Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature feature production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and today we're talking about animal senses.
Speaker 1: But this is a very special episode because joining me
Speaker 1: today is a science journalist for the Atlantic Pulitzer Prize
Speaker 1: winner for his coverage of COVID nineteen and author of
Speaker 1: the book An Immense World, which explores the hugely diverse
Speaker 1: way in which animals perceive the world, from the catfish
Speaker 1: that has taste receptors all over its body to the
Speaker 1: knife fish that sees the world using electricity, from elephants
Speaker 1: who smell with their immense trunks to snakes who smell
Speaker 1: by whisking sent in with their tongues. Welcome to the show,
Speaker 1: Edie Young, Hello, thanks for having me. I am so
Speaker 1: excited to have you here. I I'm a big fan
Speaker 1: of your articles. They are immensely helpful for me as
Speaker 1: I am researching the podcast. Thank you. I'm delighted. So
Speaker 1: I have read your book, An Immense World, and I
Speaker 1: absolutely love it. I think it really it embodies so
Speaker 1: much of what I try to talk about on the podcast,
Speaker 1: which is getting people to understand the world of animals,
Speaker 1: can put themselves inside of the minds of animals, but
Speaker 1: it can be very difficult sometimes to do that because
Speaker 1: animals are so different from us, So especially maybe the
Speaker 1: less charismatic, gregarious animals, that can be hard to relate
Speaker 1: to them. Uh. And it can be really hard to
Speaker 1: describe what might be the experience of animals when we're
Speaker 1: trapped in our own, you know, human brains. We can't
Speaker 1: get outside of our brains. But as a science writer,
Speaker 1: you have to try to get inside the heads of
Speaker 1: these animals. So how do you go about doing that right? Well?
Speaker 1: With some difficulty it is, it is very challenging. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think that there's a lot there's
Speaker 1: a lot of discussion around how animals think, um, you know,
Speaker 1: how what they might feel, um. But you know, even
Speaker 1: on a on a very basic level, like how they
Speaker 1: how they sense, what they see, what they hear, what
Speaker 1: they're capable of seeing and hearing. Um, there's a huge
Speaker 1: amount of variation there. And and we don't we often
Speaker 1: just don't really think about it. I think this is
Speaker 1: very reflective tendency to assume that animals are just seeing
Speaker 1: and hearing and feeling and smelling the same kinds of
Speaker 1: things that that we are, and that's not true, and
Speaker 1: that this whole book is about why that's not true. Um.
Speaker 1: But to sort of really grapple with why that's not
Speaker 1: true it is immensely challenging. Like I can I can
Speaker 1: look at studies, I can see what this what science
Speaker 1: tells us about what kinds of things and them all
Speaker 1: can can sense, but to really actually get into the
Speaker 1: head of that creature, to think about what about UM
Speaker 1: feels when it flies through the air, What what an
Speaker 1: electric fish feels when it when it detects the ways
Speaker 1: its own electric field is walked by the objects around it.
Speaker 1: You're never going to be entirely able to do that,
Speaker 1: and so there's always going to be this chasm between
Speaker 1: what we experience and what other animals experienced. And the
Speaker 1: only way to jump across that is with a feat
Speaker 1: of imagination. And I think that's something sort of beautiful
Speaker 1: about that. It's you're never going to be able to
Speaker 1: completely do it. It's always going to be a struggle,
Speaker 1: but it feels like such a worthwhile thing to to
Speaker 1: struggle against into sort of devote mental energy towards. I
Speaker 1: absolutely agree. I think it takes a lot of creativity,
Speaker 1: imagination and compassion to try to imagine what it would
Speaker 1: be to be one of these animals. And I think
Speaker 1: in your writing that creativity and that compassion for animals
Speaker 1: is really infectious. So like, for instance, I have a dog,
Speaker 1: and in your book An Immense World, you wrote about
Speaker 1: how their sense of smell is so pivotal to their
Speaker 1: whole quality of life. My dog loves to smell the nastiest, nastiest,
Speaker 1: rankest thing she can find on our walk and just
Speaker 1: huff that smell. And it's usually something horrifying, like you know,
Speaker 1: some animal dropping with maybe some cigarette butts mixed in there,
Speaker 1: and I, you know, it's it always kind of irked me,
Speaker 1: but now I think, okay, Well, for her, she's exam
Speaker 1: it's like viewing a piece of art. For me maybe
Speaker 1: like going to an art gallery and taking all it
Speaker 1: all in. She's going to a smell gallery. And for her,
Speaker 1: this piece of poop that has like cigarette butts in
Speaker 1: it is like some amazing piece of art for her
Speaker 1: to experience your smell, right, it's like Michelangelo's David Right,
Speaker 1: So I feel so I feel much the same way
Speaker 1: ever dog. He's a corgy. His name is Typo. When
Speaker 1: whenever we're like on a walk or in the dog park,
Speaker 1: whenever he does that thing where he sniffs something and
Speaker 1: then he drops and like rubs his back on it. Right,
Speaker 1: we have this joke that like it's never a good thing.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not like someone has just recently splits
Speaker 1: like lavender on that spot, right, Like it's always going
Speaker 1: to be some poop or like something throw up, or
Speaker 1: like there's a cigarette but or something like that. Um.
Speaker 1: But but as you say, I think smell is so
Speaker 1: central to the life of a dog that those acts
Speaker 1: of exploration, even for things that we might find gross,
Speaker 1: are really important to them. You know, I've seen dog
Speaker 1: owners like yank their dogs along walks because they sort
Speaker 1: of treated as exercise, or you know, pull their dogs
Speaker 1: away from sniffing another dog's genitals, for example, And all
Speaker 1: of those acts are just a normal part of a
Speaker 1: dog's behavior, and they're so profoundly linked to their sense
Speaker 1: of smell. A dog is an amazing sense to smell.
Speaker 1: It's you know, ol faction. Smell is primary for them
Speaker 1: in the way that vision is for sighted humans. And
Speaker 1: if we deprive them of chances to use their nose.
Speaker 1: I think we we sort of deprive them of a
Speaker 1: of a like a very essential part of their dog nous.
