An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” wrote the American naturalist Henry Beston. “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and tr

Perhaps people who experience the world in ways that are considered atypical have an intuitive feeling for the limits of typicality.

Sensing can feel passive, as if eyes and other sense organs were intake valves through which animals absorb and receive the stimuli around them. But over time, the simple act of seeing recolors the world. Guided by evolution, eyes are living paintbrushes. Flowers, frogs, fish, feathers, and fruit all show that sight affects what is seen, and that m

The critics do have a point, though: We cannot assume that all animals are capable of pain or other conscious experiences. Consciousness isn’t an inherent property of all life.

Evolution has pushed the nervous systems of insects toward minimalism and efficiency, cramming as much processing power as possible into small heads and bodies. Any extra mental ability—say, consciousness—requires more neurons, which would sap their already tight energy budget. They should pay that cost only if they reaped an important benefit.

Could pain exist without consciousness? If you strip the emotion out of pain, are you just left with nociception, or a gray area that our imaginations struggle to fill? Perhaps more than for other senses, it is easy to forget that pain can vary, and hard to conceive of how it might.

I’m suddenly aware of the choruses that might be vibrating through all the plants we walk past. I think about the vibrations that we ourselves are making with every step—the seismic surface waves that ripple out from each footfall. Although we hear the crunch of twigs underfoot and the soft squelches as shoes meet mud, we don’t detect the tremors o

That direct connection to the natural vibratory world may be in decline, but a different vibroscape has arisen. Modern cellphones buzz against our skin and fingertips, alerting us of breaking news, upcoming events, and social attention. Our devices use vibrations to connect us to the world beyond our bodies, extending our Umwelt beyond the reach of

For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. The earth was full of sounds which the old-time Indian could hear, sometimes putting his ear to it so as to hear more clearly.”