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

as Nagel predicted. But there is value and glory in the striving. On this journey through nature’s Umwelten, our intuitions will be our biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest assets.

the smells that distinguish one person’s scent from another’s are not pheromones. Indeed, despite the existence of pheromone parties where singletons sniff each other’s clothes, or pheromone sprays that are marketed as aphrodisiacs, it’s still unclear if human pheromones even exist. Despite decades of searching, none have been identified.[*15]

He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says.

Much like color, it is inherently subjective and surprisingly variable. Just as wavelengths of light aren’t universally red or blue, and odors aren’t universally fragrant or pungent, nothing is universally painful,

I’m reminded of Hamlet’s plea to Horatio that “there are more things in heaven and Earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The quote is often taken as an appeal to embrace the supernatural. I see it rather as a call to better understand the natural.

“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

The English language confirms his view with just three dedicated smell words: stinky, fragrant, and musty. Everything else is a synonym (aromatic, foul), a very loose metaphor (decadent, unctuous), a loan from another sense (sweet, spicy), or the name of a source (rose, lemon). Of the five Aristotelian senses, four have vast and specific lexicons.

He couldn’t see any of them, but he knew there was a bustling electric world below his feet. “It was a moment I can still close my eyes and go back to,” he tells me. “It was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had, and I’m so sad I’m not there right now.”

Smell works at a distance; taste works through contact.