51 pages • 1 hour read
Ed YongAn Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Conservation of Sensescapes
Animals must be able to respond to stimuli in the outside world through their senses. If they are not able to process stimuli, then their quality of life is diminished, and they may not even be able to survive. The 12th chapter concludes with a call to action. Yong uses anaphora—the repetition of initial words or phrases, specifically “we should” in the following passage—to increase the intensity and pacing of his plea to stop desecrating sensory environments:
We should approach this work humbly, recognizing how easily our intuitions lead us astray. We should move forward hopefully, knowing that even a partially successful attempt will reveal wonders that were previously hidden to us. And we should act quickly, knowing that our time is running out (334).
What follows in the final chapter is Yong’s investigation of the sensory pollution—specifically light and sound pollution—that prevents animals from being able to function fully within their umwelten. Humans, too, are negatively affected by this pollution.
While light and sound pollution are the result of an excess amount of stimuli being put out into the environment by humans, Yong earlier describes the sensory losses that are the result of stimuli being removed from the environment by humans. For example, many animals rely on the ability to sense surface waves. The near extinction of large land animals, such as elephants and bison, means that the surface waves produced by their running and walking have also largely disappeared from the planet. This is a sensory world that exists apart from human perception, and it is not fully known which animals are affected by this sensory loss or how it affects them.
Yong calls upon his readers to consider sensescapes as parts of the larger environment that require both conservation and cleanup. The sources of the pollution that come from excess stimuli are clear, and sensory landscapes can be improved immediately. This is not often the case with other forms of pollution, which often have long-term residual effects that linger in the environment. When streetlights are turned off, however, their light is gone; it does not linger.
The purpose of Yong’s book is to demonstrate the intimate connections all animals form with different sensescapes. He walks the reader through an enormous amount of information about the perceptual lives of animal subjects with the goal of educating and inspiring the reader to care about these animals by conserving their sensory worlds.
Diversity of Umwelten Across Animal Species
Yong takes the reader on a journey through an astonishing array of perceptual worlds that are counterintuitive and largely incomprehensible. For example, octopuses may have two umwelten because of the relationship between their primary brain and their eight smaller brains, located on their legs. Finches’ ears and hearing change with the seasons. Spiders may use their webs to think; spiderwebs function as a sensory organ that enables the perception of vibrations, but they are also involved in their cognition. The star-nosed mole maps out the world through a nose that does not smell but touches with incredible sensitivity. Lastly, whales can perceive one another with MRI-like abilities through echolocation and can send sound waves across oceans to both navigate and create maps of the globe.
Yong presents this range of sensory perception and the types of information and knowledge that animals create through their senses both to entertain readers and to motivate them to care for these animals’ environments. He repeatedly stresses that while research allows some understanding of the neurological processing of stimuli and the information produced, the experiences of many animals are not understood and probably never will be. The umwelten of various species are interdependent, and human ways of sensing and perceiving cannot be fully extended to them; however, disruptions in the ecology of one species can trigger loss and confusion in the ways of sensing and perceiving of a range of other species, and the scope of these changes is unknowable.
In the face of both human knowledge and ignorance of animals’ lives, Yong calls upon readers to approach this diversity with humility and respect and to resist the assumption that humans’ ways of sensing and creating meaning from their environment are superior to those of other animals. Yong presents humans as animals that are different from—but not superior to or more valuable than—other animals, and he rejects the idea that humans are free to impose their umwelt on nonhumans. There is no better or worse umwelt, Uexkull insists. Instead, each umwelt is designed and adapts to suit its species’ needs.
Humility and Intuition Versus Imagination
Uexkull’s 1909 theory of the umwelt insists that no animal’s perceptual world is superior to another’s. Rather than approaching animals through a lens of human supremacy, Uexkull calls for the necessity of humility in any attempt to understand the differences from and shared connections with animals. Thus, Uexkull simultaneously draws attention to what people share with animals and to what makes them different from each other. Both people and animals are creatures that rely on making meaning through the senses, but each umwelt is unique, making it impossible to intuit the experiences of other species.
The theory of the umwelt recognizes the impossibility of separating or removing oneself from humanness; people exist within a specifically human umwelt, and recognizing this is essential. Therefore, Uexkull calls for a recognition of anthropocentrism in attempts to imagine other animals’ umwelten. Yong repeatedly emphasizes the need for a nuanced approach in which people simultaneously recognize their human umwelt and attempt to imagine those of other animals. While humans’ imagining is always limited, Yong stresses that people must, nonetheless, try to imagine other ways of being in the world; otherwise, they will not understand the damage that they are currently inflicting on sensescapes and animals themselves and remedy that destruction.
Yong makes a distinction between intuition and imagination. Intuition may be useful within humans’ umwelt, but it can be dangerous when applied to those of other animals. Since intuition is grounded in people’s felt and specifically human experiences of the world, it often results in anthropomorphism, the imposition of human form, experiences, and ways of being on those who are not human. To cite a simple example, sea otters look like they have very crude versions of human hands that resemble mittens. Yet this is a misreading of their hands that is the result of a prototype that is specific to human anatomy and the experience of touch occurring through fingertips. Sea otters’ “mittens,” Yong notes, are much more sensitive to touch than human hands are.
Yong calls on people not to intuit—or rely on thinking that is rooted in and limited by human anatomy and experiences—in considering other species. Instead, he calls for the use of imagination, which opens up other ways of being. Science, in revealing the diversity of sensory processes of animals, can aid in this process. At the same time, science often shows little regard for the umwelten of animals and has a history of misreading and harming them.
