Reconstruct your attention
Think of the Mona Lisa. Easy, right? So ubiquitous. Now, without looking at a reproduction, try to recall the details. Lots of skin above the neckline, somehow chaste, but is she wearing a necklace? Enigmatic smile, the barest of eyebrows. Is her hair parted? Braided? A background that is natural, some swampy green. A winding river? Any specifics beyond that? A dark elegant dress. Brocade? Buttons? Hands? Is she turned slightly to the left, or am I thinking about George Washington on the dollar bill?
Over time, you have fashioned a mental model of the Mona Lisa. That model is highly optimized, capturing only the minimum characteristics necessary to successfully recognize it when you come across it. That’s a fundamental goal of the visual component of memory, after all. Expedited recognition to establish and maintain situational awareness and preserve advantage, expending as few calories as possible all the while.
If you have seen the Mona Lisa in person, then your mental model is less streamlined, but richer, because it incorporates the broader context of your particular experience. What the day and the crowd was like. How you felt. The trajectory of your life at the time. It becomes an incremental contributor to your feeling of being in the world, directly engaged, an active participant.
This is why art is best lived with, why the digital proxy standing in for a sustained phenomenological experience is, well, an atrocious alternative, however inescapable it might be. So here we are. When you move on from this reproduction of this painting, you’ll remember a scribbly jumble above, and something more ordered and spirograph-like below, together floating in a blue and magenta space that feels somehow galactic, with anomalous highlights arbitrarily scattered throughout the glowing tangle of it. If you see it again, you’ll probably remember that you’ve seen it before. But that’s about it.
A recent visitor told me, looking at this painting in particular, “it is surprising how, the more you look at it, the more interesting it gets.” Of course, you live with anything long enough, or anyone for that matter, it gets more interesting until it starts to disappear. I don’t know if familiarity breeds contempt, but it absolutely fosters blindness. Creating the potential for rediscovery? One hopes.