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.

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.

I think a lot about the limitations of language and how we interpret the language we use every day to talk about the senses.

Comparing and contrasting that tendency to make generalizations can very easily devalue the experiences of humans who sense the world in very different ways.

I think that tension between just perceiving something, just detecting a stimulus, and then using it in the sort of rich way where we have a mental representation of what’s detected, is actually a very profound tension that exists across a lot of the senses. Does a mosquito landing on my skin have a mental perception of taste in the way that I have... See more

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

An Immense World argues that the world around us is deep and richer than we know because 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. And even everyday things, a street or a plant or a featureless body of water, are ric... See more

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.

most humans don’t really realize how interdependent we are to other organisms. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, bugs—there is still this binary thinking of these organisms as good or bad, as clean or dirty, which really obscures the reality.