I’ve read a lot of writing on the senses, both about humans and other animals, and it’s really striking to me that people gravitate towards big, sweeping statements about humans as a species that clearly don’t apply to all members of the species. One of the most common things you’ll read on this topic, from almost any source, is that humans are a v... See more

He says if he was a catfish, he would jump into a vat of chocolate because you could taste chocolate with your butt.

EY: That’s right. Yeah, absolutely.

AW: Imagine if humans could taste throughout their entire body! What a great image, right? Tasting chocolate—

EY: With your butt.

AW: With your butt.

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. So humans, we have a very good sense of touch, but it only operates on close contact; we don’t have the distance touch that a fish or a manatee or a spider has. We have very sharp eyes, almost unparalleled in their sharpness; but because of that, we trade in sensitivity. Our ears are pretty good, ... See more

umwelt (a term coined by the zoologist Jakob von Uexkull): the [particular ways in which an] animal perceives the immense world.

there’s a part in the book where I talk about what kind of eye would be best at discriminating the fine differences between flowers. What you get is an eye that has receptors for blue, green, and ultraviolet: specifically, the wavelengths of an insect eye. You might think that eye evolved to see those colors, but actually it’s the other way around.... See more

we are confined by the constraints of our own sensors. Other animals operate under different constraints and so perceive a very different world than what we are familiar with.

Science is not a neutral force. A scientist’s conclusions are profoundly effect-influenced by the methods that she used, which are influenced by the questions that she thought to ask, which are influenced by her own beliefs and values, which are influenced by her senses, by her culture, by her background.

So much of the way knowledge is produced within an academy is very exclusive and inaccessible to so many people with not just different senses, but just to different walks of life. And that’s across every field. It’s such a loss, I think, about our understanding of the natural world.

One of my favorite reviews for I Contain Multitudes was a one-star review on Amazon, someone saying that this is a book about feelings, which makes it not a science book. There are no figures and tables or charts and numbers, and it’s not serious enough. That science should be opaque and serious. I think it should be exactly the opposite.