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

Equating wilderness with otherworldly magnificence treats it as something remote, accessible only to those with the privilege to travel and explore. It imagines that nature is something separate from humanity rather than something we exist within. “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually l

“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

Taste is reflexive and innate, while smell is not.

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

“No robot is as sophisticated as an insect.” Her point is that insect nervous systems have evolved to pull off complex behaviors in the simplest possible ways, and robots show us how simple it is possible to be. If we can program them to accomplish all the adaptive actions that pain supposedly enables without also programming them with consciousnes

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

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.

Distinguishing self from other isn’t a given; it’s a difficult problem that nervous systems have to solve. “This is largely what sentience is,” neuroscientist Michael Hendricks tells me. “And perhaps it’s why sentience is: It’s the process of sorting perceptual experiences into self-generated and other-generated.”

Smell works at a distance; taste works through contact.