Advertisement
Published: February 11th 2006
Edit Blog Post
Hola all.
I wanted to start by putting down a thought I have had recently about travelling, although it takes a little background information to make sense.
In cognition there is a division between bottom-up and top-down "information flow" in the brain. Basically this is the difference between information, like sound waves hitting your ear drum or light rays hitting your retina, going towards your mind (phenomenological field, or ongoing conscious experience) and memories and cognition finding a place for this bottom-up information. In cognition, until very recently, the mind has been seen as mostly bottom-up information flow. So you look at something, says the cognitive scientist, it goes through "filters" and eventually leads to a perception, such as "I am looking at a dog". However, philosophers as old as Plato, have recognized that the story is much more complex. They have noticed that there is no one set of information that IS a dog (you never receive anywhere near the same input on your retina from looking at the same dog from two different angles, nevermind two different dogs). Take for example handwritting recognition. When computer scientists first tried to build handwritting recognition software they figured that it
would be pretty strait-forward: there is something about a "D", when written by anyone on anything, that is common to all "D"s. The truth, however, is that experience is mostly top-down; there simiply isn't anything about "D"s or dogs that a computer, using bottom-up data information processing, could call "D" or "dog" input (although newer computer programs can manage to read some writting, try putting smiley faces around the letters or somehting like that...). Put another way, we are in fact all in a metaphysical space - universe - but our experience of this universe is almost entirely top-down: we imagine what we see, hear, and touch, not decipher it. Reality is top-down; reality is imagination, not investigation.
Travel, then, to me, is the ultimate exercise in imagination. Travelling forces you to twist your usual top-down explanation for your surroundings, surroundings that now require a novel explanation. That being said, lots of memories and experience can still be used, just in new ways. A good analogy is lightswitches: they are different all over the world. I have seen some that flick up and down, others that push on and off, and still others that are a side-to-side lever action.
However, they all turn on lights and all agree, even if requiring some imagination, with an ineffable intuitive understanding of lightswitches. Yesterday offers a good example.
Yesterday morning I woke up early, I mean EARLY, to get out to Cajas national park for a day hike. After jumping aboard the still-moving bus (they never come to a complete stop when picking people up or dropping them off) Tessa and I arrived at the park at about 7:30 with jaws dropped. Before us stood the road leading down to the Refugio (a place with bunks and a place to cook food) which overlooked a completely still, as if still sleeping, lake surrounded by llamas. Behind stood some very rocky mountains that seemed to break through a layer of green plants, like a giant stone tooth chewing spinach. After dropping off our excess stuff we headed off for a six-hour "difficile" hike doing a loop around the aforementioned tooth. After a quick visit with some llamas we, sometimes struggling, followed the trail northward into some very unworldly terrain. Stepping on stones reserved, in my life, to the dry desolote remains of a fire (making that same chalky sound when stepping on
them) and coloured purple, red, and an undescribable shade of green (by the mineral rich rivers running every which way) we climbed to 4500 meters, at times grasping for air. As we climbed higher the vegetation got weirder and weirder, some resembling a heavily-gelled punk's haircut (with wild yellows, reds, blues, and many shades inbetween) while others looking like a rounded troll's haircut with some crazy wisps of blue and green streaking throughout. What we didn't see, until the last 30 minutes of the hike, was another living thing (and then we saw a man leisurely guiding a donkey up the narrow, rocky trail with building supplies strapped to its back). The surrounding rocks were like nothing I had seen before, something strait from the moon. Grays mixed with blues mixed with purples mixed with white mixed with green lined the many shallow rivers we walked along while gazing out at the rocky, yellowish-green rocky landscape stretching out in all directions. Again I got my cherished total silence.
Arriving back at the refugio at around 2 pm, thick rain clouds tumbling over the surrounding mountains from which we were fleeing like Indiana Jones from that boulder, we took a
quick nap and, after noticing that I had a huge headache from the altitude, decided to head back to Cuenca at around 4 pm.
Today I am going to wander the streets looking for a Panama hat that fits my enormous head. Which reminds me: a couple days ago Tessa and I went to a, no THE, panama hat store (Cuenca is the world's center for Panama hat making) and, after trying on about 30 different hats, concluded that my head was just plain too big for the Ecuadorian selection of hats. We did get to see how they are made, though, which was pretty amazing. Still done by hand, the more finely woven hats take an entire week to make and are touched only ever worked on by one person. They cost twenty-five bucks.
Anyway I am going to go try to hunt down some pants (I really should have brough another pair...).
Ciao for now
Advertisement
Tot: 0.168s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 18; qc: 93; dbt: 0.1086s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
KEVIN
non-member comment
Man with donkey
Dear Noel, Photo 212459 was tagged by you as "Man with donkey" however the man and donkey in the photo are barely visible. Please either fix the zoom on your camera or purchase a new camera with a better zoom function. Failing those two recommendations, please refrain from teasing me with faux tags. I was excited to see a man and donkey and was greatly disappointed. God Bless You, Kevin