Animal Pawception

But this is a very special episode because joining me today is a science journalist for the Atlantic Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of COVID nineteen and author of the book An Immense World, which explores the hugely diverse way in which animals perceive the world, from the catfish that has taste receptors all over its body to the knife fish that sees the world using electricity, from elephants who smell with their immense trunks to snakes who smell

by whisking sent in with their tongues. Welcome to the show, Edie Young, Hello, thanks for having me. I am so excited to have you here. I I'm a big fan of your articles. They are immensely helpful for me as I am researching the podcast. Thank you. I'm delighted. So I have read your book, An Immense World, and I

absolutely love it. I think it really it embodies so much of what I try to talk about on the podcast, which is getting people to understand the world of animals, can put themselves inside of the minds of animals, but it can be very difficult sometimes to do that because animals are so different from us, So especially maybe the less charismatic, gregarious animals, that can be hard to relate to them. Uh. And it can be really hard to describe what might be the experience of animals when we're

trapped in our own, you know, human brains. We can't get outside of our brains. But as a science writer, you have to try to get inside the heads of these animals. So how do you go about doing that right? Well? With some difficulty it is, it is very challenging. Um. And you know, I think that there's a lot there's a lot of discussion around how animals think, um, you know,

how what they might feel, um. But you know, even on a on a very basic level, like how they how they sense, what they see, what they hear, what they're capable of seeing and hearing. Um, there's a huge amount of variation there. And and we don't we often just don't really think about it. I think this is very reflective tendency to assume that animals are just seeing and hearing and feeling and smelling the same kinds of things that that we are, and that's not true, and

that this whole book is about why that's not true. Um. But to sort of really grapple with why that's not

true it is immensely challenging. Like I can I can look at studies, I can see what this what science tells us about what kinds of things and them all can can sense, but to really actually get into the head of that creature, to think about what about UM feels when it flies through the air, What what an electric fish feels when it when it detects the ways its own electric field is walked by the objects around it.

You're never going to be entirely able to do that, and so there's always going to be this chasm between what we experience and what other animals experienced. And the only way to jump across that is with a feat of imagination. And I think that's something sort of beautiful about that. It's you're never going to be able to completely do it. It's always going to be a struggle, but it feels like such a worthwhile thing to to struggle against into sort of devote mental energy towards. I

absolutely agree. I think it takes a lot of creativity, imagination and compassion to try to imagine what it would be to be one of these animals. And I think in your writing that creativity and that compassion for animals is really infectious. So like, for instance, I have a dog, and in your book An Immense World, you wrote about how their sense of smell is so pivotal to their whole quality of life. My dog loves to smell the nastiest, nastiest, rankest thing she can find on our walk and just

huff that smell. And it's usually something horrifying, like you know, some animal dropping with maybe some cigarette butts mixed in there, and I, you know, it's it always kind of irked me, but now I think, okay, Well, for her, she's exam it's like viewing a piece of art. For me maybe like going to an art gallery and taking all it

all in. She's going to a smell gallery. And for her, this piece of poop that has like cigarette butts in it is like some amazing piece of art for her to experience your smell, right, it's like Michelangelo's David Right, So I feel so I feel much the same way ever dog. He's a corgy. His name is Typo. When whenever we're like on a walk or in the dog park, whenever he does that thing where he sniffs something and

then he drops and like rubs his back on it. Right, we have this joke that like it's never a good thing. You know, it's not like someone has just recently splits like lavender on that spot, right, Like it's always going to be some poop or like something throw up, or like there's a cigarette but or something like that. Um. But but as you say, I think smell is so central to the life of a dog that those acts of exploration, even for things that we might find gross,

are really important to them. You know, I've seen dog owners like yank their dogs along walks because they sort of treated as exercise, or you know, pull their dogs away from sniffing another dog's genitals, for example, And all of those acts are just a normal part of a dog's behavior, and they're so profoundly linked to their sense of smell. A dog is an amazing sense to smell. It's you know, ol faction. Smell is primary for them

in the way that vision is for sighted humans. And if we deprive them of chances to use their nose. I think we we sort of deprive them of a of a like a very essential part of their dog nous. You know, there have been studies showing that dogs are happier, like more optimistic, less anxious when they get a chance to use their noses. And I think, like we we

benefit too. You know, when I watched typo on a on a walk, like we walk around the same bit of neighborhood all the time, like streets and houses that I passed thousands of times over and that now feel boring to me, but they're not boring to him because they change all the time. That the smells that he gets are constantly shifting, and he smells like you know that now it's spring. I watched him like examine like

newly emerged plants with just this incredible delicacy. And I watched him like examining bits where other dogs have peede or pooped. And I see that as like you know, me check scrolling through my Instagram feed. You know, it's like me checking on social media. It's it's an entire

it's right, it's a it's a deeply social activity. Like he can tell which of the neighborhood dogs have been around, probably like what their current state is, like, what their health is like, lots of stuff about their lives that kind of like autobiographical information that I have no access to. I didn't even know, you know, which dogs were there, but he does. And so every walk, if he's allowed to sniff, becomes like an adventure, a social occasion. I

