As we look around this room, we see dear friends—some old, some new. We have a special window into each other’s souls, because our papers, year after year, variously reveal to each other our passions, our histories, our inner thoughts, and what is important to each of us. We are, with each paper, interpreters to each other of some piece of our internal lives, allowing us to know each other more deeply and to cherish and respect what we learn.
Yet we are also curators of our inner lives, choosing internally what we ignore or pay attention to, and externally what we share and with whom. Some of us are navigating life-changing illness, others, devastating loss. One or another of us may be aware of these challenges for one or another member, but they are only rarely topics of our papers or of our conversations. Rather, all of us carry a hidden world of feelings, thoughts, and experiences within the bodies and smiles that we present to each other.
We share a great deal, my Saturday Morning Club sisters: the same five (or so) senses in roughly the same proportions; an above average level of education and wealth; and we live or have lived in the same region of the same country. Yet we cannot perceive the world through each other’s eyes or be wrapped in the fabric of each other’s lives. We only know what we are allowed to know or can surmise.
However much each of us shares with each other, what we share rests on a foundation of our own personal perceptions. As we each navigate the world both within and beyond the Saturday Morning Club, we filter in and filter out what we can see, feel, and comprehend. Through these filters, we create mental and emotional maps of the physical and social world that allow us to draw conclusions about cause and effect and about what is important. These maps allow us to figure out how to navigate that world.
And with what tools do we draw that map? We are equipped with an apparatus through which we perceive what is inside and outside ourselves and a brain that interprets that input. In other words, what we know is both enabled and limited by what we perceive through our senses, which, since Aristotelian times, are commonly defined as touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. More recently, scientists are adding other senses, such as pressure and balance, to that list.
We use these senses not only to gather information, but also to filter information out. Human beings are very sight-oriented, but when sight is unavailable we orient toward hearing. Consider a blind person who can cross a street safely because of his or her heightened attention to and interpretation of the sounds of traffic.
Let’s do a little experiment here. In a moment, I’m going to count to three. On the number 3, close your eyes and listen …
What do you hear? As you were listening to me, were you aware of these sounds?
We are our own interpreters by making choices, conscious or unconscious, about what we ignore and what we pay attention to. Otherwise, we would so drown in information that we would be unable to act. Of course, we can make mistakes, too, ignoring or focusing on the wrong things, perhaps at our peril. Consider climate change.
But I believe that we humans also have an inescapable flaw, and that flaw is the problem of overconfidence in our perceptions and interpretations. We could use interpreters of our own interpretations. For my husband, Eli, and me, one such interpreter is our small dog, Lily, an adorable, lovable ball of fur who lives in a world we can only begin to guess at.
On our daily walks, Lily zippers her nose to the path, or worries a bush, following scents that are clearly beyond my capacity to discern. She barks at the seemingly empty forest, ears forward, nose twitching on the wind. I hear, see, and smell nothing, but she dashes into the woods and agitatedly worries a hole in a fallen log. Something is in there. These are the only times I can’t get my usually very good dog to come when I call. Her interpreting brain clearly tells her that whatever is in the log is more important than my, “Lily, come!”
When she finally recognizes the futility of her snuffling and pawing, she comes obediently to me, tail wagging.
So clearly, just living with a humble dog of indeterminate heritage demonstrates that there’s a world capable of being seen and heard that lies beyond the capacity of the human sensory apparatus to perceive.
And yet, human history is replete with cosmologies and epistemologies that rest on a conviction that we know everything, from the beginning of time, to the origins of creation, to who is pulling every string that is to be pulled up there. Wars lasting hundreds of years have been, are being, and will continue to be fought over who has the right explanation for everything that is to be explained. Oh my!
Of course, if we don’t know what we don’t know, who can blame us for burning people at the stake for believing that our story is right and their story is wrong?
What we do have, however, is imagination. We can imagine fairy tales. We can imagine the Pyramids and Darth Vadar and virgin birth even though we may have never experienced them. We have minds that can conceive of things that are outside our range of experience. So, let’s take a little excursion into some of the worlds that science tells us exist, though we don’t perceive them, and see where that takes us.
In his new book, “An Immense World,” science journalist Ed Yong invites us to imagine that we are in a large room, say a school gym.
In this gym are an elephant, a rattlesnake, a spider, a bat, an owl, a mosquito, a bumblebee, a robin, and what I would imagine is a rather startled girl named Rebecca. Yong asks us to consider how Rebecca and her fellow creatures might perceive one another.
“The elephant raises its trunk like a periscope, the rattlesnake flicks out its tongue, and the mosquito cuts through the air with its antennae. All three are smelling the space around them, taking in the floating scents. The elephant sniffs nothing of note. The rattlesnake detects the trail of the mouse, and coils its body in ambush. The mosquito smells the alluring carbon dioxide on Rebecca’s breath and the aroma of her skin. It lands on her arm, ready for a meal, but before it can bite, she swats it away—and her slap disturbs the mouse. It squeaks in alarm, at a pitch that is audible to the bat but too high for the elephant to hear. The elephant, meanwhile, unleashes a deep, thunderous rumble too low-pitched for the mouse’s ears or the bat’s but felt by the vibration-sensitive belly of the rattlesnake. Rebecca, who is oblivious to both the ultrasonic mouse squeaks and the infrasonic elephant rumbles, listens instead to the robin, which is singing at frequencies better suited to her ears. But her hearing is too slow to pick out all the complexities that the bird encodes within its tune.
