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

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.”

A scientist’s explanations about other animals are dictated by the data she collects, which are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses. The boundaries of the human Umwelt often make the Umwelten of others opaque to us.

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,

In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.

Nagel wrote. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.”

Evolution has pushed the nervous systems of insects toward minimalism and efficiency, cramming as much processing power as possible into small heads and bodies. Any extra mental ability—say, consciousness—requires more neurons, which would sap their already tight energy budget. They should pay that cost only if they reaped an important benefit.

Equating wilderness with otherworldly magnificence treats it as something remote, accessible only to those with the privilege to travel and explore. It imagines that nature is something separate from humanity rather than something we exist within. “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually l

The senses transform the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences—things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany. They connect animals to their surroundings. And they connect animals to each other

As the writer Marcel Proust once said, “The only true voyage…would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes…to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.”