love that. Yeah, we have a park where I take Cookie, and Cookie is not she's like a little some kind of spaniel chia am, so she's not big on exercise anyways, but I'll take her to the park and she just loves the whole the sniff experience of going and she's very particular. And it's so interesting because you know, I may want to go somewhere where it's nice and shady or there's some flowers, but she wants to go to

just this uninteresting to me patch of dirt. But I'm sure there's some kind of calling card that's been left, some sort of interesting marking from another dog, and she's just investigating it for you know, minutes, and it's it's really I think, kind of once you really put yourself

into that mindset of them exploring the world. It does become more interesting for you observing them, seeing that fascination in their eyes kind of light up when they find a particularly smelly patch, right, Like I think old dog in is like know this feeling where you're just going for where you're going for a walk, and the dog is like happily trussing along and then suddenly like just grind to a halt and and like flips around and starts investigating some random patch of ground or sidewalk that

looks completely indistinguishable to every other bit of ground or sidewalk but clearly has something that is like deeply enthralling to them. Um. And you know, I think that there's a few ways you can react to that. You could sort of go, oh god, you know, we need to

go on a walk and like yank them away. But I think if you really start to consider what they're doing, like it does, it does show you that there's, um that even parts of the world that we that are familiar and boring and mundane to us are actually rich with information, are you know, sort of wondrous and extraordinary

through the senses of other animals. And that's like, that's a feeling that I've tried to capture in this book throughout that paying attention to how other animals sense the world reveals the world that we know in a completely different light. It shows you like flickers of the magical in the mundane. Yeah, it does really feel like there's this whole secret world that we are not really aware

of until we actually pay attention to animals. There are always jokes about a cat or something be able to see ghosts or having extra senses, but it is I mean, maybe not the ghosts part, but the extra senses or at least the same senses but used differently, are very true. And you know, I think it's when we move beyond

just like domesticated animals. It's so interesting how their world, even for these like extremely intelligent animals like elephants, can just be have this whole hidden aspect to it that humans don't necessarily understand until we actually study them. I really loved that example you had in your book. It was the studies of Dr Lucy Bates, who found elephants expressing confusion over a kind of magic trick. Lucy Bates in her team did or they made it. They made

an elephant teleport right, but only for these elephants. Do you want to describe that study a little bit. Yes, So elephants, like dogs, have this very powerful sense of smell. They obviously have that trunk. They're constantly exploring with it.

And so Lucy Bates did this experiment where she followed like herd of elephants, waited for one of them to pee, and then like waiting for them to leave, and then scooped up the urine soaked soil and put it in a piece of topperware and then drove around to find like either the same herd of elephant or a different herd, like cut cut them off, dumped out the piece oat

soil in front of them, and then waited. And what happened was if she did that for a completely different herd of elephants that was unrelated, they would like examine the soil and then be like fine and move on. If it was the same herd, um, they would examine the soil and be like more interested, Like you know, they recognize that it's a family member, but specifically it was.

If it was the same herd and they knew the elephant who left who left, that scent was behind them, they acted very confused because they have an awareness of um, of who of their their own family members, who's around them, and that awareness is cemented through scent. So if they can smell, if they know that, you know, like elephant Joe is like way behind in the herd, and suddenly they smell Elephantjoe ahead of them, They're like wait, what what? How? Um? Right?

And so I love that for for several reasons. Right, So, firstly, it shows that principle we talked about that like this random bit of soil contains rich information to an to an animal that can that has the right nose for it, um. And it's and it's rich biographical information too, right, It's it's information about who who is around and where they are. Um. And And also that this this there's a lovely interaction

here between the senses and the intelligence of the animal. Right. So, so the sense some animals have all kinds of extraordinary ways of perceiving the world. But when you tag on, when you tack that on to like long lasting memories or just you know, advanced cognition, you get these wonderful little interplace um like like what these elevants being confused by a magic trick that humans have performed. Um. Yeah, I also love that we probably wouldn't know about this

awareness that these elephants have. This very it's a very advanced form of cognition to recognize an individual and know where that individual is spatially and also be able to reason out that, Okay, if they're behind us, how could they have jumped ahead in time and gotten ahead of us? That doesn't make sense. So it shows that very complex,

rich intelligence. But if we hadn't thought, or at least if Dr Lucy Bates and her team hadn't thought to investigate their sense of smell, something that to us is not as important in recognizing individuals or understanding sort of time or spatial reasoning, we wouldn't have discovered this aspect

of elephant intelligence. So being able to understand the you know, not look at an animal's intelligence through our human kind of framework, but through the animals framework, I think would reveal a lot more to us about how intelligent they are. Oh totally. And I think this also reveals something important about that the scientific method, which is that it is profoundly influenced by the kinds of people who get to be part of science, Like we sort of think of

the scientific method. This is like neutral objective thing, but but it's not. It's profoundly influenced by by the types of people who are involved in science, and in this case their own senses. So so you're right, many most humans rely on vision above all our other senses, and we sort of put that, we we map that onto

the creatures we study. So with like an animal intelligence, there is this famous test called the mirror test, where you're trying to see if an animal can recognize it's a mark that has been placed on its body in its reflection. And this has been you know, used as a as a way, this has been linked to everything from all sorts of things like self awareness, empathy, and so on. But like, it only really applies, it only

really works if the animal is visually oriented. And like people have tried this kind of test with with elephants with mixed success, And maybe the reason is that vision just ain't that important for elements, like you know, maybe if you try a version that that um that is specifically related to smell, they do better. And you know that this kind of work has been done with dogs, but for the same reason, they do better at like smell oriented tests of self recognition than than visual ones.

