If you were instructed to draw a leaf, you might draw a green, vaguely eye-shaped thing with a stem. But when you study a real leaf, say an elm leaf, it’s got much more going on than that drawing. It has rounded serrations along its edges, and the tip of each serration is the end of a raised vein, which runs from the stem in the middle. Tiny ripples span the channels between the veins, and small capillaries divide each segment into little “counties” with irregular borders. I could go on for pages.

If you could look even closer (and you can with a microscope) the detail would continue to unfold essentially forever, or at least until you reach the molecular scale, where it all becomes unfathomable to the human mind anyway. Unlike objects in a digital photo, or human ideas about what those objects are, real things exist in essentially infinite resolution.

The principle holds for everything. Looking closer always reveals more, and it’s often not what you’d expect. Archie Andrews’s orange hair (in the comics anyway) is actually rows of printed red dots. The tops of your knuckles have miniscule lines that make diamonds and triangles. Sand, examined on your fingertips, is made of a few distinct types of grains, none of which are quite the color of “sand.”

Kids spend a lot of their time zooming their attention in like that, hunting for new details. Adults tend to stay fairly zoomed out, habitually attuned to wider patterns so they can get stuff done. The endless detail contained within the common elm leaf isn’t particularly important when you’re raking thousands of them into a bag and you still have to mow the lawn after.

Even as adults, though, we retain this ability to intentionally zoom into, or out of, the details. Essentially, whenever you pay attention to something, you can dial the resolution up and down.

If you’re listening to crowd noise, for example, you can listen to it as a uniform, undifferentiated sound, or you can tune into to the individual voices that together make up the experience of “crowd noise.” When you ride a bike, it’s a bike. When you fix a bike, it’s dozens of interconnecting parts, each with its own function and condition. These parts must be seen and understood on that level of resolution in order to fix it.

More detail, about anything, can be revealed by looking closer and resisting the urge to summarize. When you’re watching a football game from the stands, you might see a group of purple-clad players battling for turf with a group of white-clad players, and the score is 17-10. If you stood down at the sidelines with one of the teams, you’d see them as a highly varied group of individuals, each with a different look, attitude, and presence. If you talked to them, you’d learn how each player has his own thoughts about the game and his performance in it. Each play of the game (there might be 150 or so) is made of twenty-two personal athletic performances, each of which is made of a number of physical actions, each of which — if you could see even closer — is made of thousands of muscular fiber contractions, and so on.

The “game” is all of that stuff too. Everything is made of details. Zooming back out, even further this time, the whole game could be expressed as a single number in the win column of the league standings that year.

Dialing up the Resolution

There’s no need to break everything in life down to molecules. All of those levels of “happening” exist at once. I think there’s a lot to gain, though, by dialing up the resolution a little beyond our default settings, and attending slightly more to the details end of day-to-day life than habit would dictate.

There’s no special trick to this other than to stay curious about details, even when the thing in question already seems familiar and feels basically “understood.” You’re just looking closer, to see more of what’s already there: the sounds that make up the noise, the life forms and materials that make up a city park, the assumptions, hopes, and truth claims that make up an opinion. Everything is details all the way down, even when we think we’re looking at a simple leaf or football game.

Sensory experience is the obvious place to start. What happens when you look, feel, smell, and taste things as though they’re new to you, even when they’re not? Study the juice vesicles as you eat the orange, like a kid might. Notice how the sound changes right as you take the kettle off the element. Listen to the words that come out of the person speaking, rather than grappling with what you think they’re getting at.

The goal here isn’t to steady the mind or gain superhuman focus, only to rediscover that everything in life consists of bottomless detail, that we can attune to those things on a variety of levels, and that perhaps we put too much faith in relatively low-resolution impressions of them.

Playing with resolution applies to ideas too. The higher the resolution at which you explore a topic, the more surprising and idiosyncratic it becomes. If you’ve ever made a good-faith effort to “get to the bottom” of a contentious question — Is drug prohibition justifiable? Was Napoleon an admirable figure? — you probably discovered that it’s endlessly complicated. Your original question keeps splitting into more questions. Things can be learned, and you can summarize your findings at any point, but there is no bottom.

The Information Age is clearly pushing us towards low-res conclusions on questions that warrant deep, long, high-res consideration. Consider our poor hominid brains, trying to form a coherent worldview out of monetized feeds made of low-resolution takes on the most complex topics imaginable — economic systems, climate, disease, race, sex and gender. Unsurprisingly, amidst the incredible volume of information coming at us, there’s been a surge in low-res, ideologically-driven views: the world is like this, those people are like that, X is good, Y is bad, A causes B. Not complicated, bro.

For better or worse, everything is infinitely complicated, especially those things. The conclusion-resistant nature of reality is annoying to a certain part of the adult human brain, the part that craves quick and expedient summaries. (Social media seems designed to feed, and feed on, this part.)

The human mind does have some ability to summarize, and deal constructively in low-res abstractions, but that’s the new, fledgling part. We’re mostly built for a high-resolution relationship to the world. No matter how driven we are to theorize and formulate, we’re still a creature that can discern a dry leaf from a damp one by scent alone. We can sense subtle shifts in someone’s intentions during a conversation, and somehow tell instantly when the dog has done something bad, but we couldn’t fully describe a banana to save our lives.

I can’t help but think we’d benefit from a conscious intention to see things in terms of their details again, dialing up the default resolution at which we engage with both our experiences and our ideas.

The world exists in infinite resolution, and that’s what we’re built for. The truth is made of details, and they go all the way down. Any ideas about it just rest on the top.

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Photos by Ash Edmonds, magnifiedsand.com, mustachecactus, Zabdiel Gonzalez, Jessica Lewis, and Andrea Appani