I’m an avid but amateur birdwatcher since some mental health struggles some years ago. I would go on long walks and eventually all these damn birds punctured my rumination and I tried making bird noises and they made bird noises back (I later learned these were Grackles, and they had arrived as a group to one of their preferred haunts). Once I started paying attention and interacting with more birds I got hooked.

It really is a very different cognitive mode. And when LLMs later came out I took my birdwatching-stance into it, which felt like a natural way to encounter some new entities.

I find it easy to believe that birdwatching is fairly distinctive in how it organizes the brain. Many sibling comments were wondering “is it the bird watching or is it an isolatable factor.” Bird watching is an extremely distinctive sensory integration, prediction, classification, etc task with lots of subproblems yes but also binding them in an irreducible way with agency detection (a vital part of cognition that modern environments are impoverished of) and attention.