What Is an Umwelt? Understanding How Animals Perceive the World
What does joy feel like to a Sperm whale? Inside the largest brain of any animal known to have existed on earth is something we don’t have called a paralimbic lobe. The limbic system is the home of our emotional brain, and in humans, it is a small, contained space. In a whale’s brain, the emotional room has expanded so much that it has burst out into the main space of their cortex, the centre of thinking. Scientists believe that for a sperm whale, thought and emotion are inseparable. Where we might think first and feel second, or vice versa, a whale could experience both as a single surge of thought-feeling. Just imagine that, each and every object you encounter throughout, a chair, an apple, a tree, stirs a deep and immediate emotional response.
Imagine if they perceive every flicker of light, every shift of current and every passing body not as mere data to be analysed, but as an intricate sensory tapestry. Suppose every object they encounter could have an affective charge: the shimmer of a fish, the shade of a companion, the push of the sea itself. Joy then would manifest as a resonant wave that surrounds their entire being and connects them to everything that exists around them.
Human joy comes and goes like fireworks. The sperm whale’s joy might be more like an ocean swell, expansive, encompassing, impossible to wrench from their way of apprehending the world. Ultimately, at least for now, we can’t ask them or truly know what the world is like to a sperm whale. Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but we can’t rule out the possibility that, for a sperm whale, joy is not the exception but the flow. This is extremely anthropomorphic, but a fascinating idea to ponder.
The deeper we can go into such experiences, the more we can sense and feel their world, maybe, just maybe, the closer we will get to having a tiny understanding of what it’s really like. To truly see the world from another perspective is to completely change the world around you. We like to think of the physical space-time world around us as an absolute and fixed reality. But in truth, it is just one of countless possibilities. The one that is available to us through our limited set of senses, a human view.
What is reality?
The idea that we experience the world as it truly is feels intuitively right. From a young age we are taught that the world we perceive is a fixed reality. But the truth is, it is one of the greatest tricks our minds play on us. What we see is just one of many possibilities, a personalised rendering, crafted uniquely for us. A brain-built simulation, one that neuroscientist Anil Seth calls a ‘controlled hallucination’. The physical world isn’t an illusion in the sense that it isn’t there, but rather the version of it that we experience is a story created by our brains.
As visual creatures, most of us navigate our way through the world heavily reliant on sight, on photons of light entering our eyes. But vision is just one of many possible senses. There are many other signals that surround us all the time, yet remain outside of our perception. What would happen to our ‘reality’ if we were suddenly able to see in infrared, hear ultrasonic, or feel electrical signals? Our seemingly solid ‘reality’ shatters into a magnificent gallery of possibilities.
Umwelt
Each animal creates its own reality from a plethora of possible signals, each equipped with its own set of sensory tools. German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll came up with a word for this; ‘umwelt’. A German word that literally means ‘environment’, but that von Uexküll repurposed to mean the way each animal perceives the environment around them. Each animal lives in its own ‘umwelt’ or sensory bubble. It is not yet possible for us to directly experience most of these other senses. We can only infer what it would be like from observing behaviours and from using imagination. And in that process, we open up the possibility that the world is far more interesting and varied than we can ever imagine.
Understanding the idea of each organism’s individual umwelt is essential to any attempt to understand the role biofluorescence plays in the lives of other animals. As long as we view the world of biofluorescence through a human lens we will never fully understand it. Yes there are cold physics and facts about light, measurements, numbers and percentages. These are all important, but ultimately when it comes to the story of the role of biofluorescence in the lives of other animals we need to consider how they perceive the world. To look at it from the narrow window of our own senses, is to view it through just one of countless possibilities, with the arrogance to believe it is the one and only truth.