Educating the Senses

Jon Young, celebrated birder and naturalist, describes what might be called extra-sensory perception in people with superior knowledge of bird calls. Such perception, he writes in What the Robin Knows, is not limited to distinguishing between bird types, but the specific calls of specific birds – some of which indicate predators, and specific ones at that. Cats versus hawks, for example. Or people.

In modern times, this may sound like a fanciful skill held by the few men and women dedicated to such novelties, but Young makes a crucial claim. Our ancestors, he says, walked through the forest with a sensory field that expanded far beyond our own. Through intimate knowledge of bird language, such people knew precisely who and what else was in the forest with them, whether friend or foe, without seeing or hearing them directly.

I find this description of Young’s delightful, and an excellent introduction to an even broader illumination of the senses in both animals and people. Ed Yong (no relation to Young) is a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist for the Atlantic. In his recent book An Immense World he invites us to look closely at the sensory worlds of wildly diverse and unique animals. What are they feeling, seeing, and tasting, and how might those senses be different from our own? To illustrate his point, let’s turn back to the birds.

Robins, like many birds, hear higher frequencies than people. When their songs were recorded by scientists, Yong reports, they found high-pitched notes being sung that none of us are hearing. But of course, there’s overlap – so what we hear a robin sing is only part of its song. To itself and other birds, it’s different.

Isn't that wonderful?

Yong’s book is a rich and detailed exploration of the sensory world of planet earth’s animals, and it extends far beyond the birds. What is it like to have the eye of a fish with four, not three, color receptors like ours? Or the mantis shrimp, which has sixteen? How about the electromagnetic bill of a platypus that can "feel" electric charges in the movements and muscles of its insect prey – without touching it? Or the feet of elephants, which pick up ultralow frequency soundwaves that can travel long distances, a skill that resembles that of their whale cousins.

But like Young’s description of birdcalls, this isn’t just a book of novelties. Yong invites us to consider the complete sensory world of any given creature, which he refers to as the umwelt (oom-welt). It’s a word worth getting to know. Originally defined by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll around the turn of the 20th century, an animal’s umwelt is understood as its total perceptive ability.

To reckon with what this means – take a second to feel into the umwelt of, say, a nearly blind snake who feels the earth rumble along the entire length of its belly, “sees” infrared heat behind objects that would occlude our own vision, and smells in stereo due to the forked tip of its tongue. Like our ability to determine the direction of a sound, or depth in our field of vision, this two-pronged approach (two eyes, two ears, two tips) tells the snake which way the prey is moving. What must it feel like to be such a creature? Surely, every umwelt must be unique.

In the 1900’s, von Uexküll could only imagine the different umwelten (plural of umwelt) of different animals. But his noteworthy insight was that different animals must be having very different sensory experiences in the same locations, and that includes us. Yong’s beautiful descriptions from modern biology fill in this picture and make it pop with color and clarity. The result is a touching and fascinating view into what the earth really is.

We usually take it for granted that the human umwelt defines color, sound, and depth. We now have excellent science and language to help us recognize that scores of other creatures are sensing colors, shapes, and voids entirely unknown to us. Whole systems of paying attention that we don’t have.

This is not fantastical. Human perceptions are sharp, and whether seeing a branch with human eyes, fish eyes, or echo-locating it like a bat – all create reasonable approximations of the object in the eye of the beholder. Neither Young, von Uexküll, nor Yong is suggesting anything supernatural, and neither am I. What makes this study exquisite is precisely how natural it is.

It gives us, I believe, a useful perspective at this time. Far from being separated by the gulf of awareness between us and other creatures, we can, using our illustrative power of imagination, expand our appreciation of any moment by recognizing that diverse life forms are at that very second seeing and participating in things we never fully know. And it’s all happening at the same time. In the same place. Right on top of each other. In our backyards.

Consider, then, the practice of kindergarteners the world over – pretending to be a bunny, a bear, or a soaring eagle. Imagination awakens us to the possibilities of what we don’t see. What’s more, it helps us develop sympathy and care beyond our own perceptions. Through the work of these noble scientists, we now possess remarkable clarity and language which helps normalize and even heighten this practice for all ages.

Imagine sitting by a river, a hilltop, or within a city park. Who and what is listening, and with what ears? What a delightful activity for children, a curious and calming meditation for adults. Each creature nearby like a tiny antenna roaming the earth’s surface with its unique sensory gates. The squirrels. The worms. The robins.

It’s even possible, I believe, to imagine ourselves into the umwelten of all the species and creatures present in any moment. von Uexküll seems to have agreed. He gave us a useful companion term to umwelt: umgebung (a fun one to pronounce with kids). Umgebung is an animal’s umwelt as seen by a separate observer.

Sitting in a quiet location and “listening” for the umgebungen (my plural) is a skill that’s worth cultivating and sharing. It may represent a novel and useful shift in human perspective, one that’s based in nature, imagination, and science. It’s simple enough to teach to children. What it induces is a sort of kaleidoscopic view of planet earth, something that might help us see beyond ourselves and our particular moment. Like a robin’s singing voice, we might develop a greater appreciation for the full song and scope of this lovely planet.

It's a listening, not a speaking.

Imagine if all or many of us were doing this – trying to listen at this level? Making mistakes. Laughing at ourselves. Being rude. Being kind. The sort of things humans always do. Sharing thoughtful care. It’s a rich perspective, one that neither invalidates human senses, nor endorses them. It’s receptive, not proscriptive. A listening, not a speaking. And it can be cultivated and shared like any skill.

Let’s end with a return to Jon Young’s forest. Now we can imagine an ancestor, or perhaps even ourselves, walking through those same trees not just with an ear to the birds, but with an eye to the umwelten of the entire ecosystem. What is this one and precious moment communicating – not just to us, but to all of its inhabitants? How might we be informed of our choices and behavior? In this one time? On this one earth?