“The robin’s chest looks red to Rebecca but not to the elephant, whose eyes are limited to shades of blue and yellow. The bumblebee can’t see red, either, but it is sensitive to the ultraviolet hues that lie beyond the opposite end of the rainbow. The sunflower it sits upon has at its center an ultraviolet bullseye, which grabs the attention of both the bird and the bee. The bullseye is invisible to Rebecca, who thinks the flower is only yellow. Her eyes are the sharpest in the room; unlike the elephant or the bee, she can spot the small spider sitting upon its web. But she stops seeing much of anything when the lights in the room go out.
“Plunged into darkness, Rebecca walks slowly forward, arms outstretched, hoping to feel obstacles in her way. The mouse does the same but with the whiskers on its face, which it sweeps back and forth several times a second to map its surroundings. As it skitters between Rebecca’s feet, its footsteps are too faint for her to hear, but they are easily audible to the owl perched overhead. The disc of stiff feathers on the owl’s face funnels sounds toward its sensitive ears, one of which is slightly higher than the other. Thanks to this asymmetry, the owl can pinpoint the source of the mouse’s skittering in both the vertical and horizontal planes. It swoops in, just as the mouse blunders within range of the waiting rattlesnake. Using two pits on its snout, the snake can sense the infrared radiation that emanates from warm objects. It effectively sees in heat, and the mouse’s body blazes like a beacon. The snake strikes … and collides with the swooping owl.
“All of this commotion goes unnoticed by the spider, which barely hears or sees the participants. Its world is almost entirely defined by the vibrations coursing through its web—a self-made trap that acts as an extension of its senses. When the mosquito strays into the silken strands, the spider detects the telltale vibrations of struggling prey and moves in for the kill. But as it attacks, it is unaware of the high-frequency sound waves that are hitting its body and bouncing back to the creature that sent them—the bat. The bat’s sonar is so acute that it not only finds the spider in the dark but pinpoints it precisely enough to pluck it from its web.
“As the bat feeds, the robin feels a familiar attraction that most of the other animals cannot sense. The days are getting colder, and it is time to migrate to warmer southern climes. Even within the enclosed gym, the robin can feel Earth’s magnetic field, and, guided by its internal compass, it points due south and escapes through a window. It leaves behind one elephant, one bat, one bumblebee, one rattlesnake, one slightly ruffled owl, one extremely fortunate mouse, and one Rebecca. These seven creatures share the same physical space but experience it in wildly and wondrously different ways. The same is true for the billions of other animal species on the planet and the countless individuals within those species. Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.”
Yong introduces us to the concept of Umvelt, described by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 to describe the sensory bubble that each living creature in the world inhabits.
Umvelt comes from the German word for environment. Each of us, from spider to mosquito to human to elephant and even to tree and vine, inhabits a world far greater than what its sensory architecture can perceive, but hopefully, enough for it to exist in its own niche, and maybe even survive. A vastly rich and complex world is filtered through our sensations and interpretations into our human species’ Umvelt, and, given experience, geography, opportunity, and capacity, into our own personal Umvelt.
Where we humans seem to shine, but perhaps not uniquely so, given our limited knowledge of the Umvelt of other creatures, is in our capacity to share and/or impose personal and community Umvelt on each other. Culture, embodied in stories, song, music, dance, religion and education, for example, shape and enlarge a community’s understanding of what is known, possible, required, and forbidden.
Science expands the boundaries of our senses to infer, observe, replicate, and manipulate what was previously unknown or undoable.
Our human Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know, which can itself serve our darkest interests. Thinking that we are capable of knowing all that there is to know, coupled with our capacity for imagination and for believing in what we imagine, and linked with our human territoriality and self-interest, does, for instance, justify and energize conquest, war, and genocide.
From a theistic perspective, if there is a God, or supreme being or originator of the universe, it would be awfully short-sighted to create humans in its image, much less human beings who think or look one way and not another! I’d like to believe that if there is a supreme being, that supreme being would have created all beings in some aspect of its own image, being the creator of all things in the universe as we do and do not know it.
This new science of animal consciousness and abilities is expanding our awareness of the fullness of the world beyond our senses, and raises questions about the nature of the universe and our place within it. We know the conundrum attributed to George Berkeley, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a noise?” Well, if there are vibrations and a spider is on her web, she will feel it, if it alters the wind flow, the bird will be pulled in the direction of the vacuum, if it allows the sun’s rays to penetrate the forest floor, plants will alter their pattern of growth and a snake might come to bask in the new warmth. The mouse that nested among the roots will need to find a new home. A tree falling in the forest makes a difference whether or not human ears are there to hear it.
But why is this important?
As Ed Yong points out, “When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens. Listen to treehoppers, and you realize that plants are thrumming with silent vibrational songs. Watch a dog on a walk, and you see that cities are crisscrossed with skeins of scent that carry the biographies and histories of their residents. Watch a swimming seal, and you understand that water is full of tracks and trails.”
Paying attention to the Umvelt of other creatures also magnifies moral questions about our outsized ability to alter the environment and why that matters. Our moral imperatives are not just to ourselves as “sentient” beings, but to all living things as “sentient” beings. We need to care about the climate and about protecting habitats and other species, not only because of our own welfare, but because of the preciousness of theirs.
But our own welfare is implicated, too, not just for our physical survival, as with needing bees to pollinate our food plants, but for our spiritual survival as well. With each loss of a species’ unique sensory sensitivity, do we lose a piece of the universe? A piece of our own natural world? What I do know is that we lose the possibility of learning what these lost creatures can teach us. As nature is diminished, so are we.
