Umwelt Empathy
TAoN No. 115: A prompt from a new book for combating "the pollution of disconnection." Plus a 'Lost Objects' discount, and more.
Note: This Monday issue going out early Tuesday due to technical error on my part! Sorry!
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I’m a bit late to this party, but writer Ed Yong has been getting a lot of attention lately for his book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Most recently I heard him on the Keen On podcast, via Lithub, and what caught my ear was his description of trying to imagine the sensory world of other animals — as what he called “an act of radical empathy.”
This practice involves a word I didn’t really know:
Umwelt — the sensory bubble in which any given animal (including me, including you) exists.
Yong writes about the practice of trying to understand another animal’s Umwelt — to try to imagine experiencing the world the way that animal does — in this New York Times essay. There he defines Umwelt as …
“… an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.” And so on.
Yong goes on to propose what I’ll call The Umwelt Empathy Prompt:
“By thinking about our surroundings through other Umwelten, we gain fresh appreciation not just for our fellow creatures, but also for the world we share with them. Through the nose of an albatross, a flat ocean becomes a rolling odorscape. … To a bee, a plain yellow sunflower has an ultraviolet bull’s-eye at its center. …
“Even the most familiar of settings can feel newly unfamiliar through the senses of other creatures. I walk my dog — Typo, a corgi — three times a day, passing the same streets and buildings that I’ve seen thousands of times. But though this urban landscape seems boring and stagnant to my eyes, its smellscape is constantly fascinating to Typo’s nose. He sniffs constantly, his nasal anatomy allowing him to continuously draw in odors even while exhaling. …
“By watching him, I feel less inured to my own life, more aware of the perpetually changing environment around me.”
In the Keen On interview, Yong referred to this practice partly as a response to the “sensory pollution” of modern life: “the pollution of disconnection,” that makes our individual Umwelt/perceptioni bubbles smaller, obscuring and distracting us from the natural world.
Of course such efforts will always be limited; there is no way to, say, see colors that only birds can, or to understand the specific information your dog is getting by furiously snifffing that fire hydrant.
But this exercises encourages us to imagine what we can’t perceive. And perhaps the more we think about what we might be missing, and challenge the limits of our individual perception bubbles, the more we will notice. Let’s try.
(There’s a long piece in The Atlantic adapted from Yong’s book, here.)
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COMING UP
In forthcoming Thursday subscriber-only editions, I’ll have a new post in my series on coping with tech distractions, and a new Hero of Noticing. I also have a new subscriber-only discussion thread planned for this weekend; stay tuned.
Last Thursday I wrote about Matt Richtel’s recent book on creativity, and the Thursday before I shared a handful of useful ideas from my notebook.
For access to past and future Thursday posts, discussion threads, and other surprises, become a paid subscriber.
The next free Monday edition in two weeks.
IN OTHER NEWS
Thanks to Abby Carney for the fun conversation, for Alcalde, about Lost Objects. (More about Lost Objects below.)
In my Fast Company column, I wrote about the weird success of the Hummer EV, and about “sportswashing.”
Absurd Trolley Problems. Set aside a few minutes; recommended. (My “kill count” was 70.)
The Payphone Museum. (Via BoingBoing.)
For whatever reason — my age perhaps? — I was quite intrigued to read about the alleged benefits of a flamingo pose.
The World’s Smallest Park. Delightful.
The “lost art” of the mini golf course.
Publisher Hat & Beard is offering a limited time discount offer on LOST OBJECTS, the book I co-edited with Joshua Glenn: Go here and use checkout code LOSTOBJECTS to take 20% off the price of either the book or a book/poster combo. (The book’s shipping has been delayed by a variety of supply chain problems, but I’m told copies are finally arriving and shipping. The book is beautiful, see below.) More Lost Objects updates at HILOBROW.
OKAY THAT’S IT!
As always, I value your feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.), as well as your tips or stories or personal noticing rituals, things we need a word for, and of course your icebreakers: consumed@robwalker.net. Or use the comments.
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And thanks for reading …
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All this by Rob Walker PO Box 171, 748 Mehle St., Arabi LA 70032
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Thanks for the post.
I used to enjoy July 4th fireworks until I got a dog who literally shivers and cowers in the bathtub when there's thunder that I can't hear with my human ears. When my "fun-loving" neighbors shoot off fireworks literally right outside our house, I hang out in the bathtub with my four-legger, doing my best to soothe her. It took a few years to learn the right dose of a doggie CBD oil that drugs her into sleeping through it, and while I'm relieved to give her some relief, I'm still resentful that I need to do it.
In a happy coincidence, I am a software engineer and had been preparing a website I'm building to display a vertical video, so I needed a random vertical video from vimeo to test while I wait for the final one for production. I happened to grab this one: https://vimeo.com/152153054. I'd been enjoying watching it in between bursts of work and I appreciate the extra context!