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.

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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

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