In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, welcoming us into previously unfathomable dimensions – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. Showing us that in order to understand our world we don’t need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.
An Immense World by Ed Yong – Penguin Books Australia
Ed Yong’s An Immense World dives into the world of senses of animals and their associated unwelt. I wrote a longer post here.
Commentary
we have historically blinded ourselves to what animals are doing and how they’re doing it because we’ve assumed that they use the same sense organs in the same ways that we do.
Source: What Do Animals Dream? by Laura Miller
Yong explores the animals’ Umwelten through chapters devoted, in addition to surface vibrations, to smells and tastes; light; color; pain; heat; contact and flow; sound; echoes; electric fields; and magnetic fields. The concluding two chapters then discuss how senses work together, and how a single species, ours, has disrupted animal senses through light and noise pollution. Gradually, the theme Yong establishes at the start gains shape and dimension as he writes that our own Umwelt feels natural, but it’s only one way to sense the world
Source: ‘An Immense World’ dives deep into the umwelt of animals by Barbara J. King
That I found myself surprised at so many moments while reading “An Immense World,” Ed Yong’s new book about animal senses, speaks to his exceptional gifts as a storyteller — though perhaps it also says something regrettable about me. I was marveling at those details because I found them weird; but it turns out, if I try to expand my perspective just a bit, they aren’t so weird after all.
Source: ‘An Immense World’ Is a Thrilling Tour of Nonhuman PerceptionBy Jennifer Szalai
Yong isn’t all that interested in the familiar question of how to exploit the senses of animals for human benefit; he wants us to try to understand how animals experience the world so that we can understand how animals experience the world.
Source: ‘An Immense World’ Is a Thrilling Tour of Nonhuman PerceptionBy Jennifer Szalai
Marginalia
INTRODUCTION: The Only True Voyage
Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.
Uexküll compared an animal’s body to a house.2 “Each house has a number of windows,” he wrote, “which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows.3 Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as it is seen from the house. By no means does it appear as a section of a larger world. Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house—its [Umwelt]. The garden that appears to our eye is fundamentally different from that which presents itself to the inhabitants of the house.”
perhaps the most common, and least recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.
1. Leaking Sacks of Chemicals: Smells and Tastes
The smell isn’t just an object unto itself but a reference point, and the walk isn’t just an intermediate state between points A and B but a tour of Manhattan’s layered, unseen stories.
Everyone likely smells the world in a slightly different way. And if it’s that hard to appreciate the olfactory Umwelt of another human, imagine how hard the task becomes for another species.
2. Endless Ways of Seeing: Light
The first step to understanding another animal’s Umwelt is to understand what it uses its senses for.
3. Rurple, Grurple, Yurple: Color
It is much easier for most people to imagine a dog’s sense of color than a bird’s (or a dinosaur’s). If you are a trichromat, you can simulate dichromatic vision by using apps that remove certain colors. You could even simulate what a different trichromat (like a bee) might see by mapping their blue, green, and UV system onto our red, green, and blue one. But there is no way of representing a tetrachromat’s color vision for a trichromatic eye.
Each of us is stuck in our own Umwelt. As I wrote in the introduction, this is a book not about superiority but about diversity. The real glory of colors isn’t that some individuals see more of them, but that there’s such a range of possible rainbows.
4. The Unwanted Sense: Pain
This point is crucial. The controversies about animal pain often assume that they either feel exactly what we feel or nothing at all, as if they’re either little people or sophisticated robots. This dichotomy is false, but it persists because it’s difficult to imagine an intermediate state. We know that some people have different thresholds of pain than others, just as we know that some have blurrier vision. But a qualitatively different version of pain is as conceptually challenging as a scallop’s scene-less vision. Could pain exist without consciousness? If you strip the emotion out of pain, are you just left with nociception, or a gray area that our imaginations struggle to fill? Perhaps more than for other senses, it is easy to forget that pain can vary, and hard to conceive of how it might.
6. A Rough Sense: Contact and Flow
The French ophthalmologist André Rochon-Duvigneaud once wrote that a bird is a “wing guided by an eye,” but he was wrong—the wings also guide themselves.
8. All Ears: Sound
If a mouse rustles, a dog barks, or a tree falls in a forest, it produces waves of pressure that radiate outward.3 As these waves travel, the air molecules in their path repeatedly bunch up and spread out. These movements, which occur in the same direction as the wave’s line of travel, are what we call sound. The number of times the molecules compress and disperse in a second determines the sound’s frequency—its pitch, which is measured in hertz (Hz). The extent to which they move determines the sound’s amplitude—its loudness, which is measured in decibels (dB). Hearing is the sense that detects those movements.
12. Every Window at Once: Uniting the Senses
WHEN ANIMALS MOVE, their sense organs provide two kinds of information.20 There’s exafference, signals produced by stuff happening in the world. There’s also reafference, signals produced by an animal’s own actions. I still struggle to remember the difference between these, and if you share that problem, you can think of them as other-produced and self-produced. From my desk, I can see the branches of a tree rustling in the wind. That’s exafference—other-produced. But to see those branches, I had to look to my left—a sudden, jarring movement that sent patterns of light sweeping across my retinas. That’s reafference—self-produced. Every animal, for each of its senses, has to distinguish between these two kinds of signals. But here’s the catch: These signals are the same from the point of view of the sense organs.
an animal’s Umwelt is the product not just of its sense organs but of its entire nervous system acting in concert. If the sense organs acted alone, nothing would make sense. Throughout this book, we have explored the senses as separate parts. But to truly understand them, we need to think about them as part of a unified whole.
13. Save the Quiet, Preserve the Dark: Threatened Sensescapes
Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and to each other. In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.
Our influence is not inherently destructive, but it is often homogenizing. In pushing out sensitive species that cannot abide our sensory onslaughts, we leave behind smaller and less diverse communities. We flatten the undulating sensescapes that have generated the wondrous variety of animal Umwelten.
With every creature that vanishes, we lose a way of making sense of the world. Our sensory bubbles shield us from the knowledge of those losses. But they don’t protect us from the consequences.
To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity, and the sacred in the mundane. Wonders exist in a backyard garden, where bees take the measure of a flower’s electric fields, leafhoppers send vibrational melodies through the stems of plants, and birds behold the hidden palettes of rurples and grurples. In writing this book, I have found the sublime while confined to my home by a pandemic, watching tetrachromatic starlings gathering in the trees outside and playing sniffing games with my dog, Typo. Wilderness is not distant. We are continually immersed in it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor, and to protect.
This ability to dip into other Umwelten is our greatest sensory skill.
Through patient observation, through the technologies at our disposal, through the scientific method, and, above all else, through our curiosity and imagination, we can try to step into their worlds. We must choose to do so, and to have that choice is a gift. It is not a blessing we have earned, but it is one we must cherish.
