What Counts as Seeing

things don’t have to be better than us to be extraordinary. I really wanted the writing to capture this feeling of nature as both being kind of goofy at times but also deeply wondrous.

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

I think of going for a walk with Typo as him checking his social media. It’s very much like when I’m scrolling through Instagram or Twitter and seeing what my friends are up to. He does this on a walk. He checks out what all the neighborhood dogs are like, what they’re doing, where they’ve been. It’s a deeply social activity for him.

There’s always going to be this chasm where it can only be leapt over through imagination rather than through empiricism. Empiricism can guide our imagination, but we still have to make that final leap on our own. To really get at this, you need to fuse the sciences and the arts. You need to think more broadly than just the products of research pap... See more

It’s a slightly limiting concept. It means all of us are kind of constrained and trapped by the confines of our own senses. But it also is wonderfully expansive because it means that nothing can do everything.

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

The senses as a topic really leans into that because of how important imagination is for understanding them. Light is electromagnetic radiation. Smells are just small molecules drifting through air and water. Sound is just pressure waves. It’s not actually obvious that we should be able to sense any of these things, let alone then transform them in... See more

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

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.