Speaker 1: You know, there have been studies showing that dogs are happier,
Speaker 1: like more optimistic, less anxious when they get a chance
Speaker 1: to use their noses. And I think, like we we
Speaker 1: benefit too. You know, when I watched typo on a
Speaker 1: on a walk, like we walk around the same bit
Speaker 1: of neighborhood all the time, like streets and houses that
Speaker 1: I passed thousands of times over and that now feel
Speaker 1: boring to me, but they're not boring to him because
Speaker 1: they change all the time. That the smells that he
Speaker 1: gets are constantly shifting, and he smells like you know
Speaker 1: that now it's spring. I watched him like examine like
Speaker 1: newly emerged plants with just this incredible delicacy. And I
Speaker 1: watched him like examining bits where other dogs have peede
Speaker 1: or pooped. And I see that as like you know,
Speaker 1: me check scrolling through my Instagram feed. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like me checking on social media. It's it's an entire
Speaker 1: it's right, it's a it's a deeply social activity. Like
Speaker 1: he can tell which of the neighborhood dogs have been around,
Speaker 1: probably like what their current state is, like, what their
Speaker 1: health is like, lots of stuff about their lives that
Speaker 1: kind of like autobiographical information that I have no access to.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know, you know, which dogs were there,
Speaker 1: but he does. And so every walk, if he's allowed
Speaker 1: to sniff, becomes like an adventure, a social occasion. I
Speaker 1: love that. Yeah, we have a park where I take Cookie,
Speaker 1: and Cookie is not she's like a little some kind
Speaker 1: of spaniel chia am, so she's not big on exercise anyways,
Speaker 1: but I'll take her to the park and she just
Speaker 1: loves the whole the sniff experience of going and she's
Speaker 1: very particular. And it's so interesting because you know, I
Speaker 1: may want to go somewhere where it's nice and shady
Speaker 1: or there's some flowers, but she wants to go to
Speaker 1: just this uninteresting to me patch of dirt. But I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's some kind of calling card that's been left,
Speaker 1: some sort of interesting marking from another dog, and she's
Speaker 1: just investigating it for you know, minutes, and it's it's
Speaker 1: really I think, kind of once you really put yourself
Speaker 1: into that mindset of them exploring the world. It does
Speaker 1: become more interesting for you observing them, seeing that fascination
Speaker 1: in their eyes kind of light up when they find
Speaker 1: a particularly smelly patch, right, Like I think old dog
Speaker 1: in is like know this feeling where you're just going
Speaker 1: for where you're going for a walk, and the dog
Speaker 1: is like happily trussing along and then suddenly like just
Speaker 1: grind to a halt and and like flips around and
Speaker 1: starts investigating some random patch of ground or sidewalk that
Speaker 1: looks completely indistinguishable to every other bit of ground or
Speaker 1: sidewalk but clearly has something that is like deeply enthralling
Speaker 1: to them. Um. And you know, I think that there's
Speaker 1: a few ways you can react to that. You could
Speaker 1: sort of go, oh god, you know, we need to
Speaker 1: go on a walk and like yank them away. But
Speaker 1: I think if you really start to consider what they're doing,
Speaker 1: like it does, it does show you that there's, um
Speaker 1: that even parts of the world that we that are
Speaker 1: familiar and boring and mundane to us are actually rich
Speaker 1: with information, are you know, sort of wondrous and extraordinary
Speaker 1: through the senses of other animals. And that's like, that's
Speaker 1: a feeling that I've tried to capture in this book
Speaker 1: throughout that paying attention to how other animals sense the
Speaker 1: world reveals the world that we know in a completely
Speaker 1: different light. It shows you like flickers of the magical
Speaker 1: in the mundane. Yeah, it does really feel like there's
Speaker 1: this whole secret world that we are not really aware
Speaker 1: of until we actually pay attention to animals. There are
Speaker 1: always jokes about a cat or something be able to
Speaker 1: see ghosts or having extra senses, but it is I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe not the ghosts part, but the extra senses or
Speaker 1: at least the same senses but used differently, are very true.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think it's when we move beyond
Speaker 1: just like domesticated animals. It's so interesting how their world,
Speaker 1: even for these like extremely intelligent animals like elephants, can
Speaker 1: just be have this whole hidden aspect to it that
Speaker 1: humans don't necessarily understand until we actually study them. I
Speaker 1: really loved that example you had in your book. It
Speaker 1: was the studies of Dr Lucy Bates, who found elephants
Speaker 1: expressing confusion over a kind of magic trick. Lucy Bates
Speaker 1: in her team did or they made it. They made
Speaker 1: an elephant teleport right, but only for these elephants. Do
Speaker 1: you want to describe that study a little bit. Yes,
Speaker 1: So elephants, like dogs, have this very powerful sense of smell.
Speaker 1: They obviously have that trunk. They're constantly exploring with it.
Speaker 1: And so Lucy Bates did this experiment where she followed
Speaker 1: like herd of elephants, waited for one of them to pee,
Speaker 1: and then like waiting for them to leave, and then
Speaker 1: scooped up the urine soaked soil and put it in
Speaker 1: a piece of topperware and then drove around to find
Speaker 1: like either the same herd of elephant or a different herd,
Speaker 1: like cut cut them off, dumped out the piece oat
Speaker 1: soil in front of them, and then waited. And what
Speaker 1: happened was if she did that for a completely different
Speaker 1: herd of elephants that was unrelated, they would like examine
Speaker 1: the soil and then be like fine and move on.
Speaker 1: If it was the same herd, um, they would examine
Speaker 1: the soil and be like more interested, Like you know,
Speaker 1: they recognize that it's a family member, but specifically it was.
Speaker 1: If it was the same herd and they knew the
Speaker 1: elephant who left who left, that scent was behind them,
Speaker 1: they acted very confused because they have an awareness of um,
Speaker 1: of who of their their own family members, who's around them,
Speaker 1: and that awareness is cemented through scent. So if they
Speaker 1: can smell, if they know that, you know, like elephant
Speaker 1: Joe is like way behind in the herd, and suddenly
Speaker 1: they smell Elephantjoe ahead of them, They're like wait, what what? How? Um? Right?
Speaker 1: And so I love that for for several reasons. Right, So, firstly,
Speaker 1: it shows that principle we talked about that like this
Speaker 1: random bit of soil contains rich information to an to
Speaker 1: an animal that can that has the right nose for it, um.
Speaker 1: And it's and it's rich biographical information too, right, It's
Speaker 1: it's information about who who is around and where they are. Um.
Speaker 1: And And also that this this there's a lovely interaction
Speaker 1: here between the senses and the intelligence of the animal. Right. So,
Speaker 1: so the sense some animals have all kinds of extraordinary
Speaker 1: ways of perceiving the world. But when you tag on,
Speaker 1: when you tack that on to like long lasting memories
Speaker 1: or just you know, advanced cognition, you get these wonderful
Speaker 1: little interplace um like like what these elevants being confused
Speaker 1: by a magic trick that humans have performed. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I also love that we probably wouldn't know about this
Speaker 1: awareness that these elephants have. This very it's a very
Speaker 1: advanced form of cognition to recognize an individual and know
Speaker 1: where that individual is spatially and also be able to
Speaker 1: reason out that, Okay, if they're behind us, how could
Speaker 1: they have jumped ahead in time and gotten ahead of us?
Speaker 1: That doesn't make sense. So it shows that very complex,
Speaker 1: rich intelligence. But if we hadn't thought, or at least
Speaker 1: if Dr Lucy Bates and her team hadn't thought to
Speaker 1: investigate their sense of smell, something that to us is
Speaker 1: not as important in recognizing individuals or understanding sort of
Speaker 1: time or spatial reasoning, we wouldn't have discovered this aspect
Speaker 1: of elephant intelligence. So being able to understand the you know,
Speaker 1: not look at an animal's intelligence through our human kind
Speaker 1: of framework, but through the animals framework, I think would
Speaker 1: reveal a lot more to us about how intelligent they are.
Speaker 1: Oh totally. And I think this also reveals something important
Speaker 1: about that the scientific method, which is that it is
Speaker 1: profoundly influenced by the kinds of people who get to
Speaker 1: be part of science, Like we sort of think of
Speaker 1: the scientific method. This is like neutral objective thing, but
Speaker 1: but it's not. It's profoundly influenced by by the types
Speaker 1: of people who are involved in science, and in this
Speaker 1: case their own senses. So so you're right, many most
Speaker 1: humans rely on vision above all our other senses, and
Speaker 1: we sort of put that, we we map that onto
Speaker 1: the creatures we study. So with like an animal intelligence,
Speaker 1: there is this famous test called the mirror test, where
Speaker 1: you're trying to see if an animal can recognize it's
Speaker 1: a mark that has been placed on its body in
Speaker 1: its reflection. And this has been you know, used as
Speaker 1: a as a way, this has been linked to everything
Speaker 1: from all sorts of things like self awareness, empathy, and
Speaker 1: so on. But like, it only really applies, it only
Speaker 1: really works if the animal is visually oriented. And like
Speaker 1: people have tried this kind of test with with elephants
Speaker 1: with mixed success, And maybe the reason is that vision
Speaker 1: just ain't that important for elements, like you know, maybe
Speaker 1: if you try a version that that um that is
Speaker 1: specifically related to smell, they do better. And you know
Speaker 1: that this kind of work has been done with dogs,
Speaker 1: but for the same reason, they do better at like
Speaker 1: smell oriented tests of self recognition than than visual ones.