So you know, the humans have this very visual bias that affects how they think about the animals that they study and the kinds of research questions that they ask. And it takes a little feet of imagination to actually think, like, now, what what are the animals themselves sensing? And how do

we study that? And how do we craft experiments and studies that that really pay respect to their different senses rather than just you know, shoving the round peg of animal behavior into the square hole of like of of the human unbolt. Yeah, I can imagine an alien species picking one of us up and maybe changing our smell, like changing our personal smell, which as humans we don't

notice that much. We do do a certain extent, but not much, and then not seeing that we don't notice that changed our own smell, and coming to the conclusion, oh, humans aren't self aware. They have no awareness of self right, yeah, right right, Like you know, we we talked about how um dogs have, you know, are aware of things in

the street that we aren't aware of. But of course it works in other ways to like every animal has its own little sensory bubble, like we are aware of stimuli in the world that other animals and not all and vice versa. So so you're right, you know that there's a very simple example I've given the book where our color vision extends from red to violet and we can't see ultra violet light that that lies beyond the violet end of the visible spectrum. And for that reason,

there's been a lot of mystique around ultra violets. You know, a lot of scientists have said that it maybe it's a secret communication channel that animals used to share messages that no one else can see. But that breaks down when you realize that actually most animals that can see colors see ultra violet. We are just the exception. So it's not really super special. It just happens to be another color, and it happens to be another color that

we can't see. And if you, you know, if you for a moment you imagine that like bees were scientists like bees, for be, the rainbow goes from green to ultra violet, so they can't see it. And you can imagine a b scientist thinking like, oh, these weird like you know, two legged apes they can see. I guess they would call it like ultra yellow, right, like the color that that they can't see, and maybe it's like

really special. Maybe ultra maybe ultra yellow is a way of for them to like exchange secret messages that we can't see. And and only after like decades of study where they realize actually a lot of animals can see ultra yellow. There's a lot of you know, there's a lot of ultra yellow in the world, and it just

it's just another color. Um. So yeah, I think there's there's a lot of that around where there are parts of the world that we don't experience and we think are like just kind of magical, and they are a little magical, but like they're only magical because they're there are things that we don't have access to. So there's that sensory experience you talk about in the book Magneto Reception,

that being able to detect the Earth's gravitational field. I'm really jealous of that ability because I get very easily lost. I'm I even with a map like two inches from my face, I can get lost. So I would love to have an internal compass like that. And I think, you know, originally it was thought maybe only you know, a few species had this, but it seems like more the more we study it, the more it seems like a lot of animals have this ability, and it seems

so magical to us, but it seems not that uncommon. Yeah, there's a lot of animals that can sense the Earth's magnetic field. Um. So songbirds definitely can do it. A lot of species are known to do it and they use that that ability to guide their migrations. Um. Sea turtles can do it. Um. There's there's some really interesting

work sudjusting that giant whales can do it. Um. But yeah, so this magnetic reception, the ability to sense Earth's magnetic field, it's actually a very interesting and quite difficult case study because there's a lot of work here and some of it might be wrong. That there's a lot of debate about which animals actually have this ability, Like the ones I told you sea turtles and songbirds I think are pretty are pretty clear. Those are those are pretty definitive.

But there's a long list of other creatures that are said to have magnetic reception, and there's there's just a bit of um debate in the scientific community. And partly that debate exists because this is an incredibly hard sense to study, Like, firstly, we don't have it, and also

it's very unintuitive. You know, if I if if you asked me to explain to you how magnetism works, like I would I would struggle, right, you know, like I can I can show you, I can draw you like a textbook picture of a bar magnet with like lines coming out of it, but to actually understand on the fundamental level is hard, and to appreciate then how that might feel to an animal, like does there's this idea that songbirds can actually see the magnetic field so that

they might have like an overlay on their vision that sort of tells them where like north might be. And you know, that might be true, but it might not, Like you know, in either case, it's quite difficult to to think about how that feels to an animal, like does it does a does a migrating turtle always have a little like tug towards like where north is? Does it feel very differently um for something like that, which is you know, entirely different a sense that we don't have.

It's not like, you know, trying to imagine a b seeing ultra violet. It's it really taxes um that the boundaries of our understanding, as does the rest of the sense. You know, no one actually knows. Like for vision, right, my vision is in my eyes, Um, the organ is clear. That the molecules responsible for my ability to see are known, and the way they work is clear. None of that

is clear. For magnetic reception, there are some there are loads of theories, but the magnetic field penetrate cell bodies. So a sense organ doesn't have to be on the surface, it doesn't have to have like a hole that allows it to access the environment. Could be anywhere. It could be distributed throughout my entire body. It could be hidden into in my internal organs, it could be in my butt.

