Animal Senses #1: Umwelt

Ed Yong’s wonderful book, Immense World, looks into how different living things perceive the world. We depend so heavily on vision, but others rely more on other senses. Bats relying on sound is the most well-known example, but as Yong explains, the list of other senses is, well, immense, and fascinating.

 

Yong explains the term “Umwelt” in this context – it’s a German word coined in 1909 that refers to what an animal perceives as the world around it. That depends on which senses it uses, the “resolution level” of those senses, and finally how the brain processes the signals. Put them in the same room, and the Umwelt of the human and the bat would be very different.

“Each species is constrained in some ways and liberated in others… This is a book not about superiority but about diversity.”

 

He then asks us to consider the miracle that animals, including us, can perceive anything at all. Huh?

“Light is just electromagnetic radiation. Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules… The senses transform the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences… They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information.”

 

Anthropomorphism refers to the human tendency to inappropriately attribute human emotions or mental abilities to other animals. But, as Yong reminds us, the most common error of anthropomorphism is to forget the Umwelt and therefore “to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.”. This bias has consequences. We inadvertently fill the world with stimuli that confuse or irritate other animals and misinterpret the behavior of those animals.

 

Despite the risks, difficulties and challenges, Yong has written a terrific book on the Umwelt of animals by describing a different sense in each chapter. I will summarize each of those in this series of blogs.