Speaker 1: So you know, the humans have this very visual bias
Speaker 1: that affects how they think about the animals that they
Speaker 1: study and the kinds of research questions that they ask.
Speaker 1: And it takes a little feet of imagination to actually think, like, now,
Speaker 1: what what are the animals themselves sensing? And how do
Speaker 1: we study that? And how do we craft experiments and
Speaker 1: studies that that really pay respect to their different senses
Speaker 1: rather than just you know, shoving the round peg of
Speaker 1: animal behavior into the square hole of like of of
Speaker 1: the human unbolt. Yeah, I can imagine an alien species
Speaker 1: picking one of us up and maybe changing our smell,
Speaker 1: like changing our personal smell, which as humans we don't
Speaker 1: notice that much. We do do a certain extent, but
Speaker 1: not much, and then not seeing that we don't notice
Speaker 1: that changed our own smell, and coming to the conclusion, oh,
Speaker 1: humans aren't self aware. They have no awareness of self right, yeah,
Speaker 1: right right, Like you know, we we talked about how
Speaker 1: um dogs have, you know, are aware of things in
Speaker 1: the street that we aren't aware of. But of course
Speaker 1: it works in other ways to like every animal has
Speaker 1: its own little sensory bubble, like we are aware of
Speaker 1: stimuli in the world that other animals and not all
Speaker 1: and vice versa. So so you're right, you know that
Speaker 1: there's a very simple example I've given the book where
Speaker 1: our color vision extends from red to violet and we
Speaker 1: can't see ultra violet light that that lies beyond the
Speaker 1: violet end of the visible spectrum. And for that reason,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of mystique around ultra violets. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of scientists have said that it maybe it's
Speaker 1: a secret communication channel that animals used to share messages
Speaker 1: that no one else can see. But that breaks down
Speaker 1: when you realize that actually most animals that can see
Speaker 1: colors see ultra violet. We are just the exception. So
Speaker 1: it's not really super special. It just happens to be
Speaker 1: another color, and it happens to be another color that
Speaker 1: we can't see. And if you, you know, if you
Speaker 1: for a moment you imagine that like bees were scientists
Speaker 1: like bees, for be, the rainbow goes from green to
Speaker 1: ultra violet, so they can't see it. And you can
Speaker 1: imagine a b scientist thinking like, oh, these weird like
Speaker 1: you know, two legged apes they can see. I guess
Speaker 1: they would call it like ultra yellow, right, like the
Speaker 1: color that that they can't see, and maybe it's like
Speaker 1: really special. Maybe ultra maybe ultra yellow is a way
Speaker 1: of for them to like exchange secret messages that we
Speaker 1: can't see. And and only after like decades of study
Speaker 1: where they realize actually a lot of animals can see
Speaker 1: ultra yellow. There's a lot of you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of ultra yellow in the world, and it just
Speaker 1: it's just another color. Um. So yeah, I think there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot of that around where there are parts
Speaker 1: of the world that we don't experience and we think
Speaker 1: are like just kind of magical, and they are a
Speaker 1: little magical, but like they're only magical because they're there
Speaker 1: are things that we don't have access to. So there's
Speaker 1: that sensory experience you talk about in the book Magneto Reception,
Speaker 1: that being able to detect the Earth's gravitational field. I'm
Speaker 1: really jealous of that ability because I get very easily lost.
Speaker 1: I'm I even with a map like two inches from
Speaker 1: my face, I can get lost. So I would love
Speaker 1: to have an internal compass like that. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, originally it was thought maybe only you know,
Speaker 1: a few species had this, but it seems like more
Speaker 1: the more we study it, the more it seems like
Speaker 1: a lot of animals have this ability, and it seems
Speaker 1: so magical to us, but it seems not that uncommon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of animals that can sense the Earth's
Speaker 1: magnetic field. Um. So songbirds definitely can do it. A
Speaker 1: lot of species are known to do it and they
Speaker 1: use that that ability to guide their migrations. Um. Sea
Speaker 1: turtles can do it. Um. There's there's some really interesting
Speaker 1: work sudjusting that giant whales can do it. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so this magnetic reception, the ability to sense Earth's magnetic field,
Speaker 1: it's actually a very interesting and quite difficult case study
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of work here and some of
Speaker 1: it might be wrong. That there's a lot of debate
Speaker 1: about which animals actually have this ability, Like the ones
Speaker 1: I told you sea turtles and songbirds I think are
Speaker 1: pretty are pretty clear. Those are those are pretty definitive.
Speaker 1: But there's a long list of other creatures that are
Speaker 1: said to have magnetic reception, and there's there's just a
Speaker 1: bit of um debate in the scientific community. And partly
Speaker 1: that debate exists because this is an incredibly hard sense
Speaker 1: to study, Like, firstly, we don't have it, and also
Speaker 1: it's very unintuitive. You know, if I if if you
Speaker 1: asked me to explain to you how magnetism works, like
Speaker 1: I would I would struggle, right, you know, like I
Speaker 1: can I can show you, I can draw you like
Speaker 1: a textbook picture of a bar magnet with like lines
Speaker 1: coming out of it, but to actually understand on the
Speaker 1: fundamental level is hard, and to appreciate then how that
Speaker 1: might feel to an animal, like does there's this idea
Speaker 1: that songbirds can actually see the magnetic field so that
Speaker 1: they might have like an overlay on their vision that
Speaker 1: sort of tells them where like north might be. And
Speaker 1: you know, that might be true, but it might not,
Speaker 1: Like you know, in either case, it's quite difficult to
Speaker 1: to think about how that feels to an animal, like
Speaker 1: does it does a does a migrating turtle always have
Speaker 1: a little like tug towards like where north is? Does
Speaker 1: it feel very differently um for something like that, which
Speaker 1: is you know, entirely different a sense that we don't have.
Speaker 1: It's not like, you know, trying to imagine a b
Speaker 1: seeing ultra violet. It's it really taxes um that the
Speaker 1: boundaries of our understanding, as does the rest of the sense.
Speaker 1: You know, no one actually knows. Like for vision, right,
Speaker 1: my vision is in my eyes, Um, the organ is clear.
Speaker 1: That the molecules responsible for my ability to see are known,
Speaker 1: and the way they work is clear. None of that
Speaker 1: is clear. For magnetic reception, there are some there are
Speaker 1: loads of theories, but the magnetic field penetrate cell bodies.
Speaker 1: So a sense organ doesn't have to be on the surface,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to have like a hole that allows
Speaker 1: it to access the environment. Could be anywhere. It could
Speaker 1: be distributed throughout my entire body. It could be hidden
Speaker 1: into in my internal organs, it could be in my butt.
