I think I will always remember Ed Yong as the voice who, along with Norman Swan, helped keep me informed in regards to COVID. I therefore was initially intrigued when I came upon An Immense World and found that it was in fact not about the pandemic.
At the heart of An Immense World is Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of ‘unwelt’. The unwelt is the unique, species-specific sensory bubble that every animal inhabits, the “slice of reality I can perceive.”[1]
Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.
Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong
Throughout, Yong explores the concept through chapters on surface vibrations, smells and tastes; light; color; pain; heat; contact and flow; sound; echoes; electric fields; and magnetic fields. However, Yong is also keen to highlight that the concept of unwelt is more complicated than any single sense.
An animal’s Umwelt is the product not just of its sense organs but of its entire nervous system acting in concert. If the sense organs acted alone, nothing would make sense. Throughout this book, we have explored the senses as separate parts. But to truly understand them, we need to think about them as part of a unified whole.
Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong
All in all, Yong’s writing balances between “scientific rigor and personal awe.” [2] Laura Miller captures it best, calling the book a “catalog of wonders.”
One of the things that really stood out for me while reading An Immense World was the limit to what we can actually know. Whether it be the constraints of science or appreciation of differences. This is something that Michel Faber touches upon in his exploration of animals and music in Listen.[3] However, one of the biggest challenges is anthropomorphism and actually forgetting about others.
Perhaps the most common, and least recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.
Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong
At its heart, An Immense World is about humility and serves as a corrective to the presumptions of human beings.
- Source: Ed Yong unlocks the secret world of animal senses – ABC listen ↩
- “In this book that follows on from 2018’s I Contain Multitudes, Yong writes in a perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world.” Source: ‘An Immense World’ dives deep into the umwelt of animals by Barbara J. King ↩
- “Cognitive neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel explains that when we humans listen to music, we predict where the next beat will be, and get pleasure either from our guesses being correct or from the rhythm teasingly wrong-footing us with unexpected syncopations. Apes just don’t get that.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
REVIEW: An Immense World (Ed Yong) by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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