. What do I think? How do I imagine the life on board a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars? What is the role of intracellular calcium in brain damage during and after a stroke? One learns quickly that the information swirling about in the mind evaporates like mist when asked to explain it to some one else. The transfer of understanding from one mind to another is why we write. But it can’t be done, until we learn.

In Writing To Learn, Zinnser tells us that the best path to learning is the writing itself. Assembling, synthesizing and expressing thought in written form is a method of clarifying and codifying knowledge. Extending the arguments of On Writing Well, he places clarity and simplicity of expression as the ultimate goals of writing to lead thought itself to clarity and simplicity. Zinnser being Zinnser, he pulls off the trick of writing about writing once again.

Clarity and simplicity are the goals. Volume is the challenge. There are so many authorities and so many facts. The universe is incomprehensibly huge and our own small world to big to know. What is it about writing that can distill that complex and chaotic experience into something manageable and known?

Street Scene, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Florence, Itally

It never bothers me that people want to know the future. Anybody would want to know what’s going to happen next week or next year. In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s going to be raining tomorrow morning, but I would like to enjoy a run on a crisp, sunny fall morning. Is that run going to prolong my life? The longevity effects of running are of a bit more import and might change what I do tomorrow even if the weather is fine. Please, if I could know which way Apple’s stock price was headed over the next 5 years, I’d be able to make a good bit of money. I don’t need to know the exact price, mind you. I’d settle for knowing if it will be higher or lower and by about how much.

We just can’t know the future. I argue strongly that we don’t even know the present. We don’t even have a very sound understanding of the past. Our world is too big and too complex to comprehend thoroughly. The present and the past are here or were here and are fixed. The future hasn’t happened yet. Critically, our intuitive notion of free will convinces us that the future is not determined and can be changed by our choices.

Now if you believe in a clockwork universe, where each present state determines the next state mechanically and without uncertainty, stop reading here please. You have no choice, the future is already determined and you’ll gain nothing from understanding how to decide better. I don’t even know why I’d tell anyone living in a clockwork universe to stop reading in the first place. After all, they lack the ability to choose whether or not to continue anyway.

If you believe in free will and a truly uncertain future that can’t be known, then you’d a prediction of tomorrow’s weather or next year’s stock prices. I’ll continue to reference the National Weather Service forecast and consider the estimates of Apple’s 5 year sales and earnings growth rates.

It never bothers me that we all want to know the future. We realize that we can’t know. What bothers me is when I hear disappointment that predictions about the future turn out to be wrong. “They predicted an inch of snow and we ended up with six!” or “They predicted inflation and rising gold prices and instead gold fell and the price of corn and cotton skyrocketed!” We wanted the prediction, acted on it and then feel betrayed when it’s wrong.

Why predict the future when we know perfectly well it can’t be known? Even when the prediction is right, maybe it was a lucky guess. After all, even the broken clock tells the right time twice a day.

We can’t know the future but we can predict it. These two very important English words, know and predict, deserve closer examination. The space between them reveals so much of the mystery of how we live in an uncertain universe.

Know and predict are verbs. They are things to do. Since one can only do things in the moment, they can’t be done in the future or the past. Of course our language lets us talk about future and past events as if they are happening now, saying “I will know” or “I knew” are just shifts in outlook, not an ability to actuall do something now that occurs in the future or the past. The flow of time constrains us to living and acting moment to moment.

At present, only people know and predict. In speech, we’ll often ascribe the doing to an object, but its a convenience. The thermometer knows the temperature. The crystal ball predicts the winner of the Worlds Series. The thermometer and the crystal ball can’t really know or predict. A person knows the temperature when he or she reads the indication and a person uses the crystal ball to predict the future.

To know implies certainty. There’s only one temperature to be read off of the thermometer. If there is any doubt as to the true state of the world, then believe becomes the appropriate verb. One can argue whether knowledge can be certain, but it seems quite clear to me that if the belief is strong enough, we act as if it is the truth. To know the truth is to admit no doubt.

To predict is to make statements about the future. Is a prediction somehow a claim of knowledge of the future? What does it mean to predict the winner of the world series or the winner of the next Presidential election?

In anything but a trivial case, statements about the future have to admit at least some doubt. Most of the time, they ought to come along with a truckload of disclaimers. And since the future is not determined by present conditions, free will can overturn any prediciton that allow for human action.

Those who claim to know can be proved right or wrong. A prediction can’t ever be right or wrong, being a statement of belief, of future probability. Can I predict the result of your next toss of a coin? If I predict heads, I’ll be wrong half the time. Yet I’ll confidently predict that over a large number of coin flips, the result will be close to 5o-50. The Law of Large Numbers lets me refine the accuracy of my prediction based on the number of coin flips. But the next result is not knowable by man or machine.

Does anyone really want to hear pundits say they believe who the winner of an election will be? That the mathematical model reveals that 4 out of 5 times tomorrow morning will be sunny and dry? Since those future events will occur only one time and we want to know the future, we demand predictions that have to be wrong in some or even most cases. So that we can pretend to know the future.

It was great to spend a few days this week at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. I was invited to a reunion of the Coyle Lab, folks who worked with Joe Coyle over the years. It was great to revisit scientific interests at the meeting and then renew friendships with great people who I see very rarely. After all, I live in the world of drug development and clinical trials which intersects with neuroscience only around areas of disease targets or drug mechanisms.

One of the fun aspects of the Coyle Lab reunion was acting as the night’s photographer. I stay away from event photography in general, having had some bad experiences both in photographing and being photographed. Thanks to the automation of the Nikon Creative Flash System, I was able to use off camera flash to more less consistently light a cavernous atrium room. I’m not sure I would volunteer again soon without some practice and learning of technique. Two lessons- Just like any other type of image capture, event photos need a subject, generally something happening of interest. Second, making something happen- like suggesting posing an groupings facilitates interesting interactions that can be the subject of photographs.

As for the meeting, the broad sweep of modern neuroscience is breathtaking. Elegant, in depth work goes on studying every level of organization from molecular, to cellular to structural to cognitive. As always, gaining the larger synthetic view is our ongoing challenge. A system is isolated, a factor is manipulated, a change is reported. Evidence is collected resulting in masses of data no single scientist could ever assimilate. For a bystander like myself, I feel the significance each scientist sees in their own set of experiments, contributing to a larger effort, but I can’t see the larger picture. Attending symposium talks where more senior scientists present their stories, wider context and significance are assumed or dismissed with a sentence or two.

I can’t help but think that we are doing something fundamentally wrong in building this scientific edifice. Findings get reported as news but are quickly forgotten, changing very little. While the money invested in biomedical science has grown exponentially, the yield of new drugs has been completely flat for 40 years now. As much as we’re able to watch cognition occurring in the brain, the way most of us experience our own thoughts, the actions of our own brains, is still mostly a Cartesian Dualism. We believe we are rational, abstract souls inhabiting bodies rather than understanding how mind is our subjective experience of our brains actions.