In an earlier blog post I wrote about the “umwelt,” the individual view of the world created by a creature’s unique physiological ability to perceive its environment. For example, the internal model of reality of a blind bat is built through sonar, which creates a very different umwelt than that of a keen-eyed hawk that can spot a mouse from hundreds of feet in the air.
As another example, my husband Arthur is always smelling things that I can’t smell, and he’s often astonished at my inability to detect odors that he finds strong. But those smells just do not exist in my umwelt.
I thought of umwelt again because Arthur is working on an archival project, transferring tapes of singer-songwriters he recorded in the 1970s into an audio-editing software and burning CDs. One musician’s songs are marred by a hideous tape squeal—to my ears. Arthur couldn’t hear it and none of our friends could hear it either. But to me it was so loud it made the CD unlistenable. Arthur and I opened that musician’s computer file and I manipulated the EQ setting, creating a narrow band of lowered volume that I slid up and down the frequency scale until I’d removed the squeal (at about 8300 Hz). Then I played a song, toggling the EQ on and off as Arthur tried to hear the squeal. What was loud and obvious to me was completely nonexistent to him. This sound did not exist in Arthur’s umwelt.
A wondrous book I have been savoring for weeks, The Forest Unseen, also made me think of the limits of not only my umwelt but every human’s. Dr. David Haskell spent a year observing a small patch of eastern Tennessee old-growth forest, and beautifully combines a meditative consciousness with a scientist’s mind. Dr. Haskell says we’re limited in our ability to see reality not just by the constraints of our senses, but also by scale:
Humans consider themselves to be the dominant creature on earth, yet that is a misconception based on our collective umwelt. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote in a 1996 essay entitled “Planet of the Bacteria,” the attempts to characterize the earth’s history by naming eras after their dominant creatures—“Age of the Dinosaurs,” “Age of Mammals,” “Age of Man”—misses the creature that has been dominant throughout:
At the end of the essay, Dr. Gould summarizes the many reasons for assigning the dominant position to bacteria:
Arthur and I have started using a new phrase, “portal of awareness,” to describe the process of perception. Ordinarily, we think that when we look or listen or smell we take in all of the information streaming our way. But this is incorrect. Our physiology and our psychology create a window, an opening with definite limits or borders, that allows in only a fraction of what is really out there. It’s impossible for us to even know how much we’re missing.
For me this is just another reason to be humble about my opinions. If I can’t perceive something it doesn’t exist in my personal reality. How can I be certain about any opinion, knowing there may exist something outside of my umwelt that would disprove my belief?
The umwelt shows that I know nothing absolutely. Everything I know is conditional, provisional, limited.
As another example, my husband Arthur is always smelling things that I can’t smell, and he’s often astonished at my inability to detect odors that he finds strong. But those smells just do not exist in my umwelt.
I thought of umwelt again because Arthur is working on an archival project, transferring tapes of singer-songwriters he recorded in the 1970s into an audio-editing software and burning CDs. One musician’s songs are marred by a hideous tape squeal—to my ears. Arthur couldn’t hear it and none of our friends could hear it either. But to me it was so loud it made the CD unlistenable. Arthur and I opened that musician’s computer file and I manipulated the EQ setting, creating a narrow band of lowered volume that I slid up and down the frequency scale until I’d removed the squeal (at about 8300 Hz). Then I played a song, toggling the EQ on and off as Arthur tried to hear the squeal. What was loud and obvious to me was completely nonexistent to him. This sound did not exist in Arthur’s umwelt.
A wondrous book I have been savoring for weeks, The Forest Unseen, also made me think of the limits of not only my umwelt but every human’s. Dr. David Haskell spent a year observing a small patch of eastern Tennessee old-growth forest, and beautifully combines a meditative consciousness with a scientist’s mind. Dr. Haskell says we’re limited in our ability to see reality not just by the constraints of our senses, but also by scale:
We are tens of thousands of times larger than most living creatures, therefore our senses are too dull to detect the citizens of Lilliput that crawl around and over us. Bacteria, protists, mites, and nematodes make their homes on the mountains of our bodies, hidden from us by the dislocation of scale. We live in an empiricist’s nightmare: there is a reality far beyond our perception. Our senses have failed us for millennia. Only when we mastered glass and were able to produce clear, polished lenses were we able to gaze through a microscope and finally realize the enormity of our former ignorance.
Humans consider themselves to be the dominant creature on earth, yet that is a misconception based on our collective umwelt. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote in a 1996 essay entitled “Planet of the Bacteria,” the attempts to characterize the earth’s history by naming eras after their dominant creatures—“Age of the Dinosaurs,” “Age of Mammals,” “Age of Man”—misses the creature that has been dominant throughout:
If we must characterize a whole by a representative part, we certainly should honor life's constant mode. We live now in the "Age of Bacteria." Our planet has always been in the "Age of Bacteria," ever since the first fossils—bacteria, of course—were entombed in rocks more than 3 billion years ago.
On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant forms of life on Earth. Our failure to grasp this most evident of biological facts arises in part from the blindness of our arrogance but also, in large measure, as an effect of scale. We are so accustomed to viewing phenomena of our scale—sizes measured in feet and ages in decades—as typical of nature.
At the end of the essay, Dr. Gould summarizes the many reasons for assigning the dominant position to bacteria:
Not only does the Earth contain more bacterial organisms than all others combined (scarcely surprising, given their minimal size and mass); not only do bacteria live in more places and work in a greater variety of metabolic ways; not only did bacteria alone constitute the first half of life's history, with no slackening in diversity thereafter; but also, and most surprisingly, total bacterial biomass (even at such minimal weight per cell) may exceed all the rest of life combined, even forest trees, once we include the subterranean populations as well.
Arthur and I have started using a new phrase, “portal of awareness,” to describe the process of perception. Ordinarily, we think that when we look or listen or smell we take in all of the information streaming our way. But this is incorrect. Our physiology and our psychology create a window, an opening with definite limits or borders, that allows in only a fraction of what is really out there. It’s impossible for us to even know how much we’re missing.
For me this is just another reason to be humble about my opinions. If I can’t perceive something it doesn’t exist in my personal reality. How can I be certain about any opinion, knowing there may exist something outside of my umwelt that would disprove my belief?
The umwelt shows that I know nothing absolutely. Everything I know is conditional, provisional, limited.
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