Who who knows. Um, all these possibilities are are on the table, which makes it a fiendishly difficult sense to study. And so this goes back to what we talked about about the link between imagination and discovery. The fact that this sense taxes are imagination so means that the process of discovery has been very slow and kind of jerky

and erratic. And for that reason, I think kind of fun Yeah, No, I think it's in a way it's comforting to me that we don't know things about the animal world, because it really shows how rich it is. If we already had discovered everything, everything was a settled science, that would be I think it would feel lonely because I think there's always this hope that will discover more things to make us feel like we're not the only thinking,

feeling species on Earth. And so I love it when it when there are these secrets, because to me, it feels like, oh that this is another thing to try to understand. And you know, having that understanding of animals around us, you know, it makes me feel like, hey, we're not you know, we're not the only thing around here. We have a bunch of interesting creatures that have their own internal experience and we can actually try to understand that. Right And the wonderful thing here is is that every

creature has its own unique sensory world. So the amount of stuff that you could potentially learn is is almost limitless, right. It's it's limited only by the number of species that exist. And wherever scientists look, it seems that they always find something cool. Um And And because sensory biology is such an an old, rich field with a deep history to it, um And because surprises seem to be just around the corner and and infinite in their number. There's a lot

of work on frankly, like weird animals. You know, it's not like everything is just in like fruit flies or dogs or elephants, like the book also includes catfish and like golden moles. Um And you know that there are probably I would hope there are animals here that like people have never heard of before. And there's such a rich vein of literature to to draw from that there was such a rich vein to draw from in writing

this book because the questions are so fascinating. Um And like the people who study this, who who work in this field, seem to get like very easily drawn towards like weirdos, you know, to to some random animal that they happen to like walk past in a zoo or you know, stumble across the field trip and they suddenly become and throw like and and um enraptured by like what by thinking about how that animal perceives? And yeah,

I think there's it meant. It means that it means that the book gets to be diverse, and that I get to write about a lot of um, a lot of strange and wonderful things. Yeah, I mean I think that it is the stranger the animal that maybe it gets harder to empathize with it, but the more fascinating it can be. So for example, in the book You Discus u U Scalop TV study where Professor Daniel Spizer put scalops in little scalop chairs and made them watch TV.

I love this studies so much. I love to visualize a bunch of scalops in like a theater watching a movie. And what I love about it also is that it highlights the eyes of scalops. I think people can be quite surprised that scalops have eyes. Uh, in fact, they can have over a hundred eyes, and that they are They're beautiful to me. They're they're like these little jewels,

these shiny, little, bright, bright blue jewels. And I love just finding a hidden secret where you know, we're used to scalops, like you say in the book, is just kind of this tasty little cylinder of flesh on a plate, but it's an animal and not and it has this sensory experience. And this scalop TV study is really weird but really into sting. Could you talk a little bit

about it. Yeah. I love the study because everyone involved is very clear that this was an absolutely absurd experiment to try and they no one thought that it would work, but they gave it a go and it and they found something really cool, which is that if you put scalops like on these these little I don't know, scalop armchairs and show them movies like just a little little flecks of food, like little particles drifting by on a screen, um, they you know, they will react, they'll open their shells,

they'll extend their their their little sensory tentacles in a kind of curious way. And okay, so so to explain what this means, um As as we said, a scalop is a living animal. It is not just like a lump of flash. The flesh is like the muscle of the scalps foot. But there's a whole other animal besides that inside the shell, and that includes eyes. Has rows of very beautiful, quite surprisingly complex eyes. And this experiment the scientists in who did it and I thought that

maybe the eyes are used to to spot passing food. Um. You know, scalops will filter bits of food um part of floating past them. So maybe the eyes detect that and and allow the scalpt to two on the momb. But um, what they actually think is that now is that the scalops of these like centory tentacles that smell and and taste and feel, and the eyes are just a way of saying, hey, there's something interesting over there, and the tentacles allow them to then explore with their

other sensors um, which is really cool. But I think, like the thing that's extraordinary to me about this is I think, try and think about what a scalop sees. Because the eyes are, like I said, they're surprisingly complicated. Like they they have reasonable optics. Um. So each eye has like you know, nowhere near as a good division

as us, but they have decent image forming abilities. But the scalps brain is really simple, Like the scalop is almost certainly not experiencing like a movie playing through its head in the same way that you and I are now like looking up the world around us. Um. So the way I the way I UM imagine this in the book, it's as if imagine that every eye is

like a state of the art motion sensing camera. Um. The camera is amazing, and they all feed into this bank of monitors, and the scalops brain is like a security guard looking over this bank of monitors. Um that that gets the feed from the cameras. But but here's the thing. Even though each camera is actually very good, what it gives to the monitor is just like a yes or no, did it see something or not? So the security guard isn't looking at this like wall of

moving images. It's just really looking at this wall of like maybe a thumbs up or a thumbs down, depending on whether the camera has spotted something. So it's vision, but it's vision without scenes. And that's very hard to imagine because our visual experience is entirely based on scenes, right Like I'm looking around my room in my house

right now. No, imagine if you didn't have that. Imagine if you you could see stuff happening around you, you were visually aware of it, but you didn't have that that scenery playing out in your mind. You know, I can't, Like I really struggled to do that. But that I think is a much closer approximation of what a scallop experiences. You know, this immediately minded me of blind sight in cortically blind individuals. So that's people who have blindness due

to lesions in their visual cortex. But their eyes, they're actually like the their eyes in their that sensory organ is completely intact and functioning fine. It's just the in the visual cortex where we process that visual information is damaged. And so people with this are will report not having that visual experience, just as as if they had regular blindness. But when they do have a visual stimuli, they often will react subconsciously even though they're not experiencing seeing that thing.

