{"id":10136,"date":"2018-12-19T17:37:28","date_gmt":"2018-12-19T17:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=10136"},"modified":"2018-12-19T17:37:28","modified_gmt":"2018-12-19T17:37:28","slug":"mental-dominoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2018\/12\/19\/mental-dominoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Mental Dominoes"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
The prairie falcon (Falco mexicanus) is a medium-large sized falcon of western North America. Public domain photo, accessed via Wikipedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The human mind is astonishing.<\/p>\n

At the end of November I was on what turned out to be a pretty perfect road trip\u2014taking my youngest daughter to and from Bozeman for a hockey tournament. Just outside of Arco, we were on Highway 20 passing the Four Winds Caf\u00e9 when I noticed a bump on top of a utility pole. We had already loaded our trip into eBird and were actively logging sightings along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cOoooh, what is that?\u201d I said in my now characteristic early-warning-system voice. Penelope, it turns out, is a birding ninja. She established this outside of Picabo when she looked north and said, \u201ctrumpeter swans,\u201d picking North America\u2019s largest duck out of a sky that was literally the color of trumpeter swans with what I call \u201cGame of Thrones Snow\u201d falling\u2014that snow that is big atmospheric flakes that don\u2019t seem to either accumulate or bother anyone.<\/p>\n

Penelope picked up the bird on the pole right away.<\/p>\n

Then we shot past it going 70.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpeckled chest, brown back,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was that?\u201d I asked, at once voicing two things: first, that I didn\u2019t know what it was; and second\u2014and this is the human-mind part\u2014that this bird seemed a bit different, somehow.<\/p>\n

Birders often refer to GISS\u2014the General Impression of Size and Shape\u2014that one gets the moment you see a bird (or anything, for that matter). This is that very first sense, that inkling that is much more emotional than intellectual. The goal is to respond to the part of our brain that identifies something almost instantly. This sense can lead to specifics: \u201crobin,\u201d and the bird is a robin. Or it can be much vaguer: \u201cHmmm, that is different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zipping by the post, my GISS-dar kicked in. \u201cShould we stop?\u201d My voice was tentative; we had a game to get to.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes.\u201d Remember, Penelope is a ninja.<\/p>\n

Big U-turn. Then we were close enough to expand on the markings; pretty uniformly brown, with similarly uniform speckling on a buff chest. And something that looked like tears or even a moustache. Moustache? Wait a minute.<\/p>\n

Somehow our minds store vast categories of information that exist like an enormous board of dominoes\u2014disparate, discrete, yet potentially connected by the slightest tipping.<\/p>\n

The dominoes: Speckled bird. Utility pole. Agricultural lands. Raptor.\u00a0 <\/span>Southcentral Idaho. The tip: Moustache. Birds of prey with moustaches. Falcons have moustaches.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a prairie falcon!\u201d<\/p>\n

And the bird leaned forward and took off across the field.<\/p>\n

Chasing birds can be like chasing your mind\u2014watching your thoughts flit in and out, or your attention wander. It is building up a repertoire of experiences, each with individual significance, and also with the power to become something else. There is immediacy and patience; the known and the unknown; the constant and the fleeting. Reflecting is perhaps one of our greatest mental attributes.<\/p>\n

Of course, reflection would, necessarily, have to wait. We had to get to Bozeman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES The human mind is astonishing. At the end of November I was on what turned out to be a pretty perfect road trip\u2014taking my youngest daughter to and from Bozeman for a hockey tournament. Just outside of Arco, we were on Highway 20 passing the Four Winds Caf\u00e9 when I noticed a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,34],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-commentary","8":"category-science-place"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}