The book An Immense World is a bit different than the books that I usually read but I got really interested in it after watching the documentary Life in Colour with David Attenborough on Netflix.

I wanted to understand more about how other animal senses are different from ours but learned a lot more about not only how their senses differ from ours but also how their senses build their view of their world (Umwelt).

It is so interesting how we have in a way a limited experience of the world as there’s much that we don’t know that exists.

Let’s see more about the book An Immense World: How Animals Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.

Learnings from An Immense World

Learning that the other animals see the world in a very different and unique way made me appreciate more and try to pay more attention to the small things around us and how all of them relate to each other.

It is fascinating that the way we perceive the world sometimes is so different that we may think of them as alien-like. We are such a visual being that we miss much of what other senses have to offer (mostly because we are not capable of sensing but sometimes just because we don’t pay attention to it)

During the reading on a few occasions, I remember what Lex Friedman used to ask his guests when talking about if there’s life out there in the space. He would ponder about how would we perceive other intelligent beings if they operated very differently from us or in a very different time scale. The question was very provocative because we are so limited to what we can see by our senses, what we consider intelligence, or even by our limited lifetime. And reading this book brought up this feeling a few times.

We live in an alien world but don’t pay attention or we are not capable of sensing due to our limitations and what evolution focused on during our evolution.

The book is full of learnings, but to not be a too-long post, I will share the 5 most important learnings from the book.

every animal senses the world in a different way

We humans have vision as our “primary” sense and because of that we usually think that most other animals also see the world the same we see it. But even animals that have vision as the primary sense may not see the same as us as their color sensing can be different, the sensitivity, the acuity, and even the speed we things.

Other animals have smell as a primary sense (like dogs), heat, surface vibrations, sounds, etc. So every animal sees their own world. We can be in the same environment and each animal will sense it in a different way.

smell is more important than taste for humans

Comparing senses is a complicated thing, as each sense gives different or complementary information about the world, but one thing that I found nice is that we sometimes forget the importance of smell in our daily lives.

When we eat something delicious, we mainly think that its flavor comes from the taste. But the sensation of the flavor comes more from the smell than from the taste. That’s the reason why food tastes dull during a cold: Its flavor remains unchanged, but without the ability to smell it, its richness fades.

elephant’s main sense is the smell

I like documentaries as a way to passively learn something while relaxing and nature documentaries are my favorites. In one of them (not sure if it was “Life on Our Planet”, “Our Planet” or “Our Great National Parks”) they should how the elephants can find underground water during their migrations in Africa.

I found it fascinating how they did that. One idea about how they did this was that they remembered where the water wells were buried from previous visits in past years but the book gives more clarity on the subject (at least for me).

Elephant’s main sense is smell. It is believed that they can recognize each other only by smell, recognize the sex, and age of other elephants, recognize if the poop left is from someone in their group or another group and it probably helps them find water. Maybe their capacity to find trails and places is not only due to their memory but also to their very good sense of smell.

a few fishes use electric fields

Some fishes like Knifefishes and elephantfishes use their bodies are a kind of battery, they generate an electric field around them and use this electric field to detect their environment and also to communicate with one another. “Electricity is to them what echoes are to bats, smells are to dogs, and light is to humans—the core of their Umwelt.”

light is also pollution

As we are a very visual species our eyes traded sensitivity for acuity, or in that words, we can see very clearly, but only in a place with good light. Once we turn off the lights, we are very limited. Due to this, we added very bright lights everywhere so we can see better in the dark. But that comes with a price.

Many other animals are attracted to light or behave in a very different way in environments that contain light. As we are lighting more and more everywhere, we are disrupting the lives of other animals because we don’t usually think about them (or when we think we use our view of the world).

Favorite quotes

These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book.

  • “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”
  • “It turns out that all living things produce electric fields when submerged in water. Remember that animal cells are bags of salty liquid.”
  • ““We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets,” Jakob tells me.”
  • “An animal’s visual field determines where it can see. Its acute zones determine where it sees well. Without considering both traits, we can seriously misinterpret an animal’s actions.”
  • “We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.”

These are my learnings from the book An Immense World: How Animals Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us written by Ed Yong. A special thanks to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing access to the book for free.

Cheers.