From an early age, we are told that there are five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. We see with our eyes, hear with our ears, smell with our nose, taste with our mouth, and touch with our hands. This, however, is only true for humans, and the world is actually teeming with countless other sights, sounds, smells, tastes, colours, vibrations, surfaces, and electric and magnetic fields. Not all animals perceive these senses in the same way, but we do not need to feel everything; the important thing is to focus on what we need to survive.
The word ‘Umwelt’ was coined by the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, and defines the part of the world that animals can sense and experience. It is a kind of sensory bubble, in which different stimuli are transformed into information. Every Umwelt is different, but we tend to measure them all using the same metrics that define our own, because we believe that they are universal. Viewing everything through our own limited interpretation, however, severely diminishes our understanding of the world. Studying the Umwelts of other creatures is crucial for conservation, but it requires what Alexandra Horowitz calls an ‘informed imaginative leap’. In other words, we need to step outside our own environment, leave our safe and familiar comfort zone behind, let ourselves be guided by our curiosity, and gain a new perspective of our planet.
Some animals use two or more different senses together, at the same time, such as the platypus, whose duck-like beak contains two different types of receptors: those that detect electric fields, and those that are sensitive to touch. Both send the same signal to the brain, which does not distinguish between the electrical sense and touch; for the platypus, they both make up one sense, which we might call ‘electric touch’.
Humans are the only creatures capable of experiencing different Umwelts, and therefore of coming close to understanding, even if only partially, how other animals live in the world.