Speaker 1: Who who knows. Um, all these possibilities are are on
Speaker 1: the table, which makes it a fiendishly difficult sense to study.
Speaker 1: And so this goes back to what we talked about
Speaker 1: about the link between imagination and discovery. The fact that
Speaker 1: this sense taxes are imagination so means that the process
Speaker 1: of discovery has been very slow and kind of jerky
Speaker 1: and erratic. And for that reason, I think kind of
Speaker 1: fun Yeah, No, I think it's in a way it's
Speaker 1: comforting to me that we don't know things about the
Speaker 1: animal world, because it really shows how rich it is.
Speaker 1: If we already had discovered everything, everything was a settled science,
Speaker 1: that would be I think it would feel lonely because
Speaker 1: I think there's always this hope that will discover more
Speaker 1: things to make us feel like we're not the only thinking,
Speaker 1: feeling species on Earth. And so I love it when
Speaker 1: it when there are these secrets, because to me, it
Speaker 1: feels like, oh that this is another thing to try
Speaker 1: to understand. And you know, having that understanding of animals
Speaker 1: around us, you know, it makes me feel like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're not you know, we're not the only thing around here.
Speaker 1: We have a bunch of interesting creatures that have their
Speaker 1: own internal experience and we can actually try to understand that.
Speaker 1: Right And the wonderful thing here is is that every
Speaker 1: creature has its own unique sensory world. So the amount
Speaker 1: of stuff that you could potentially learn is is almost limitless, right.
Speaker 1: It's it's limited only by the number of species that exist.
Speaker 1: And wherever scientists look, it seems that they always find
Speaker 1: something cool. Um And And because sensory biology is such
Speaker 1: an an old, rich field with a deep history to it,
Speaker 1: um And because surprises seem to be just around the
Speaker 1: corner and and infinite in their number. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of work on frankly, like weird animals. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not like everything is just in like fruit flies or
Speaker 1: dogs or elephants, like the book also includes catfish and
Speaker 1: like golden moles. Um And you know that there are
Speaker 1: probably I would hope there are animals here that like
Speaker 1: people have never heard of before. And there's such a
Speaker 1: rich vein of literature to to draw from that there
Speaker 1: was such a rich vein to draw from in writing
Speaker 1: this book because the questions are so fascinating. Um And
Speaker 1: like the people who study this, who who work in
Speaker 1: this field, seem to get like very easily drawn towards
Speaker 1: like weirdos, you know, to to some random animal that
Speaker 1: they happen to like walk past in a zoo or
Speaker 1: you know, stumble across the field trip and they suddenly
Speaker 1: become and throw like and and um enraptured by like
Speaker 1: what by thinking about how that animal perceives? And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's it meant. It means that it means
Speaker 1: that the book gets to be diverse, and that I
Speaker 1: get to write about a lot of um, a lot
Speaker 1: of strange and wonderful things. Yeah, I mean I think
Speaker 1: that it is the stranger the animal that maybe it
Speaker 1: gets harder to empathize with it, but the more fascinating
Speaker 1: it can be. So for example, in the book You
Speaker 1: Discus u U Scalop TV study where Professor Daniel Spizer
Speaker 1: put scalops in little scalop chairs and made them watch TV.
Speaker 1: I love this studies so much. I love to visualize
Speaker 1: a bunch of scalops in like a theater watching a movie.
Speaker 1: And what I love about it also is that it
Speaker 1: highlights the eyes of scalops. I think people can be
Speaker 1: quite surprised that scalops have eyes. Uh, in fact, they
Speaker 1: can have over a hundred eyes, and that they are
Speaker 1: They're beautiful to me. They're they're like these little jewels,
Speaker 1: these shiny, little, bright, bright blue jewels. And I love
Speaker 1: just finding a hidden secret where you know, we're used
Speaker 1: to scalops, like you say in the book, is just
Speaker 1: kind of this tasty little cylinder of flesh on a plate,
Speaker 1: but it's an animal and not and it has this
Speaker 1: sensory experience. And this scalop TV study is really weird
Speaker 1: but really into sting. Could you talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah. I love the study because everyone involved
Speaker 1: is very clear that this was an absolutely absurd experiment
Speaker 1: to try and they no one thought that it would work,
Speaker 1: but they gave it a go and it and they
Speaker 1: found something really cool, which is that if you put
Speaker 1: scalops like on these these little I don't know, scalop
Speaker 1: armchairs and show them movies like just a little little
Speaker 1: flecks of food, like little particles drifting by on a screen, um,
Speaker 1: they you know, they will react, they'll open their shells,
Speaker 1: they'll extend their their their little sensory tentacles in a
Speaker 1: kind of curious way. And okay, so so to explain
Speaker 1: what this means, um As as we said, a scalop
Speaker 1: is a living animal. It is not just like a
Speaker 1: lump of flash. The flesh is like the muscle of
Speaker 1: the scalps foot. But there's a whole other animal besides
Speaker 1: that inside the shell, and that includes eyes. Has rows
Speaker 1: of very beautiful, quite surprisingly complex eyes. And this experiment
Speaker 1: the scientists in who did it and I thought that
Speaker 1: maybe the eyes are used to to spot passing food. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, scalops will filter bits of food um part
Speaker 1: of floating past them. So maybe the eyes detect that
Speaker 1: and and allow the scalpt to two on the momb.
Speaker 1: But um, what they actually think is that now is
Speaker 1: that the scalops of these like centory tentacles that smell
Speaker 1: and and taste and feel, and the eyes are just
Speaker 1: a way of saying, hey, there's something interesting over there,
Speaker 1: and the tentacles allow them to then explore with their
Speaker 1: other sensors um, which is really cool. But I think,
Speaker 1: like the thing that's extraordinary to me about this is
Speaker 1: I think, try and think about what a scalop sees.
Speaker 1: Because the eyes are, like I said, they're surprisingly complicated.
Speaker 1: Like they they have reasonable optics. Um. So each eye
Speaker 1: has like you know, nowhere near as a good division
Speaker 1: as us, but they have decent image forming abilities. But
Speaker 1: the scalps brain is really simple, Like the scalop is
Speaker 1: almost certainly not experiencing like a movie playing through its
Speaker 1: head in the same way that you and I are
Speaker 1: now like looking up the world around us. Um. So
Speaker 1: the way I the way I UM imagine this in
Speaker 1: the book, it's as if imagine that every eye is
Speaker 1: like a state of the art motion sensing camera. Um.
Speaker 1: The camera is amazing, and they all feed into this
Speaker 1: bank of monitors, and the scalops brain is like a
Speaker 1: security guard looking over this bank of monitors. Um that
Speaker 1: that gets the feed from the cameras. But but here's
Speaker 1: the thing. Even though each camera is actually very good,
Speaker 1: what it gives to the monitor is just like a
Speaker 1: yes or no, did it see something or not? So
Speaker 1: the security guard isn't looking at this like wall of
Speaker 1: moving images. It's just really looking at this wall of
Speaker 1: like maybe a thumbs up or a thumbs down, depending
Speaker 1: on whether the camera has spotted something. So it's vision,
Speaker 1: but it's vision without scenes. And that's very hard to
Speaker 1: imagine because our visual experience is entirely based on scenes,
Speaker 1: right Like I'm looking around my room in my house
Speaker 1: right now. No, imagine if you didn't have that. Imagine
Speaker 1: if you you could see stuff happening around you, you
Speaker 1: were visually aware of it, but you didn't have that
Speaker 1: that scenery playing out in your mind. You know, I can't,
Speaker 1: Like I really struggled to do that. But that I
Speaker 1: think is a much closer approximation of what a scallop experiences.
