The joy/peril of our digital news feeds these days is that we can happen upon articles by chance, from publications we would never have followed. That’s how, at the height of procrastination, I ended up reading a review of Ed Yong’s new book, An Immense World, that took me down a rabbit-hole of research.
I’ll admit I never took much interest in biology at school. By the time it got interesting I was at peak hormonal chaos. Too busy ‘kissing frogs’ to care about dissecting them. However, despite my limited knowledge of the natural world, I still live in it, and as such have always had great reverence for the beauty and diversity of nature. There was something about Ed Yong’s book (which I’ve since devoured) that made me feel like a kid again. Wide-eyed in wonder and awe-struck by discovery of the everyday world around me.
The book beautifully details the way different animals perceive the world through various senses unavailable to humans. This diversity of perception exists because each animal operates in accordance with its own sensory environment - what German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll called ‘umwelt’.
I love this word. I love how it gives name to what we perceive and personally experience rather than viewing the world through a fixed lens. Reading about the diverse unwelt in nature took me in two directions of thought:
How much have we dulled our own senses?
How does our mental health affect our umwelt?
The first is much talked about so I wont go on yet another ‘we’re all distracted by our phones rant’, because frankly it’s boring. However, I found myself envious when reading of these incredible creatures with their electric fields, or sonic song that can be heard halfway around the planet. This is superhero sh*t! I mean, sure, we can tweet across the globe in 280 characters, but only with adequate wifi. But of course, I was dismissing all the extraordinary (offline!) components of living as a human being, because I think, on the whole, we do tend to dismiss them. We don’t value what we have until it is threatened or taken from us.
The long-held narrative has been that when we lose one sense it heightens the others, which studies on neuroplasticity have shown to be true. In fact, scientists argue we have more than five senses to begin with (and no, the sixth has nothing to do with Bruce Willis!). Our brains are brilliant switchboards that operate to maximum efficiency for our survival and energy reservation. So if our environment doesn’t require certain facets of human capability, we simply don’t use them. If we compare a child’s experience to our own, it’s vastly different because a child’s senses are activated as they explore everything for the first time. Just how hot is fire, what do plugs taste like, can I fly? The more knowledge we acquire as we go through the world, the more efficient we become at filing away our experiences to the point that we often rarely experience them at all. One of the strangest things that ever happened to me was shortly after my mum died. I was at my worst with my mental health and had been suppressing all my emotions to ‘be strong’ for others. There was an incident with my dad and something in my brain snapped. Mired in the darkest thoughts, I went off into the woods near my home to disappear in nature. I can’t quite explain it, but something took over where I regressed to being a child again. I picked up sticks, I played with mud, I touched my own face to see what was there. Basically, I’d gone f*cking insane. But it was a day like no other that brought me back into my body and to the awareness of the life around me. When I returned that day, a child no more, I took out my adult credit card and booked flights to Japan, which would become the most important and healing adventure in my evergreen quest of trying to get my sh*t together. My point? I’d been trying so hard to rationalise, control, and manage the world around me that I hadn’t actually been experiencing it. I was craving death because I hadn’t been living life. It was through sense and touch that I became real again.
My second thought was to each human’s personal umwelt. To the myriad miscommunications we have because we just aren’t experiencing the world in the same way. Of course, this applies to socio-economics, culture, race, gender, ability. But also to the hidden recesses of our mental health. The way we interpret the behaviour of others, convinced that we know their motivations. We mostly exist in a warped eco-system whereby our behaviours are reactionary based on judgements, assumptions and/or rejection-management. By keeping ‘umwelt’ in mind, we can appreciate the fact that we are all seeing life through a slightly different lens.
"We could all be sharing exactly the same physical space and have a radically different experience of that space," Ed Yong, An Immense World
The natural world is truly incredible, and we are an incredible part of that. Mindfulness, meditation, all that jazz - it’s all about slowing down to notice our experience in the moment. To acknowledge our umwelt is to bring ourselves back to our natural being. Curious, intelligent, loving.
Humans in a truly immense world.
The Spin
There is so much happening to us every second of each day, most of which we take for granted.
Noticing the small moments and experiences is hugely rewarding to our overall mental health - which can help tackle the big stuff.
Being in touch with our senses brings us back into the body and is incredibly grounding (particularly important for anxiety)
We can only truly know of our own experience. Others may see the world completely differently, so we can’t assume to know their interpretation, as they can’t with ours.
Adding More Weight
How Colours Affect the Way You Think
Experience the World as a Spider
What Are We Missing When We’re Distracted?
Option To Go Deeper
Consider the past few hours. Retrace your experience - what might your senses have detected?
There are myriad moments in our day that we either overlook or are too distracted to notice. Think about all the sensory experiences you encounter - it might be the smell of coffee, the feeling of cool floor tiles on your feet, the different tastebuds activated when you eat. Try to notice as much as you can today - the tiny and seemingly insignificant experiences - and just notice how it makes you feel.
Haha! Thank you Paul!! A very happy Friday to you (and Mr Spock) too! x
As one of my favourite fictional characters would say... Fascinating!
I have never heard the word umwelt before either but I think I've always felt it was out there 🤔? Great choice of subject for your newsletter this week Hannah... I love it when you shine lights and take us with you on these exciting new neural pathway adventures. Thank you - this one is a doozy.
Ohhh and in case you were wondering (and I'm sure you were not) it was Mr Spock who always said fascinating... And I'm pretty sure he'd subscribe and appreciate "it's not what you think" too if he was real of course. But then... what is real? 😳
HAPPY Friday!! x