Why did I get this book?
I love Yong’s science writing, but this is also a general subject that intensely fascinates me (animal cognition, including sensory experience) and that I’ve been reading about as a generalist for years.
Is it what I thought it was?
Far more. Easily one of the most satisfying “scientific overviews” I’ve ever read, and it’s stimulated a lot of thinking for me.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I will have to suppress an urge to fanboy it up around my colleagues in Biology, or to bug them for more information about some of the research that Yong discusses. I intend to re-read it heavily to help me with writing a work of speculative fiction I’ve been doodling around with for a few years. (Any teacher of creative writing who focuses on speculative fiction should think about using the book in their teaching.) I could easily see reading this book in some kind of interdisciplinary group—everybody could take something from it, but I think especially philosophers, literary critics and artists could get a lot out of it.
Quotes
“Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world…A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. These three things constitute its Umwelt. Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world. The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist.”
“Smells can arrive before their sources, foretelling what’s to come. The scents unleashed by distant rain can clue people in to advancing storms; the odorants emitted by humans arriving home can send their dogs running to a door. These skills are sometimes billed as extrasensory, but they are simply sensory. It’s just that things often become apparent to the nose before they appear to the eyes.”
“‘If I were a catfish, I’d love to jump into a vat of chocolate,’ John Caprio tells me. ‘You could taste it with your butt.’”
“Through a fly’s eyes, the world might seem to move in slow motion. The imperceptibly fast movements of other flies would slow to a perceptible crawl, while slow animals might not seem like they were moving at all. ‘Everyone asks us how we catch the killer flies,’ Gonzalez-Bellido says. ‘You just move toward them slowly with a vial. If you’re slow enough, you’re just part of the background.’”
“The separation between nociception and pain does not make the latter any less real. People (and especially women) with chronically painful disorders have long been disbelieved and neglected by the medical establishment…Pain is easy to dismiss in this way because it is subjective…It is not the case that nociception is a physical process of the body, while pain is a psychological process of the mind. Both arise from the firing of neurons. It’s just that in human, nociception can be confined to the peripheral nervous system, while with pain, the brain is always involved. Pain requires some degree of conscious awareness. Nociception can exist without it.”
“Arriving at a fire, the beetles have perhaps the most dramatic sex in the animal kingdom, mating as a forest burns around them. Later, the females lay their eggs on charred, cooled bark.”
“Nature documentaries get this wrong when they try to show what rattlesnakes see by filming the world with thermal cameras. Those images, with white and red rodents moseying in front of blue and violet backgrounds, are always unrealistically detailed. Predator, the 1987 movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger encounters a trophy-hunting alien, did a better job of depicting the blurriness of infrared vision. (This is perhaps the only time that anyone has accused Predator of being realistic.)”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
This kind of science writing is a really difficult thing to pull off as well as Yong habitually does. The clarity of his prose can make it easy to underestimate the art involved. Yong manages to give credit to the scientists whose research he is summarizing and synthesizing in an artful, subtle way (as opposed to the paleontologist Steve Brusatte, whose tendency to go on long personal tangents describing the lives of other researchers I’ve noted before), but he also provides a much clearer kind of added value than many science journalists by explaining difficult technical points in a way that doesn’t merely make them accessible but also connects what he’s explaining to a much wider range of questions and ideas. You can come into this book as a philosopher of mind whose main touchpoint with this research is Thomas Nagle’s famous essay about whether we can know what it’s like to be a bat (an essay that Yong references often) and find that Yong is repeatedly looping in your angle of approach while also pushing out new information in your direction that is deeply challenging and important.
Yong also deeply underscores how much scientific understanding can’t be straightforwardly observational and empirical. It requires speculative, imaginative thinking. Much of the research he describes depended upon the scientists in question doing their best to understand the Umvelt of different organisms as they experience it—that’s been the only way to even begin to seriously map out and predict the consequences of different sensory infrastructures in various organisms. But that effort, as Yong points out, eventually hits the hard limits that Nagle explores in his essay—there are things we literally can’t imagine. I think this incidentally points out why speculative fiction has such a hard time really describing the subjective perspective of imaginary aliens, and it makes it harder than ever for me to envision a genuine first contact with any sapient aliens whose Umvelt is fundamentally different than ours. The only successful examples we may have are within our species—Yong describes how a small handful of humans have different vision, how some blind humans really can echolocate (it’s not just in the comic-books), how synesthesia gives us a bit of insight into sensory alterity, etc. But expand that outward—when we experiment with trying to use language with other earthbound species (gorillas, chimpanzees, dolphins), we are usually privileging our Umvelt, and it almost works with our closest relatives. With dolphins or elephants, it’s a hopeless project unless we can somehow imaginatively inhabit their sensory world more than we’ve been able to. Yong points out how much our sensory chauvinism even limits our relationship to dogs—we’re helped only because our co-evolution has made dogs simulate a visuality that gets positive responses from us, but most dog owners spend almost no effort thinking about what smell means in canine terms.
I also really appreciated how profoundly physics comes into this book, repeatedly. I’m sure the biophysical character of sensory systems is obvious to my colleagues in biology, but it was a really big revelation for me—that different kinds of sight involve fundamentally different relationships to light, that some sensory systems are profoundly local and others extend over far vaster distances than sight, that the speed of signals through environments interacts with the movement systems of organisms in all sorts of ways, that the morphology of an organism affects its sensory pickup profoundly, and so on. I think the most striking example of the physics of sensory systems for me was, “So how is it in purely physical terms that bats are able to cognitively sort out their echolocating signals returning to their ears at the necessary speed to govern rapid flight towards targets and evading obstacles, especially if there are other bats nearby whose signals are also within hearing range that might confuse interpretation of an individual bat’s own signal?”
This is the sort of book that really makes me wish I’d stuck with my teenage aspiration to be a herpetologist—I think I’d have a completely different experiential and emotional relationship to my life as a scholar if I’d gone in that direction—but it’s also interesting for me to chart the interleaving of professional outcomes with shifting paradigms in biology if you pay close attention to the biographies that Yong integrates into his synthesis of research. There’s a considerable number of scientists he talks to who are in this field despite the advice of mentors and senior professors rather than because of it, and have in some cases labored fairly long in obscurity before finding that their work has become important or influential. (It’s also striking how long it took in some cases for consensus to form in favor of what we now regard as completely established fact—bat echolocation among many examples.) So there’s a brake on the romance of “that would have been so cool!”—every discipline and every field has its own kind of short-sightedness (so to speak).