So especially with object movements, so like they may react to a moving object but not actually were court being aware of that, So like they get a sense of feeling about, you know, movement, but they don't actually have that conscious experience, which is so it's so interesting, and I mean, I think this is also kind of like what you were saying earlier, how respecting sort of the diversity of human experience in science can be really important

in understanding the world around us, because I imagine that people with this experience may have more insight into that kind of having that kind of like not having the visual experience that a lot of people have, but still

have their eyes still reacting to the world around them. Yeah, absolutely, I think that that's such a that comparison is spot on, and it makes me to think two things, like, firstly, that there is this that they can be this very stock difference between sensing on and perception on the one hand, and then conscious experience on the other, And we sort of, I think we're given to thinking that those two things are inseparable, but but of course they're not, And Blindside

is an example of that. So so when we think about, for example, um, you know, a songbird sensing the Earth's magnetic field, it could work in the same way, like maybe it actually has no conscious awareness at all, It just has this sort of reflexive set of behaviors that that guide it to where it knows north or south might be. Um, you know, there's there's a lot about the senses that could basically just be about detection without

necessarily involving a conscious experience. Like there's a whole chapter in the book about pain and how we think about that that that that draws heavily on that idea. Um. But you know, what you said about about Blindside also made me think about the chapter in the book where I write about echolocation and an ability that bats and dolphins have and and some other mammals, but including humans, right, so, um, some blind people can absolutely echolocate, like not as well

as a bat, but but pretty damn well. I met one of them. His name is Daniel kish Um. You know he he he is. He was blind from an extremely young age, and he walks around with a cane. But he also echolocates. He makes loud, sharp clicking noises with his tongue, and he senses the world in the rebounding echoes. You know, we we we were walking along the street. Um, he knows when a tree branches in his way. He can tell me as we're walking along, like where houses are, where parked cars are, you know,

where bushes and fences are. And it's it's it's amazing because I think, like you know, Daniel points out that there are even echolocation researchers who don't know that humans can do this. Um, but but they very much can. And and I think this again speaks to why this stuff is difficult to to think about and to to to imagine, because like a dog or a songbird or an elephant, and none of these things, none of these animals have language, right, they can't tell me about their experience.

But but Daniel obviously can you know, he he can describe what he senses, how how he experiences the world through location. But even so, there is an enormous barrier there because he doesn't have any memory of of being cited. I don't know what it's like to echo locate. So even though we have the same language, we're still trying to convey things that neither of us are really privy to. And because he grew up in a world with several billion cited people, a lot of his language is visual.

You know, he he uses visual metaphors when describing the way he echolocates in a way that like I can kind of tap into. But you know, if he's describing something as like a bright or a flash, like, who knows whether the two of us are using the same words to to really convey the same kinds of qualities.

And this is what I said at the start, there's always a gulf that there's always a chasm between our sensory experience and that of another animal or in this case, another human who just happens to be sensor early diverse um. And that's why you know, these these acts of imagination and being thoughtful about how you conceive of other senses

is so important. Yeah, I think sometimes people separate empathy and trying to understand other people from science, Like there's hard science and then there's emotion, you know, like emotional intelligence and scientific intelligence, and that I really think that's does such a disservice to science because having having that emotional intelligence where you really want to understand another person, I think is is such a key to be able to do good science, because how do you come up

with a good study that had investigates something that needs to be investigated without being able to connect to other people and their different experience and learn from that um A degree, I think the people who think that who who think you know the um what what you said? The people who think that science is cold and detached

and unemotional honestly are just terrible scientists. Um Like, I don't trust the quality of their work because, like we said, our in this case, our senses, but more broadly, luck, our experience, our culture or values profoundly influence the kind of questions that we ask, the way we design experiments to probe those questions, the way we interpret the returning results. And if you think that that whole process exists in a social and emotional vacuum, then you will be completely

oblivious to the biases that you bring into it. And so which is why I don't trust the work of people who think in that way, you know, because I think that there's a certain thoughtlessness there that leads to misleading research. I mean, even in the field of animal sciences,

there have been so many cases. I mean, there's tons in the book where people drew the wrong conclusions about what animals were doing for decades or even centuries because they just weren't paying attention, because they were they were scoffing at the idea of of animals doing something vastly different. Many weird senses like echolocation, the electric senses of electric fish, magneto reception, the the infrared senses of of rattlesnakes, and

many other animals have all been subject to this. There's long histories of people thinking that the animals were doing all kinds of weird stuff aside from what they were actually doing. Because there existing understanding of the world and the limitations of their own sense. Organs like cut off the possibility of thinking about the much weirder very different reality. Well that's where the concept of blind as a bat

