THE VARIOUS INTENSITIES OF PANORAMIC SENSING

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There are many different degrees and qualities of panoramic seeing and listening, just as there are with focused seeing and listening.

States of intense focused concentration and absorption can be passive or active.

Focusing is passively absorbing with beautiful music, love, entertainment and a good comedy, or active when painting a masterpiece, calculating maths, or sport.

I don't think there are as many forms of panoramic sensing as with focused sensing... Panoramic sensing is a far simpler way of sensing. Focusing has been developed and studied for thousands of years.

At the other extreme, Daydreaming is usually passive in that it's not consciously directed, but it is always focused on the dream, and while we daydream we often gawp vacantly into a ca. 90° empty panoramic space. Then there's the blank fixed stare of Christmas shopping...

Panoramic hunting is another complex area. There are worlds still to discover.

Degrees
There are many different degrees of panoramic and focused sensing, and both can be passive, absent-minded, active, or receptive.

Even receptive focusing, always limits the big picture.

When daydreaming we absent mindedly focus on a specific train of thoughts and we do that while absent mindedly focusing with a fixed stare infront of us; or sometimes gazing vacantly at maybe 90° of the panoramic field, but without any receptivity.

At the other extreme with intense concentration – the experience of simultaneously seeing and hearing numerous signals as a sort of multi-focus, is comparable with multi-tasking with its intense focusing on several specific but often isolated tasks in a short period of time.

When daydreaming, relaxed cycling or wandering in nature, we sometimes gaze at a ca. 90° panoramic area. This is peripheral, a superficial, usage.

We often listen peripherally, it isn't an astute searching and waiting for sounds, but it is ready to consciously recognise .

The quality of panoramic visual awareness depends on the field of vision, horizontally and vertically. (One of the problems of modern city life is the exceptional amount of horizontal stimuli, and they are all designed to stimulate us to focus.)

Most humans occasionally experience a generalised panoramic connection with everything. It happens when we see wide landscapes, or look at the stars. It usually only lasts for a few seconds before we start focusing on something specific.

The trees are swaying and its raining, and we notice everyday sounds which incorporate change, like bird song, or the wind and rustling leaves in the undergrowth. These can all be beautiful and very relaxing, for humans and probably animals.

But for animals, noticing the background is pointless and could even be dangerous. It's when changes and movements in the environment happen suddenly and unexpectedly – a crunching of leaves or a change in the bird song – that it's important for animals to notice and possibly react.

It's this openness to anything quick which is happening within the panoramic field which is vital to animals.

It happens quite naturally, after watching and listening panoramically for a few minutes in an active environment, the background fades away, and it's only the sudden changes and movements which we notice.

This results in a sort of multi-focus on all the random movements happening within the 'big picture'.

This way of sensing is a being ready and waiting for things which aren't there yet. It's a pre-emptive way of sensing.

There is at present no word to describe this way animals (and humans) can use their senses to detect just the events happening, all the moving things, all the changes, with almost no awareness of the background panorama.

At present the word panoramic seems the clearest and safest to describe all forms of panoramic sensing.

Please continue with Going On The Lookout

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