Speaker 1: You know, this immediately minded me of blind sight in
Speaker 1: cortically blind individuals. So that's people who have blindness due
Speaker 1: to lesions in their visual cortex. But their eyes, they're
Speaker 1: actually like the their eyes in their that sensory organ
Speaker 1: is completely intact and functioning fine. It's just the in
Speaker 1: the visual cortex where we process that visual information is damaged.
Speaker 1: And so people with this are will report not having
Speaker 1: that visual experience, just as as if they had regular blindness.
Speaker 1: But when they do have a visual stimuli, they often
Speaker 1: will react subconsciously even though they're not experiencing seeing that thing.
Speaker 1: So especially with object movements, so like they may react
Speaker 1: to a moving object but not actually were court being
Speaker 1: aware of that, So like they get a sense of
Speaker 1: feeling about, you know, movement, but they don't actually have
Speaker 1: that conscious experience, which is so it's so interesting, and
Speaker 1: I mean, I think this is also kind of like
Speaker 1: what you were saying earlier, how respecting sort of the
Speaker 1: diversity of human experience in science can be really important
Speaker 1: in understanding the world around us, because I imagine that
Speaker 1: people with this experience may have more insight into that
Speaker 1: kind of having that kind of like not having the
Speaker 1: visual experience that a lot of people have, but still
Speaker 1: have their eyes still reacting to the world around them. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think that that's such a that comparison is spot on,
Speaker 1: and it makes me to think two things, like, firstly,
Speaker 1: that there is this that they can be this very
Speaker 1: stock difference between sensing on and perception on the one hand,
Speaker 1: and then conscious experience on the other, And we sort of,
Speaker 1: I think we're given to thinking that those two things
Speaker 1: are inseparable, but but of course they're not, And Blindside
Speaker 1: is an example of that. So so when we think about,
Speaker 1: for example, um, you know, a songbird sensing the Earth's
Speaker 1: magnetic field, it could work in the same way, like
Speaker 1: maybe it actually has no conscious awareness at all, It
Speaker 1: just has this sort of reflexive set of behaviors that
Speaker 1: that guide it to where it knows north or south
Speaker 1: might be. Um, you know, there's there's a lot about
Speaker 1: the senses that could basically just be about detection without
Speaker 1: necessarily involving a conscious experience. Like there's a whole chapter
Speaker 1: in the book about pain and how we think about
Speaker 1: that that that that draws heavily on that idea. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, what you said about about Blindside also
Speaker 1: made me think about the chapter in the book where
Speaker 1: I write about echolocation and an ability that bats and
Speaker 1: dolphins have and and some other mammals, but including humans, right, so, um,
Speaker 1: some blind people can absolutely echolocate, like not as well
Speaker 1: as a bat, but but pretty damn well. I met
Speaker 1: one of them. His name is Daniel kish Um. You
Speaker 1: know he he he is. He was blind from an
Speaker 1: extremely young age, and he walks around with a cane.
Speaker 1: But he also echolocates. He makes loud, sharp clicking noises
Speaker 1: with his tongue, and he senses the world in the
Speaker 1: rebounding echoes. You know, we we we were walking along
Speaker 1: the street. Um, he knows when a tree branches in
Speaker 1: his way. He can tell me as we're walking along,
Speaker 1: like where houses are, where parked cars are, you know,
Speaker 1: where bushes and fences are. And it's it's it's amazing
Speaker 1: because I think, like you know, Daniel points out that
Speaker 1: there are even echolocation researchers who don't know that humans
Speaker 1: can do this. Um, but but they very much can.
Speaker 1: And and I think this again speaks to why this
Speaker 1: stuff is difficult to to think about and to to
Speaker 1: to imagine, because like a dog or a songbird or
Speaker 1: an elephant, and none of these things, none of these
Speaker 1: animals have language, right, they can't tell me about their experience.
Speaker 1: But but Daniel obviously can you know, he he can
Speaker 1: describe what he senses, how how he experiences the world
Speaker 1: through location. But even so, there is an enormous barrier
Speaker 1: there because he doesn't have any memory of of being cited.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it's like to echo locate. So
Speaker 1: even though we have the same language, we're still trying
Speaker 1: to convey things that neither of us are really privy to.
Speaker 1: And because he grew up in a world with several
Speaker 1: billion cited people, a lot of his language is visual.
Speaker 1: You know, he he uses visual metaphors when describing the
Speaker 1: way he echolocates in a way that like I can
Speaker 1: kind of tap into. But you know, if he's describing
Speaker 1: something as like a bright or a flash, like, who
Speaker 1: knows whether the two of us are using the same
Speaker 1: words to to really convey the same kinds of qualities.
Speaker 1: And this is what I said at the start, there's
Speaker 1: always a gulf that there's always a chasm between our
Speaker 1: sensory experience and that of another animal or in this case,
Speaker 1: another human who just happens to be sensor early diverse um.
Speaker 1: And that's why you know, these these acts of imagination
Speaker 1: and being thoughtful about how you conceive of other senses
Speaker 1: is so important. Yeah, I think sometimes people separate empathy
Speaker 1: and trying to understand other people from science, Like there's
Speaker 1: hard science and then there's emotion, you know, like emotional
Speaker 1: intelligence and scientific intelligence, and that I really think that's
Speaker 1: does such a disservice to science because having having that
Speaker 1: emotional intelligence where you really want to understand another person,
Speaker 1: I think is is such a key to be able
Speaker 1: to do good science, because how do you come up
Speaker 1: with a good study that had investigates something that needs
Speaker 1: to be investigated without being able to connect to other
Speaker 1: people and their different experience and learn from that um
Speaker 1: A degree, I think the people who think that who
Speaker 1: who think you know the um what what you said?
Speaker 1: The people who think that science is cold and detached
Speaker 1: and unemotional honestly are just terrible scientists. Um Like, I
Speaker 1: don't trust the quality of their work because, like we said,
Speaker 1: our in this case, our senses, but more broadly, luck,
Speaker 1: our experience, our culture or values profoundly influence the kind
Speaker 1: of questions that we ask, the way we design experiments
Speaker 1: to probe those questions, the way we interpret the returning results.
Speaker 1: And if you think that that whole process exists in
Speaker 1: a social and emotional vacuum, then you will be completely
Speaker 1: oblivious to the biases that you bring into it. And
Speaker 1: so which is why I don't trust the work of
Speaker 1: people who think in that way, you know, because I
Speaker 1: think that there's a certain thoughtlessness there that leads to
Speaker 1: misleading research. I mean, even in the field of animal sciences,
Speaker 1: there have been so many cases. I mean, there's tons
Speaker 1: in the book where people drew the wrong conclusions about
Speaker 1: what animals were doing for decades or even centuries because
Speaker 1: they just weren't paying attention, because they were they were
Speaker 1: scoffing at the idea of of animals doing something vastly different.
Speaker 1: Many weird senses like echolocation, the electric senses of electric fish,
Speaker 1: magneto reception, the the infrared senses of of rattlesnakes, and
Speaker 1: many other animals have all been subject to this. There's
Speaker 1: long histories of people thinking that the animals were doing
Speaker 1: all kinds of weird stuff aside from what they were
Speaker 1: actually doing. Because there existing understanding of the world and
Speaker 1: the limitations of their own sense. Organs like cut off
Speaker 1: the possibility of thinking about the much weirder very different reality.