came from. People would see bats kind of flitting about erratically, as if they didn't know where they were going, But in fact they are. That erratic movement is actually quite calculated to hone in on an insect as they're using their echolocation. And they're also, as you point out in the book, they are not blind either in even in the traditional sense. They can use their eyes, but their

echolocation skills are the most useful in hunting insects. But yeah, we had this misconception about bats being blind for so long, just by misinterpreting their movement, that the way that they move in the sky, and assuming that taking a straight path from point A to point B is the correct way to hunt something or or to move around. Right. You know, people scoffed at the idea of echolocation when

it first when it was first proposed. You know, they're they're great stories of like um, you know, so, like Robert Glambo is one of the co discoverers being you know, having a guy shaking his shoulders at a meeting, going you can't possibly mean that, um, you know, so, Donald Griffin the the the the other person and who pioneered

the study. Beck of location wrote about this idea of the echo location as a magic well, a thing that just yielded one kept on yielding, like one discovery after another. But he also wrote about how scientists were often limited by the scope of their own imaginations, um and and so you know, just just didn't even countenance the possibility that something weird and beyond what they could could imagine

was actually going on. And it's sort of ironic because like Griffin himself was very skeptical about the existence of magneta reception as a sense, right, so we were all kind of subject to this. So in terms of the blinders a bad metaphor, I think part of that also is related to able is um that you know, we we we think of like the kind of average default human sensorium as the norm and anything that sort of

deviates from that as as being worse. So blind is about is derogatory, not really just to bat but also to blind people. Um. You know, there's this assumption that like site is good and a lack of sight is bad. You know, we talk about darkness as being a bad thing. You know, we we talked about we we equate blindness with um, with obliviousness with ignorance. UM. But of course, you know, blind people are profoundly aware of their surroundings.

You know, they have um, you know abilities and and and awareness is that that cited people don't possess and and sort of can't really and and often don't think about it or underappreciate. And the same goes for many other animals that have de emphasized division in favor of other sites, other senses. UM. So yeah, there's there's a lot at play here. There's um and and thro oper centrism, there's able is um that there's a lot that goes

into some of these negative and and um frankly wrong stereotypes. Yeah. Absolutely, And I think that assumption that you cannot have a rich inner world unless you have the senses, like the kind of assumed senses and the assumed state that a human should be in, right, like, okay, we all need to be a certain way. We can't have any kind of cognitive differences or sensory differences otherwise you must have a more impoverished uh inner world is of course very wrong.

And I think we are as a society kind of starting to reckon with that, this idea that you know, having having a different perspective, having different cognition, having different sensory experiences is not something that robs you of you know, that richness of being. It's just it is a different experience, you know, It's not we don't have to have carbon copy experiences in um as you say, like the unvelt as everyone else. In fact, having people who have different perspectives,

different sensory experiences, different cognitive experiences, can be very enriching. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know there's this I think there's this kind of very deep seated idea that like more is better when it comes to the senses um and so color blindness is a great example of this. Right, there are loads of people who see a small narrow range of colors than the average person. But you know that's no different than the vast majority of other animals, especially mammals. Right.

So most mammals are dichromatic, which means they have two types of color sensing cells in their eyes as opposed to three that we have. So my dog Pipo is dichromatic. He his rainbow stems from yellow to blue with like whites and grays in the middle instead of greens. And that's what a lot of color blind people have. And it's fine, Like there's there's it's not the case that like having three kinds of color sensing cells is inherently

better than two. And in fact, we know that's not the case, firstly because so many mammals have only two. But also like there are many species of monkey in South America, so the females either are trichromatic or dichromatic, but all the males are dichromaticum, So there's variation in what kinds of colors. Even like a brother and a

sister monkey can see. The trichromatic females are much better at spotting fruit from a distance, but the dichromatic males are much better at breaking the camouflage of hidden insects. So there's like there's pros and cons of each and

it's definitely not the case that more is better. So if you think about like color blind people, like there are things that people with color blindness find different court Um, you know a lot of tasks that involve m colors, like I don't know, uh, you know, looking at paint swatches or sometimes electrical wiring traffic lights can be confusing. Um, but like, none of that has to be the case. Color blindness only becomes a disability because we've created a

world that caters for the vision of trichromatic people. Um. You know, there's nothing inherently worse about about being a dichromat versus a trichromat. Um, it's just what we choose to value and accommodate to. UM. So yeah, in many, many ways, I think this book is call for empathy, to call for trying to understand the experiences of other creatures, but but also other people too. You know, I had this question because this relates a little bit to you.

Also your coverage of COVID ninth team is that sometimes when people find out that, oh, you know, COVID nineteam may have had an animal origin, like that, well, doesn't that mean we should cold this animal? Like shouldn't we avoid researching them or you know, get rid of them? Like is it so bad if a species goes extinct if we get rid of the threat of COVID or something?

