Thinking unlike a modern human

I was still considering that contrast between experiencing and collecting when I came upon this passage in Tristan Gooley's Wild Signs and Star Paths:

The simplifying approach of animals is instructive, because it’s the opposite of what most naturalists encourage today. All communication aiming to improve our understanding of nature over the past few centuries has, by definition, aimed at our slow thinking. The neocortex is king because it handles speech and reading. This has accelerated our move away from an intuitive understanding of nature.

Yes, I thought. We are so busy taking the whole scene apart and collecting fragments that we lose meaning and feeling and vivacity as well as connection. We can't see the wood for the trees. Literally.

I keep trying to practice a kind of holistic sensing - but it's hard as my analytic mind pops up with something like "Definitely a wren!" and my seeking-grasping mind asks "Will I see a hare today?" and my anxious mind says "Must leave for work soon after three." And all the rest of it.

Gooley goes on to say that as well as knowing what to look for and what those signs mean, we have to care.

Oh, yes! We have to care! We care about whether our favourite brand of coffee is in stock. We care if fuel prices change. We care if someone slights us. So we are primed to notice that.

In the wood, the holistic feeling also has to engage with this caring feeling. Gooley's talking about not getting lost - caring where we are (which could lead me down a metaphysical rabbit hole that I'll resist for now). When doing my Ancient Woodland things, I care about species and landmarks (like ditches and banks). I'm always caring about badger setts. I've started noticing various deer footprints. Over this winter-spring I've noticed all the ways the trees change - for the first time! And I notice more butterflies and bees... and others.

I don't know what it is - one on the bark of an oak, the other at the base of the trunk.

A few other things: I only hear nuthatches in woodland with old trees; the sounds of birds' flight is incredibly variable and will be related to both their place in the food chain and the behavious they are displaying; ash and horse chestnut leaves never last out the winter on the ground, oak and beech and sweet chestnut do - which suggests a very different structure or chemistry and that must matter; acute oak decline seems more common in planted trees - apart from in that place I called the Dead Zone. Oh, the volunteer manager for the Observatree project has written a paper on this and thinks - I think, she told me and the paper's not published yet - that agricultural run off probably plays a part. the secret's in the soil - and planted oaks may have been planted in former agricultural land and are always enclosed by fields.

Anyway, I am interested in this - because it's about assimilating meanings rather than collecting distinct facts.