Speaker 1: Well that's where the concept of blind as a bat
Speaker 1: came from. People would see bats kind of flitting about erratically,
Speaker 1: as if they didn't know where they were going, But
Speaker 1: in fact they are. That erratic movement is actually quite
Speaker 1: calculated to hone in on an insect as they're using
Speaker 1: their echolocation. And they're also, as you point out in
Speaker 1: the book, they are not blind either in even in
Speaker 1: the traditional sense. They can use their eyes, but their
Speaker 1: echolocation skills are the most useful in hunting insects. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we had this misconception about bats being blind for so long,
Speaker 1: just by misinterpreting their movement, that the way that they
Speaker 1: move in the sky, and assuming that taking a straight
Speaker 1: path from point A to point B is the correct
Speaker 1: way to hunt something or or to move around. Right.
Speaker 1: You know, people scoffed at the idea of echolocation when
Speaker 1: it first when it was first proposed. You know, they're
Speaker 1: they're great stories of like um, you know, so, like
Speaker 1: Robert Glambo is one of the co discoverers being you know,
Speaker 1: having a guy shaking his shoulders at a meeting, going
Speaker 1: you can't possibly mean that, um, you know, so, Donald
Speaker 1: Griffin the the the the other person and who pioneered
Speaker 1: the study. Beck of location wrote about this idea of
Speaker 1: the echo location as a magic well, a thing that
Speaker 1: just yielded one kept on yielding, like one discovery after another.
Speaker 1: But he also wrote about how scientists were often limited
Speaker 1: by the scope of their own imaginations, um and and
Speaker 1: so you know, just just didn't even countenance the possibility
Speaker 1: that something weird and beyond what they could could imagine
Speaker 1: was actually going on. And it's sort of ironic because
Speaker 1: like Griffin himself was very skeptical about the existence of
Speaker 1: magneta reception as a sense, right, so we were all
Speaker 1: kind of subject to this. So in terms of the
Speaker 1: blinders a bad metaphor, I think part of that also
Speaker 1: is related to able is um that you know, we
Speaker 1: we we think of like the kind of average default
Speaker 1: human sensorium as the norm and anything that sort of
Speaker 1: deviates from that as as being worse. So blind is
Speaker 1: about is derogatory, not really just to bat but also
Speaker 1: to blind people. Um. You know, there's this assumption that
Speaker 1: like site is good and a lack of sight is bad.
Speaker 1: You know, we talk about darkness as being a bad thing.
Speaker 1: You know, we we talked about we we equate blindness
Speaker 1: with um, with obliviousness with ignorance. UM. But of course,
Speaker 1: you know, blind people are profoundly aware of their surroundings.
Speaker 1: You know, they have um, you know abilities and and
Speaker 1: and awareness is that that cited people don't possess and
Speaker 1: and sort of can't really and and often don't think
Speaker 1: about it or underappreciate. And the same goes for many
Speaker 1: other animals that have de emphasized division in favor of
Speaker 1: other sites, other senses. UM. So yeah, there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot at play here. There's um and and thro oper centrism,
Speaker 1: there's able is um that there's a lot that goes
Speaker 1: into some of these negative and and um frankly wrong stereotypes. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And I think that assumption that you cannot have a
Speaker 1: rich inner world unless you have the senses, like the
Speaker 1: kind of assumed senses and the assumed state that a
Speaker 1: human should be in, right, like, okay, we all need
Speaker 1: to be a certain way. We can't have any kind
Speaker 1: of cognitive differences or sensory differences otherwise you must have
Speaker 1: a more impoverished uh inner world is of course very wrong.
Speaker 1: And I think we are as a society kind of
Speaker 1: starting to reckon with that, this idea that you know,
Speaker 1: having having a different perspective, having different cognition, having different
Speaker 1: sensory experiences is not something that robs you of you know,
Speaker 1: that richness of being. It's just it is a different experience,
Speaker 1: you know, It's not we don't have to have carbon
Speaker 1: copy experiences in um as you say, like the unvelt
Speaker 1: as everyone else. In fact, having people who have different perspectives,
Speaker 1: different sensory experiences, different cognitive experiences, can be very enriching. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And you know there's this I think there's this kind
Speaker 1: of very deep seated idea that like more is better
Speaker 1: when it comes to the senses um and so color
Speaker 1: blindness is a great example of this. Right, there are
Speaker 1: loads of people who see a small narrow range of
Speaker 1: colors than the average person. But you know that's no
Speaker 1: different than the vast majority of other animals, especially mammals. Right.
Speaker 1: So most mammals are dichromatic, which means they have two
Speaker 1: types of color sensing cells in their eyes as opposed
Speaker 1: to three that we have. So my dog Pipo is dichromatic.
Speaker 1: He his rainbow stems from yellow to blue with like
Speaker 1: whites and grays in the middle instead of greens. And
Speaker 1: that's what a lot of color blind people have. And
Speaker 1: it's fine, Like there's there's it's not the case that
Speaker 1: like having three kinds of color sensing cells is inherently
Speaker 1: better than two. And in fact, we know that's not
Speaker 1: the case, firstly because so many mammals have only two.
Speaker 1: But also like there are many species of monkey in
Speaker 1: South America, so the females either are trichromatic or dichromatic,
Speaker 1: but all the males are dichromaticum, So there's variation in
Speaker 1: what kinds of colors. Even like a brother and a
Speaker 1: sister monkey can see. The trichromatic females are much better
Speaker 1: at spotting fruit from a distance, but the dichromatic males
Speaker 1: are much better at breaking the camouflage of hidden insects.
Speaker 1: So there's like there's pros and cons of each and
Speaker 1: it's definitely not the case that more is better. So
Speaker 1: if you think about like color blind people, like there
Speaker 1: are things that people with color blindness find different court Um,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of tasks that involve m colors,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, uh, you know, looking at paint
Speaker 1: swatches or sometimes electrical wiring traffic lights can be confusing. Um,
Speaker 1: but like, none of that has to be the case.
Speaker 1: Color blindness only becomes a disability because we've created a
Speaker 1: world that caters for the vision of trichromatic people. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, there's nothing inherently worse about about being a
Speaker 1: dichromat versus a trichromat. Um, it's just what we choose
Speaker 1: to value and accommodate to. UM. So yeah, in many,
Speaker 1: many ways, I think this book is call for empathy,
Speaker 1: to call for trying to understand the experiences of other creatures,
Speaker 1: but but also other people too. You know, I had
Speaker 1: this question because this relates a little bit to you.
Speaker 1: Also your coverage of COVID ninth team is that sometimes
Speaker 1: when people find out that, oh, you know, COVID nineteam
Speaker 1: may have had an animal origin, like that, well, doesn't
Speaker 1: that mean we should cold this animal? Like shouldn't we
Speaker 1: avoid researching them or you know, get rid of them?
Speaker 1: Like is it so bad if a species goes extinct
Speaker 1: if we get rid of the threat of COVID or something?