And of course I think there are several things wrong with this, one being like the idea that you could get rid of one species and eliminate an animal like

all animal reservoirs of a disease. And also this idea, like the jumping to the idea of destruction, you know, destroying something in the name of some kind of imagined safety, rather than trying instead to actually understand more how is the relationship between humans and animals leading to health crises both in humans and in animals, and what we can

do to prevent that. So, you know, you're you're someone who is both very well versed in these zoonotic diseases as well as you know the basically that we should respect animals and respect their rights to be here. So what what would you say to someone who feels that way, that like we should either be afraid of these animals or get rid of them when they are in our, uh, you know, territory or what we perceived to be our territory. Right, I think right, I think it's it's it's a profoundly

misguided idea. I mean, I can see why people think that. So Sarscoby too almost certainly came from a bat um, and bats in general harbor a lot of viruses that could potentially cause problems for humans. But you know a couple of things. Firstly, bats are incredibly important and they play you know, vital, irreplaceable roles in most of the ecosystems where they live, so you just can't get rid

of bats. Second, there are a lot of bats. It's like, you know, bats are like a fifth of all mammal species, and they're incredible creatures in their own right, like the specific group um that is, you know that that stars like viruses are often found in have this incredible style of echo location that is even like weirder and more advanced and more sophisticated than what like your average bat can do, which is already pretty spectacular. So there's that,

there's you know, there's what we stand to lose. But then there's also the fact that this idea as signs blamed to entirely the wrong party, Like why are zoonotic events, Why are zoonotics belovers becoming more common? They're becoming more common because we have destroyed habitat, because we have approached into the spaces where animals, wild animals live, and because we have crushed those animals into smaller and smaller rangers. You know, it's said in one of my pandemic pieces.

You know, it's as if we've we've been crushing the world's wildlife in an ever tightening fist, and what happens is that viruses start bursting out of that. But you know, there's also the fact that we are reshuffling the networks of mammals and their viruses all around the world. As the world warms because of climate change, um species of mammals that mammals are having to move in order to track new areas that have the environments that they were

well adapted to. As this happened, species that never previously co existed are meeting each other for the first time, which create opportunities for their viruses to hop into new

hosts and then eventually into us. This has been happening for decades now, and we're sort of in the peak of that process as we speak, which means that the kinds of events that lead to a new coronavirus ripping through the human population are becoming more and more common, and they're becoming more and more common because of things that we did, because of changes that we wrought upon

the world. And if we don't fix those changes, you know, you're not going to be able to You're not going to be able to drive the risk of pandemic stant zero by culling bats. If anything, you're just going to make the ecosystems where those bats live much worse, and you're gonna lose the whatever spectacular way of experiencing the world those bats have. That you know, we look for the problem in the wrong place, in that we try and shove responsibility onto others, and we try and look

for quick, easy, sticking plaster fixes. The problem lies within us, and the fixes need to be much bigger and much more systemic. So I think, yeah, unless we actually extend the full force of our empathy and ingenuity to the rest of the natural world and understand that we are a part of it and that we have had a profound influence in shaping it, then you know, we're just going to experience more of these problems that climate change phenomenon.

The link between climate change and pandemic risk. What that tells us, what that should tell us is that many of the big existential problems of our time, climate change, the sixth extinction, mass extinction of wildlife, um uh, the risk of future pandemics, they're all the same problem. They're all intercate, they're all facets of the same interconnected megaproblem, and the responsibility for fixing that problem is on us,

not on that. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I I you know, ultimately, like I think is very evident in your book, this idea that our human experience is the only important thing is just very wrong. But in addition to that, I think it is it's important to remember that we don't are our sort of priorities, and the priorities of you know, our our ecosystem are not necessarily in conflict. We can actually have a lot of solutions to our own human issue, our own problems by turning to our animal cousins and

trying to both help them and also understand them. Yeah, I I totally agree with that. Yeah. And in the in the last chapter of my book, I talk about this problem of sensory pollution, this idea that we have flooded the dark with light and the quiet with noise in ways that really harm the creatures around us, and that we we don't really understand or appreciate. I mean, light um has positive connotations with us, and darkness is

negative ones. You know, we we crave more illumination not less, but the amount of light pollution in the world is phenomenal and causes a lot of harm to insects, to birds, to sea turtles, to all kinds of creatures. And you know, it hurts us too in ways that I think we

don't really appreciate. Like so many people have never really seen the night sky, have never really appreciated like seen what the stars look like, certainly in the northern atmosphere, have never seen like have you ever seen the milky White. I only saw it when I went to the Sequoias and got really far away from the city and it was I was I was so shocked that it existed. I when I was imagining the Milky Way, I just

imagined maybe a few more stars. I had no idea how vast and bright it was, and that that would get drowned out by city lights. You know, even you know, when I was a kid living in the suburbs, thinking like, well, it's not that right out, Why wouldn't I be able to see it? It is shocking what you are missing

in the night sky. It's it's really shocking. And like that site is just like transcendentally beautiful, Like I think the first time you see it, because most of us have never seen it before, it's it's just like a kingly beautiful to behold. But and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to see it, Like it's clearly

visible in the northern hemisphere. It's just that the light from all of these distant stars from our own galaxy travels you know, countless light years, reaches Earth and then gets washed out by the glow of our own buildings. And I think that's I think that's profoundly sad. You know, we affect our own health, our our own biological clocks

