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I remember the first time I heard this word. I was listening to a podcast called "Big Biology" about Cetaceans.
During the episode, the scientists mentioned the word "Umwelt" to describe other worlds.
I instantly had an eureka moment when they described the concept.
"This is it" I thought.
"Reality is no more than a construction of our nervous system, so there are multiple worlds out there, each in every animal's nervous system."
What is Umwelt?
Umwelt comes from the German word "environment", but Jakob von Uexküll used it for more than that between 1900 and 1920.
He used Umwelt to describe not only animal's surroundings but also their perceptual world.
A sensory bubble that represents what an animal can sense and experience.
When I first heard and studied more about this concept I became fascinated.
And it also made me more empathetic.
Every animal, including you, has a sensory bubble.
Some people can experience more anxiety than others, or loud sounds can hurt someone but not to another one, some people can see colors that others don't.
Each person has an Umwelt that makes them unique, and we need to understand and respect all the sensory bubbles.
Now take this to other animals!
Your dog doesn't rely primarily on vision like most humans, but on olfaction. Have you ever considered whether your perfume is too much for its Umwelt?
Or did you throw your red ball towards the green grass but your dog couldn't find it? Did you think "Oh gosh, it's just there dear!"? Well, your dog didn't see it because it doesn't see the colors you see.
What about other animals?
Elephants can hear rain miles of distance ago, so imagine them in Zoos in the middle of a big city.
Cetaceans rely on echolocation, just as bats, so imagine living in a tank where you constantly echolocate and you get signals back like:
"Wall, wall, wall, wall"
And back to humans, because we are also animals:
Have you ever wondered if the noisy city or alarms are too much for your friend?
Or perhaps those bright lights are beautiful for you, but it's making someone close to you anxious.
It's all about Umwelt. It's all about our sensory bubbles.
Umwelt Made Me More Emphatetic to Animals and People
Knowing that others, including animals, experience the world in a completely different way than me made me more empathetic to others.
Now I try to take care of the smells in my house for my 2 dogs: Chloe and Taylor.
I turn off the lights on my balcony during the night so insects can fly and live peacefully.
I care about the loud sounds of the city for my autistic friends, who can perceive sounds more intensively than me.
Since learning about Umwelt, I've been full of happiness. I feel like I submerge into a beautiful diversity of experiences that I respect and admire.
How Umwelt Changed My Academic Life
When I was an undergraduate student in Psychology, I remember how shocked I was when realizing in my Neuroscience lectures that all that we see, smell, touch, taste, and more is just a construction of our brain.
Think about it! Colors are just electromagnetic radiation. Smells are compounds of small molecules. Sound is pressure waves.
Our biology transforms this into a perception and experience.
Colors are the result of our capacity to detect the longitude of waves in the spectrum. We detect them with our opsines, where most humans have 3.
Depending on the wave longitude, opsines can be large, medium, or short. After complex neurons do a "calculation" of the colors detected (a process called oponence), we perceive and experience a color.
Our color palette depends on these 3 opsines, so we are trichromatic (most humans though). Dogs and several mammals are dichromatic, and many birds are pentachromatic!
And Our Umwelt is Limited
I would like to add a last comment on Umwelt:
We think that our sensory bubble is enough, but it is highly limited.
We can't smell all the colors, neither see all the colors, or hear all the sounds.
Our Umwelt is limited because we only perceive a tiny fraction of the total reality, and this is because of how our nervous system constructs our sensory bubble, our Umwelt.
Conclusion
Our planet has a beautiful diversity of images, textures, sounds, vibrations, odors, tastes, and electric and magnetic fields, but each animal is only capable of perceiving a tiny portion of the total reality.
We humans are not the exception.
There is no superiority in the Umwelten (plural of Umwelt), but diversity.
I hope this word also changes your life positively as it did with me.
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📚 Reference
Yong, E. (2022). An immense world: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. Knopf Canada.