Speaker 1: And of course I think there are several things wrong
Speaker 1: with this, one being like the idea that you could
Speaker 1: get rid of one species and eliminate an animal like
Speaker 1: all animal reservoirs of a disease. And also this idea,
Speaker 1: like the jumping to the idea of destruction, you know,
Speaker 1: destroying something in the name of some kind of imagined safety,
Speaker 1: rather than trying instead to actually understand more how is
Speaker 1: the relationship between humans and animals leading to health crises
Speaker 1: both in humans and in animals, and what we can
Speaker 1: do to prevent that. So, you know, you're you're someone
Speaker 1: who is both very well versed in these zoonotic diseases
Speaker 1: as well as you know the basically that we should
Speaker 1: respect animals and respect their rights to be here. So
Speaker 1: what what would you say to someone who feels that way,
Speaker 1: that like we should either be afraid of these animals
Speaker 1: or get rid of them when they are in our, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, territory or what we perceived to be our territory. Right,
Speaker 1: I think right, I think it's it's it's a profoundly
Speaker 1: misguided idea. I mean, I can see why people think that.
Speaker 1: So Sarscoby too almost certainly came from a bat um,
Speaker 1: and bats in general harbor a lot of viruses that
Speaker 1: could potentially cause problems for humans. But you know a
Speaker 1: couple of things. Firstly, bats are incredibly important and they
Speaker 1: play you know, vital, irreplaceable roles in most of the
Speaker 1: ecosystems where they live, so you just can't get rid
Speaker 1: of bats. Second, there are a lot of bats. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, bats are like a fifth of all mammal species,
Speaker 1: and they're incredible creatures in their own right, like the
Speaker 1: specific group um that is, you know that that stars
Speaker 1: like viruses are often found in have this incredible style
Speaker 1: of echo location that is even like weirder and more
Speaker 1: advanced and more sophisticated than what like your average bat
Speaker 1: can do, which is already pretty spectacular. So there's that,
Speaker 1: there's you know, there's what we stand to lose. But
Speaker 1: then there's also the fact that this idea as signs
Speaker 1: blamed to entirely the wrong party, Like why are zoonotic events,
Speaker 1: Why are zoonotics belovers becoming more common? They're becoming more
Speaker 1: common because we have destroyed habitat, because we have approached
Speaker 1: into the spaces where animals, wild animals live, and because
Speaker 1: we have crushed those animals into smaller and smaller rangers.
Speaker 1: You know, it's said in one of my pandemic pieces.
Speaker 1: You know, it's as if we've we've been crushing the
Speaker 1: world's wildlife in an ever tightening fist, and what happens
Speaker 1: is that viruses start bursting out of that. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's also the fact that we are reshuffling the networks
Speaker 1: of mammals and their viruses all around the world. As
Speaker 1: the world warms because of climate change, um species of
Speaker 1: mammals that mammals are having to move in order to
Speaker 1: track new areas that have the environments that they were
Speaker 1: well adapted to. As this happened, species that never previously
Speaker 1: co existed are meeting each other for the first time,
Speaker 1: which create opportunities for their viruses to hop into new
Speaker 1: hosts and then eventually into us. This has been happening
Speaker 1: for decades now, and we're sort of in the peak
Speaker 1: of that process as we speak, which means that the
Speaker 1: kinds of events that lead to a new coronavirus ripping
Speaker 1: through the human population are becoming more and more common,
Speaker 1: and they're becoming more and more common because of things
Speaker 1: that we did, because of changes that we wrought upon
Speaker 1: the world. And if we don't fix those changes, you know,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be able to You're not going
Speaker 1: to be able to drive the risk of pandemic stant
Speaker 1: zero by culling bats. If anything, you're just going to
Speaker 1: make the ecosystems where those bats live much worse, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna lose the whatever spectacular way of experiencing the
Speaker 1: world those bats have. That you know, we look for
Speaker 1: the problem in the wrong place, in that we try
Speaker 1: and shove responsibility onto others, and we try and look
Speaker 1: for quick, easy, sticking plaster fixes. The problem lies within us,
Speaker 1: and the fixes need to be much bigger and much
Speaker 1: more systemic. So I think, yeah, unless we actually extend
Speaker 1: the full force of our empathy and ingenuity to the
Speaker 1: rest of the natural world and understand that we are
Speaker 1: a part of it and that we have had a
Speaker 1: profound influence in shaping it, then you know, we're just
Speaker 1: going to experience more of these problems that climate change phenomenon.
Speaker 1: The link between climate change and pandemic risk. What that
Speaker 1: tells us, what that should tell us is that many
Speaker 1: of the big existential problems of our time, climate change,
Speaker 1: the sixth extinction, mass extinction of wildlife, um uh, the
Speaker 1: risk of future pandemics, they're all the same problem. They're
Speaker 1: all intercate, they're all facets of the same interconnected megaproblem,
Speaker 1: and the responsibility for fixing that problem is on us,
Speaker 1: not on that. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I I you know, ultimately,
Speaker 1: like I think is very evident in your book, this
Speaker 1: idea that our human experience is the only important thing
Speaker 1: is just very wrong. But in addition to that, I
Speaker 1: think it is it's important to remember that we don't
Speaker 1: are our sort of priorities, and the priorities of you know,
Speaker 1: our our ecosystem are not necessarily in conflict. We can
Speaker 1: actually have a lot of solutions to our own human issue,
Speaker 1: our own problems by turning to our animal cousins and
Speaker 1: trying to both help them and also understand them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I totally agree with that. Yeah. And in the
Speaker 1: in the last chapter of my book, I talk about
Speaker 1: this problem of sensory pollution, this idea that we have
Speaker 1: flooded the dark with light and the quiet with noise
Speaker 1: in ways that really harm the creatures around us, and
Speaker 1: that we we don't really understand or appreciate. I mean,
Speaker 1: light um has positive connotations with us, and darkness is
Speaker 1: negative ones. You know, we we crave more illumination not less,
Speaker 1: but the amount of light pollution in the world is
Speaker 1: phenomenal and causes a lot of harm to insects, to birds,
Speaker 1: to sea turtles, to all kinds of creatures. And you know,
Speaker 1: it hurts us too in ways that I think we
Speaker 1: don't really appreciate. Like so many people have never really
Speaker 1: seen the night sky, have never really appreciated like seen
Speaker 1: what the stars look like, certainly in the northern atmosphere,
Speaker 1: have never seen like have you ever seen the milky White.
Speaker 1: I only saw it when I went to the Sequoias
Speaker 1: and got really far away from the city and it
Speaker 1: was I was I was so shocked that it existed.
Speaker 1: I when I was imagining the Milky Way, I just
Speaker 1: imagined maybe a few more stars. I had no idea
Speaker 1: how vast and bright it was, and that that would
Speaker 1: get drowned out by city lights. You know, even you know,
Speaker 1: when I was a kid living in the suburbs, thinking like, well,
Speaker 1: it's not that right out, Why wouldn't I be able
Speaker 1: to see it? It is shocking what you are missing
Speaker 1: in the night sky. It's it's really shocking. And like
Speaker 1: that site is just like transcendentally beautiful, Like I think
Speaker 1: the first time you see it, because most of us
Speaker 1: have never seen it before, it's it's just like a
Speaker 1: kingly beautiful to behold. But and there's no reason why
Speaker 1: we shouldn't be able to see it, Like it's clearly
Speaker 1: visible in the northern hemisphere. It's just that the light
Speaker 1: from all of these distant stars from our own galaxy
Speaker 1: travels you know, countless light years, reaches Earth and then
Speaker 1: gets washed out by the glow of our own buildings.
