Different Senses Mean Different Umwelts
Every species experiences our planet differently, what happens if we were to combine them
Hiya!
Isn’t it interesting how once you become aware of something, you start seeing it everywhere? It doesn’t matter what it is, either. If you’re considering buying a yellow car, you see yellow vehicles everywhere. Wondering whether to switch jobs or make another major life decision? Signs seemingly from the Universe pop up anywhere you look. Well, it appears I’m going through something like that.
I’ve written a few articles lately, including in this newsletter, that dance around the same concept. The idea is that there is far more to Life than we thought, and much of it occurs beyond our reach. This is even more apparent when you consider that despite our unique intelligence or conscious awareness, our senses still limit us. Many animals have capabilities we lack, so imagine what their experience of our planet is like.
Anthropomorphization
I’ve written about this before in more detail, but somewhere along the way, we humans evolved the ability to become emotionally attached and even assign human-like traits to non-human entities. Which, by the way, don’t even have to be alive — like your favorite mug. This trait is called anthropomorphization. We don’t know how long we’ve had this ability, maybe since the beginning, but it at least goes back to our ancient ancestors.
Then during the nineteenth century, our anthropomorphizing habits influenced the development of Scala Naturae — the idea that humans are at the peak of the supposed pyramid or “tree of life” and have essentially crowned ourselves the superior species on the planet. Both anthropomorphization and the belief in human superiority over the animal kingdom influenced our bias toward the actual experiences of animals.
According to a 2018 paper published in Frontiers, so much animal research is imbued with anthropomorphism that the terminology for animals’ sensory physiology is primarily based on how humans perceive the stimuli with our own senses — despite the sometimes vast differences between the animal we’re studying and us.
Umwelt
If you’ve read much of my writing, then you know that living in a world created of opposites, and finding balance within it, is a recurring theme of mine. In this case, the struggle is finding a balance between staying objective while studying the subjective experience of something else. But in 1934, Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll developed a concept called umwelt that does just that.
Umwelt paradoxically supports achieving objectivity via studying subjectivity. He describes umwelt as:
“All that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt”
In other words, an umwelt is the combination of our independent subjective experiences and perceptions within our shared reality. Your umwelt combines your perceptions and personal experiences and argues that, like you, anything capable of subjective perceptions and/or experiences has its own unique umwelt.
In his book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, author and science journalist Ed Yong explores the idea further by examining the many mysterious senses within the animal kingdom. Beyond what we humans can experience for ourselves, or outside our own umwelt if you will.
For instance, what might it actually be like to tap into Earth’s magnetic field to navigate without technology or to introduce ourselves by smelling each other rather than a fist bump? While science shows we are capable of echolocation, imagine if we only used echolocation and didn’t have sight as we know it.
During an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta about his book, Yong used a great example to help us imagine umwelt. He instructs readers to imagine sitting in a room with an elephant, a bat, a bee, a rattlesnake, and a spider. Then he reminds us that while we’d be in the same space as all of these animals, we would have vastly different experiences.
The rattlesnake will be able to sense the body heat of the animals around it; the elephant could make low infrasonic rumbles that the other creatures couldn't hear. A dog in that space would be able to get so much scent ... that its fellow animals couldn't get. So, each of us is trapped in our own sensory bubble and perceiving just this thin sliver of the fullness of reality."
If we found a way to combine the diverse information each of these senses provides, it would paint a far more precise picture of our planet and the life on it. An image immensely superior to ours alone.
We Have an Incomplete Image of Our Surroundings
Umwelt blends surprisingly well with other recent topics I’ve written about. Like Panpsychism — the idea that everything has a mind, even quarks — the brand new world of vibrational-based sciences, or even whether plants should be considered conscious.
To me, some, if not all, of these concepts seem just simple enough to warrant serious consideration. Still, it’s so easy to get caught up in our own perceptions of our world and forget that our experience is actually pretty limited. Or, as Yong shares in the previously mentioned interview,
"I'm sitting here in this room, and I don't feel as if my perception of the world is incomplete. I'm not sitting here marveling at the gaps in what I'm perceiving.
But this feeling of getting everything is such an illusion, and it's an illusion that every animal shares. It tells us that even the most familiar parts of our world are full of unknowns and extraordinary things."
We’ve come a long way over the last millennia, learning everything we can about the physical world as we experience it. Now we have the technology and opportunity to tap into new methods beyond our natural capabilities and explore beyond what we can experience for ourselves.
Observing and learning about other animals will help us gain a more diverse and well-formed picture of our surroundings than is visible to our eyes alone. It will also help us discover new layers of the same surroundings. Layers we wouldn’t dream of on our own.
Perspective Shift
Actually, if you think about it, we don’t even need to venture outside our species yet to discover significant differences in perceptions. We could study the differences in our own species’ experiences. I mean, we’re already starting to by learning about the perspectives of people outside our culture/class/race/religion/sexuality/etc. Though, what I’m talking about goes deeper than an individual’s social identity.
I’m talking about the literal experiences of our minds. Some people have inner monologues, some don’t, some have synesthesia where their senses blur together, and some have hyper-sensitive senses like super smellers. I could go on, but my point is we all assume that our mind is like everyone else’s. Our thoughts may differ, but we assume how we experience thought is the same for everyone. The truth is it isn’t, and we know very little about these differences.
What else might we learn about the world as we learn more about animals? Of course, knowing us, we’d probably have fun with it too. Imagine decades, maybe a century from now, if we developed a virtual reality where you could experience all the various ways animals see the world. With a click of a button, you could have vision like a lizard, a duck, or an elephant.
Just a reminder that you’re reading my free newsletter, Curious Adventure. If you’re itching for more, you’ll probably enjoy my other newsletter, Curious Life, which you’ve already received sneak peeks of on Monday morning. This week I’m talking about hybrid species.
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