every(thing is sentient

  

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In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. 

A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. 

It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.


—Ed Yong (treasure
NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

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we are never alone

This is a detailed model of one human cell, obtained using x-ray, NMR and cryoelectron microscopy datasets by Evan Ingersoll and Gael McGill.

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"You are mostly not you,” microbial ecologist Rob Knight wrote in his fascinating exploration of the human biome, in which he pointed out that only 1% of the genes in our bodies are human and the remaining 99% are microbial.

—Nicola Davies 
Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes

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We are beginning to encounter ourselves—not always comfortably or pleasantly—as multi-species beings already partaking in timescales that are fabulously more complex than the onwards-driving version of history many of us still imagine ourselves to inhabit.

The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.


—Robert Macfarlane
Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis — a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while they are still unfertilised eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right — a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world.

All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them. And we cannot fully appreciate our own microbiome without appreciating how those of our fellow species enrich and influence their lives. We need to zoom out to the entire animal kingdom, while zooming in to see the hidden ecosystems that exist in every creature.

When we look at beetles and elephants, sea urchins and earthworms, parents and friends, we see individuals, working their way through life as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single brain, and operating with a single genome.

This is a pleasant fiction. In fact, we are legion, each and every one of us. Always a “we” and never a “me.”


—Ed Yong (treasure
I Contain Multiudes, excerpts

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Umwelt!

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Umwelt — that lovely German word for the sensory bubble each creature inhabits, both limiting and defining its perceptual reality.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn't feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

The umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.

It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity. When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.


—Ed Yong
An Immense World, excerpts
(treasures

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this is how all animals see

  

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Dogs and other animals detect smells using proteins called odorant receptors, chemical sensors. They sit on the surface of cells, grabbing specific molecules that float past. 

The process is temporary: after the [receptors] are done, they either release or destroy the molecules that they’ve grabbed. But one group of them bucks this trend: opsins. 

They are special because they keep hold of their target molecules, and because those molecules absorb light. This is the entire basis of vision. This is how all animals see—using light-sensitive proteins that are actually modified chemical sensors. 

In a way, we see by smelling light. 

—Ed Yong

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

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Light is breath’s shadow.


—Ahmed Salman
NOOSPHE.RE

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this is prayer

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Each house has a number of windows, which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as seen from the house. By no means does it seem like a section of a larger world.

Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house— its [Umwelt] unique sensory bubble. The garden which appears to our eye is fundamentally different to that which presents itself to the inhabitants of the house.


—Jakob von Uexküll, 1909
from An Immense World, Ed Yong

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Even when animals share the same senses with us, their Umwelten can be very different. There are animals that can hear sounds in what to us seems like perfect silence, see colours in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness.

There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins see with their entire bodies.


—Ed Yong (treasure)
An Immense World
also treasure

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To be conscious of oneself right to the core is to perceive, at the depths of the self, an Other. 

This is prayer: to be conscious of oneself to the very center, to the point of meeting an Other. 

Thus prayer is the only human gesture which totally realizes the human being’s stature.


—Luigi Giussani

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The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within.

The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.


—Louis Pasteur

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If you want to know who someone is, what is flowing through or not flowing, stay in a listening posture. 

Close your eyes inside your companion’s shadow. 

—Rumi

  

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