Speaker 1: And I think that's I think that's profoundly sad. You know,
Speaker 1: we affect our own health, our our own biological clocks
Speaker 1: by the lights we produce at night. And I think
Speaker 1: that the thing about century pollution that's really important is that,
Speaker 1: unlike a lot of the other things that we're doing
Speaker 1: to the world, and unlike greenhouse gas emissions and like
Speaker 1: plastic pollution, environmental toxins, this is easy to fix. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, light pollution goes away when you turn the
Speaker 1: lights off. It is a it is literally a switch.
Speaker 1: We just have to care enough to want to fix
Speaker 1: the problem. Yeah, And I think there are other types
Speaker 1: of sort of sensory pollution that we're just like learning about,
Speaker 1: like the idea that animals that have a wider range
Speaker 1: of visual perception than we do can see sort of
Speaker 1: a halo coming off of of power lines and that
Speaker 1: to them it's this intimidating glowing thing, not you know where.
Speaker 1: To us, you know, we may only kind of perceive
Speaker 1: a slight buzzing coming from it. Or like with birds,
Speaker 1: like whose mating cycles are entirely dependent on them being
Speaker 1: able to hear each other. Uh, that's like the way
Speaker 1: that they can locate each other for mating, and how
Speaker 1: that so negatively impacts their their breeding cycles when there's
Speaker 1: too much noise pollution. If we don't if we don't
Speaker 1: even really understand what their sensory world is, how can
Speaker 1: we have the empathy to know even what to change?
Speaker 1: And I think, I mean for me, that is what
Speaker 1: is so important about books like yours and learning about
Speaker 1: these animal internal experience because it is so vital in
Speaker 1: understanding our world and how to you know, basically prevent
Speaker 1: our world from becoming dull and uh, you know, bereft
Speaker 1: of this diversity of experience. Yeah, and you know, we
Speaker 1: we we can choose something different, like at the at
Speaker 1: the start of the COVID pandemic, when when when a
Speaker 1: lot of people were, you know, staying at home, that
Speaker 1: there was there was a lot of talk of there
Speaker 1: were a lot of cases of people going, oh, they're
Speaker 1: just more birds, right, like, loads of people said that.
Speaker 1: And it's not that there were just more birds, it's
Speaker 1: just that you can hear them now because everyone's being
Speaker 1: a lot quieter. And what what happens when you're quietis
Speaker 1: is not just that you start picking up on sounds
Speaker 1: that might otherwise be drowned out, but you can hear
Speaker 1: over much longer distances. You know, even just a few
Speaker 1: decibels less noise, you can double the radius over which
Speaker 1: you're hearing. And so sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection.
Speaker 1: It disconnects us from the sounds of nature around us
Speaker 1: by shrinking our own sensory bubble. It disconnects us from
Speaker 1: the cosmos by drowning out the lights of distant stars.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's it's sort of ironic that at
Speaker 1: this moment, at that moment in time, when people felt
Speaker 1: isolated in some ways, they actually were more connected to
Speaker 1: the world around them. M And I think, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we should we should aim for that. I mean, not
Speaker 1: like the horrible, not saying we should name for like
Speaker 1: lockdowns and say at home orders, we should aim for
Speaker 1: being more connected through the all dorandous by expanding the
Speaker 1: reach of our own senses, um and by going on
Speaker 1: these mental adventures and thinking about the senses of other animals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, circling back to what we talked about with
Speaker 1: dogs perception. I enjoy my walks with Cookie a lot
Speaker 1: more after reading the book and really thinking about how
Speaker 1: much fun she's having smelling these things. And I just
Speaker 1: watch her and enjoy seeing her reaction to things, or
Speaker 1: like I'll leave hide little treats around the house and
Speaker 1: watch her like sniff, I see she catches the scent
Speaker 1: and she tries to find it, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: in that very simple, limited way. It's brought me so
Speaker 1: much more joy. And I think that once we if
Speaker 1: we extend that past just the cute animals like dogs
Speaker 1: into you know, all sorts of animals out there, even
Speaker 1: the you know, the maybe less beautiful ones like snakes
Speaker 1: and spiders, bats, all though personally I think that's are
Speaker 1: very very cute, you know, really kind of getting feeling
Speaker 1: that excitement about watching them experience the world and understanding. Hey,
Speaker 1: they have that internal experience. It's like when you're a
Speaker 1: really young kid and you finally come to the realization,
Speaker 1: oh wait, there are a ton of people on Earth
Speaker 1: and they each have their own internal experience and that
Speaker 1: immensity of understanding. Hey, like, I am not the only
Speaker 1: conscious human and there's so many other conscious humans. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then like extending that realization to animals I think
Speaker 1: is a very profound and enriching experience. Yeah, me too,
Speaker 1: I I could. I couldn't agree more well ed, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining me today. This was wonderful.
Speaker 1: I love your book. I am eternally grateful for your
Speaker 1: articles as well, because without them, uh, this podcast would
Speaker 1: probably be a lot less interesting. So where can when? Where?
Speaker 1: And when can people get a copy of your book?
Speaker 1: So An Immense World is out on June twenty one
Speaker 1: in all the places you get books from, preferably your
Speaker 1: local bookstore, but anyway you want to grab a copy,
Speaker 1: please do. You can get the audiobook as well, which
Speaker 1: is read by me um. So yeah, it should be
Speaker 1: out pretty soon. I hope you all check it out,
Speaker 1: and I hope everyone enjoys it. I hope it brings
Speaker 1: a bit of joy to people's lives at a moment
Speaker 1: when I think we could all use more infusions of joy. Well,
Speaker 1: I can attest to that I really enjoyed it. Before
Speaker 1: we go, Let's play guest who squawk? In the Mystery
Speaker 1: Animal Sound game. Every week I play a Mystery animal
Speaker 1: sound in you the listener guests who is making that
Speaker 1: sound could be any animal on Earth. So the hint
Speaker 1: for last week's Mr Animal sound was this the eachured
Speaker 1: in the Silence of the Lambs. This fellow is not
Speaker 1: so silent, So congratulations to Joey Pete, Kegan H and
Speaker 1: Remy H who were the fastest guessers for the Death's
Speaker 1: Head moth. So the Death's Head Moth was featured on
Speaker 1: the poster for Silence of the Lambs. They have what
Speaker 1: appears to be a human skull marking their thorax, so
Speaker 1: to make that chirping sound, they actually inhale and exhale air,
Speaker 1: forcing it through their mouth tube, which was thought to
Speaker 1: originally be used to like slurp up sugary syrup um,
Speaker 1: but it is now used to make sound and it
Speaker 1: can vibrate like an accordion, and this is a way
Speaker 1: of scaring away predators, so startling them and hopefully scaring
Speaker 1: them away. And due to the skull like marking and
Speaker 1: shrill squeaks, it has become a figure in many superstitions.
Speaker 1: So onto this week's Mr Animal Sound. Here's your hint.
Speaker 1: It has a prehensile tale, a hunger for eucalyptus and
Speaker 1: for fresh meat. If you think you know who's squawking,
Speaker 1: you can write to me at Creature Feature Pod at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com, also on Twitter at Creature feet Pod.
Speaker 1: That's f e a T not at the et that
Speaker 1: is something very different And if you leave a rating
Speaker 1: or review, I would be ever so grateful. I read
Speaker 1: all the reviews and it means so much to me.
Speaker 1: And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome
Speaker 1: song Exo Luina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app ALP podcast or Hey guess what?
Speaker 1: Where have you listen to your favorite shows? I do
Speaker 1: not judge you. See you next Wednesday.