by the lights we produce at night. And I think that the thing about century pollution that's really important is that, unlike a lot of the other things that we're doing to the world, and unlike greenhouse gas emissions and like plastic pollution, environmental toxins, this is easy to fix. Like, you know, light pollution goes away when you turn the lights off. It is a it is literally a switch. We just have to care enough to want to fix

the problem. Yeah, And I think there are other types of sort of sensory pollution that we're just like learning about, like the idea that animals that have a wider range of visual perception than we do can see sort of a halo coming off of of power lines and that to them it's this intimidating glowing thing, not you know where. To us, you know, we may only kind of perceive a slight buzzing coming from it. Or like with birds, like whose mating cycles are entirely dependent on them being

able to hear each other. Uh, that's like the way that they can locate each other for mating, and how that so negatively impacts their their breeding cycles when there's too much noise pollution. If we don't if we don't even really understand what their sensory world is, how can we have the empathy to know even what to change?

And I think, I mean for me, that is what is so important about books like yours and learning about these animal internal experience because it is so vital in understanding our world and how to you know, basically prevent our world from becoming dull and uh, you know, bereft

of this diversity of experience. Yeah, and you know, we we we can choose something different, like at the at the start of the COVID pandemic, when when when a lot of people were, you know, staying at home, that there was there was a lot of talk of there were a lot of cases of people going, oh, they're just more birds, right, like, loads of people said that. And it's not that there were just more birds, it's just that you can hear them now because everyone's being

a lot quieter. And what what happens when you're quietis is not just that you start picking up on sounds that might otherwise be drowned out, but you can hear over much longer distances. You know, even just a few decibels less noise, you can double the radius over which you're hearing. And so sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It disconnects us from the sounds of nature around us

by shrinking our own sensory bubble. It disconnects us from the cosmos by drowning out the lights of distant stars. And you know, it's it's sort of ironic that at this moment, at that moment in time, when people felt isolated in some ways, they actually were more connected to the world around them. M And I think, like, you know,

we should we should aim for that. I mean, not like the horrible, not saying we should name for like lockdowns and say at home orders, we should aim for being more connected through the all dorandous by expanding the reach of our own senses, um and by going on these mental adventures and thinking about the senses of other animals. Yeah, I mean, circling back to what we talked about with dogs perception. I enjoy my walks with Cookie a lot more after reading the book and really thinking about how

much fun she's having smelling these things. And I just watch her and enjoy seeing her reaction to things, or like I'll leave hide little treats around the house and watch her like sniff, I see she catches the scent and she tries to find it, and it's you know, in that very simple, limited way. It's brought me so

much more joy. And I think that once we if we extend that past just the cute animals like dogs into you know, all sorts of animals out there, even the you know, the maybe less beautiful ones like snakes and spiders, bats, all though personally I think that's are very very cute, you know, really kind of getting feeling that excitement about watching them experience the world and understanding. Hey,

they have that internal experience. It's like when you're a really young kid and you finally come to the realization, oh wait, there are a ton of people on Earth and they each have their own internal experience and that immensity of understanding. Hey, like, I am not the only conscious human and there's so many other conscious humans. Uh. And then like extending that realization to animals I think is a very profound and enriching experience. Yeah, me too,

I I could. I couldn't agree more well ed, Thank you so much for joining me today. This was wonderful. I love your book. I am eternally grateful for your articles as well, because without them, uh, this podcast would probably be a lot less interesting. So where can when? Where? And when can people get a copy of your book? So An Immense World is out on June twenty one in all the places you get books from, preferably your local bookstore, but anyway you want to grab a copy,

please do. You can get the audiobook as well, which is read by me um. So yeah, it should be out pretty soon. I hope you all check it out, and I hope everyone enjoys it. I hope it brings a bit of joy to people's lives at a moment when I think we could all use more infusions of joy. Well, I can attest to that I really enjoyed it. Before we go, Let's play guest who squawk? In the Mystery Animal Sound game. Every week I play a Mystery animal sound in you the listener guests who is making that

sound could be any animal on Earth. So the hint for last week's Mr Animal sound was this the eachured in the Silence of the Lambs. This fellow is not so silent, So congratulations to Joey Pete, Kegan H and Remy H who were the fastest guessers for the Death's Head moth. So the Death's Head Moth was featured on

the poster for Silence of the Lambs. They have what appears to be a human skull marking their thorax, so to make that chirping sound, they actually inhale and exhale air, forcing it through their mouth tube, which was thought to originally be used to like slurp up sugary syrup um, but it is now used to make sound and it can vibrate like an accordion, and this is a way of scaring away predators, so startling them and hopefully scaring

them away. And due to the skull like marking and shrill squeaks, it has become a figure in many superstitions. So onto this week's Mr Animal Sound. Here's your hint. It has a prehensile tale, a hunger for eucalyptus and for fresh meat. If you think you know who's squawking, you can write to me at Creature Feature Pod at gmail dot com, also on Twitter at Creature feet Pod. That's f e a T not at the et that is something very different And if you leave a rating

or review, I would be ever so grateful. I read all the reviews and it means so much to me. And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Luina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the I Heart Radio app ALP podcast or Hey guess what? Where have you listen to your favorite shows? I do not judge you. See you next Wednesday.