A wonderful friend and former colleague recommended a book to me that I found fascinating. It’s called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong. It speaks to so many issues and concerns of our world today.
We both live the truth, and an illusion. The world we perceive can be so clear, immediate, and vital to us. Yet it sits imbedded in innumerable other worlds, universes, though we don’t and can’t perceive almost any of them. We mistake what we see for all that is there. What we perceive is not the world but one our human brain and body have evolved to perceive.
For example, Yong points out that we humans “cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can…[nor] the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect.” Our ears can’t hear the ultrasonic calls of hummingbirds or the infrasonic speech of elephants and whales. We can’t perceive the infrared radiation that is the heart of what snakes detect or the ultraviolet light birds and bees sense every moment.
Each species has what Yong, borrowing from Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexkull, called an umwelt or perceptual world. A tick does not perceive a tree, green leaves, blue skies. It doesn’t ignore them. It simply is incapable of sensing or knowing them; they are outside its umwelt. Likewise, we can’t sense the tick’s world.
Too often we ignore, or are ignorant of these co-existing realties, and we harm other species by imposing our perceptual system bias on them. For example, our submarines use underwater noises that confuse whales and drown out their calls. The glass panes in our homes appear as bodies of water to a bat’s sonar. We hurt our cats and dogs by interfering in their use of their primary sense activity, sniffing, and unknowingly impose our human visual bias on them.
If we can’t understand what the other worlds are like to live in, Yong points out maybe we can use our reason and imagination to honor and recognize them. For example, we can imaginatively enter the world of a dog, or even more so, an elephant. Scents, unlike light, do not move in straight lines. They go around corners, up and down, swirl, and twist in all directions. Humans have fine noses. But a dog not only has more sense receptors, a larger olfactory bulb and scent-brain than we do, but a more complicated nasal structure.
When we humans exhale, we purge odors from our nose. But each nostril of a dog is divided in two so it can exhale carbon dioxide while inhaling more aromas. This is one reason they can detect low blood sugar levels or tumors in humans or discern a single fingerprint on a microscopic slide even after it was outdoors for a week. They can smell in the air an oncoming storm.
For dogs, everything around them includes the scent not only of what’s here, now, but the past and future. And smell has the most direct link to the brain of any sense. And since that link goes right to the brain’s emotional center, I imagine their world is dominated by emotions. Some might doubt the rich emotional lives of many animals but this science argues otherwise.
It can appear that when we see a tree, the tree is an object out “there” separate from us, and we are the subject “in here.” But this is an illusion. It’s a useful one, allowing us to live in a socially constructed world of names, neighbors, and nations. The seeming gap between the tree over there and me is not empty. The air is filled with molecules. A dog can smell odors in it. The snake can feel vibrations in it. The earth holds both our feet and a tree’s roots.
The universe provides us with an ever changing, spinning plethora of stimuli, says Yong. Our sense receptors detect pressure or movement of that stimuli. Light is just electromagnetic radiation. Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It takes biology, a body-mind, to turn these swirling stimuli into something meaningful; to turn randomness into colors, songs, and delightful aromas and tastes. The tree is not separate from the mind perceiving it.
Even more, it seems to me that it takes all our senses plus our history, and the history of all humans⎼ and the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat⎼ to give us a perception. All this, and everything is involved in any perception. In a deeper and more scientific way, “we” as a separate being don’t see a separate “tree.” Somehow, a universe perceives. The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh summarized this insight as “to be is to inter-be.”
Another point in the book that had exceptional relevance to me is that for many reasons, even with one sense we can’t sense everything there for us. For example, if we were able to see everything that might be available to any sort of eye at all, it would completely overwhelm, maybe kill us.
Our senses must be in a nearly constant state of readiness so they can fire when necessary. This takes great amounts of energy. So, they don’t just detect stimuli but filter out what is unnecessary. What we need is certainty. Going back to the tick; it can sense only 3 stimuli, but that restriction is necessary so they can be certain about what they do detect and move appropriately. In this case, certainty is more important than richness of stimuli.
This explains something about us humans that helps and yet plagues us. Our certainty. We think what we know and experience, or what we think we know, is right, correct. Even when we are self-critical and doubtful, we are certain about the accuracy of our criticisms.
And since we humans are usually so tied to others through relationships, social media, just being in a culture, what we are certain of can be misinformation, propaganda, and destructive. It can be something we believe only because people we know believe it, or it fits our identity. We didn’t evolve mechanisms to automatically filter out lies and misinformation or a possible bias toward self-interest, and we must choose to learn to do that.
And as Yong advises, we must choose to learn about what we don’t sense or learn what the implications are of how and what we do sense. Each species contributes in its own way to creating the vast universe of worlds we inhabit. Losing any species, and we are losing species to extinction at an alarming rate, is not just losing a neighbor. It is losing a segment of how the universe sees itself. We need to better accept and honor the species we live with.
We need humility and an open awareness that there are other ways of sensing and conceptualizing the universe than our ways of doing so. And when we even try to open to others like this, we give ourselves a gift that frees us. It can be necessary at times to turn away, to not think about all that is changing. But we must be careful that we don’t turn away so often we create a nightmare that imprisons us.
One practice I’ve used to help me open a little to this immensity is to: pause, standing or maybe sitting still in a safe place. Let our eyes just rest or close partly or fully. And simply feel the air on our face as we take a breath. Maybe feel the air passing over our upper lip; or how our shoulders expand with the inbreath, let go with the outbreath. We might taste the air as we inhale; and as we exhale, simply let it go. We might feel our belly expand with an inhalation, let go with an exhalation. Or feel our feet, balanced and pushing down on the earth. We might feel the air around us not only with our face, our hands, but our belly, back, and thighs, or with our whole being. We might hear or feel whatever sounds are around us not only with our ears. Smell any aromas not only with our noses but our belly, or our whole body. We might notice how each touch, taste, smell, sound, sight, pressure is just here in the universe; just right here.
If only we could feel this openness, this humility, maybe we could better sense the immense universe of our inter-being. Thank you, Ed Yong, for assisting us in this realization.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock