Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there.
This week, I cover Ed Yong’s An Immense World, a grand tour of the sensory abilities of earthly animals.
What It’s About
The problem with the world, as anyone online can tell you, is that there’s so much of it. For animals, there’s a fine balance between taking in and processing enough information to survive and thrive, and not taking in so much that you can’t pick out the relevant information. And yet, there are (at least) as many precise methods of achieving this balance as there are species.
Yong starts by warning us against a simple five-senses model event of the human “umwelt”—our perceptual world. Besides leaving out our senses of proprioception and balance, many divisions and combinations are arbitrary. Smell and taste both pick up volatile chemicals, and often combine (as you’ll notice when a stuffed-up nose makes food taste bland). Touch can be divided into separate receptors for pressure, temperature, pain, etc. Trying to precisely quantify other species’ senses gets even more fraught.
Broadly, though, the number of sensory purposes is constrained. Electromagnetic spectrum information can help gather information from a distance, regulate (or hunt based on) temperature, or navigate long migrations. Vibrations can carry both distant information and intimate details about the position and balance of one’s own body. Volatile chemicals warn of toxins and make food easier to find and identify. And of course, any organism wants to know when and how something is touching—or worse, damaging—tissue.
There are many variations on these basic themes. Dogs not only have greater sensitivity to smells than humans, and a larger brain area dedicated to processing them, but process those smells in a more continuous way—without the “flicker” between breaths. Rats, pigs, and elephants have similarly scent-rich worlds. But humans are also better than we think, and often particularly good at distinguishing marginally-different smells. We also vary in our use of smell across culture; harking back to my last column on language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, many hunter-gatherer cultures have rich vocabularies for odor.
The electromagnetic spectrum is wide, and human vision covers only about 400-700 nanometers. We also pick up an extra bit via thermoceptors in our skin. Other animals have wider, narrower, or shifted bands; they also vary in color vision, night vision, distance, depth, and ability to pick up fine details. But many fish sense their surroundings using weak electric fields. These not only give them a 360-degree sense of objects, but pick up saline gradients in water and allow for communication by modulating their own electric fields. Lobsters, sea turtles, and songbirds navigate using magnetoreception, travelling long distances with reliable internal compasses.
Yong goes through all these senses and more—for each introducing readers to specific animals and researchers (a dog training in nosework, a lab full of echolocation scientists cheering on their bats). He talks about controversies, areas of historical confusion, and open questions. Wrapping up, he discusses how senses operate in combination, starting with the distressing example of how difficult it is to interfere with the ability of mosquitoes to track tasty, tasty human blood. They’re combining heat detection, vision, and chemoreception; interfere with one and they have a “Plan B,” often using the same neurons. Humans estimate the weight of an object by looking at it; dolphins can visually recognize things they’ve previously only observed through echolocation. Though we study senses in approximate isolation, in actual experience the umwelt is holistic and cohesive.
Buy the Book
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
* * *
A popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, Yong is an engaging writer, whether he’s sharing a “hey babe, new species just dropped” announcement or covering the pandemic beat. An Immense World is closer to the former: the comfort read of a guy showing you things that are just neat. It makes a good break from…well, all the things, even with the final chapter pointing out the work to be done on noise and light pollution.
It’s also an excellent imagination-stretcher. Describing the mindlife of other species has long been a popular exercise among writers and philosophers, Nagel’s claim that it’s impossible notwithstanding. But the more we know, the stranger the possibilities get. Take a familiar animal like the dog currently lying at the foot of my bed, and it’s easy to seesaw between anthropomorphization and oversimplification. Is anything really going on in his head, other than the possibility that I might give him cheese? Listen to canine researcher Alexandra Horowitz talking about smell as a “shimmering environment, where nothing has a hard boundary… everything is sort of seeping together,” which suggests a mindlife that’s not more or less, but different. This poodle doesn’t only smell more than me, but he gets different types of information and experience out of it. Some of which, admittedly, do involve cheese.
As a psychologist, I know that human thought is deeply embodied—shaped by all the things our bodies are and aren’t capable of, including perception. The same is necessarily true for other species. While Yong is largely paying attention to the first steps of sensory intake and processing, he offers a lot of implications for further cognition. Color perception may be affected by language, but it’s affected a lot more by the number of cone types in your eyes. And that in turn affects what information you read off of the world around you—influencing everything from food preparation to artistic imagination. At a more extreme level, octopuses can perceive and process either at the level of a single arm or a whole body. What is it like, to have semi-autonomous limbs and the option of thinking at different levels of neural complexity?
In other words, animal sensoria are one of those parts of reality that is deeply science fictional, and becomes moreso the deeper into it you peer—or sniff, or flash your electrical field.
The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories
Better Talking Animals: One of my regular rereads is Richard Adams’ Watership Down. I adore the language-building and the folk tales, but one of the things that makes the book most stand out from any number of adventure-having cats and squirrels is the degree to which Adams cares that rabbits are not humans. He’s not trying to be realistic—this is a retelling of the founding of Rome, after all—but the psychology of El-ahrairah’s children is not human psychology, their senses not human senses. Adams regularly cites R.M. Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit where he thinks readers may doubt, for example, the ability of does to reabsorb fetuses in times of stress.
How many more Adamsesque other-species stories could we get, with all that we know now? Even with sheep mysteries and the recent spate of octopus point-of-view stories, there’s room for more well-written aliens right here on earth, and art that gives us the vocabulary for a wider range of sensoria.
Mix-and-Match Umwelts: Earthly diversity is also inspiration for the unearthly, whether you’re doing detailed science-up worldbuilding, or just looking for an extra sense to round out your aliens. Yong provides great seeds for both. On the detailed side, Earth can tell us a lot about what kinds of environments and survival needs encourage the evolution of what perceptual abilities. It can also tell us what abilities are easier to develop—my rule of thumb is that if parallel evolution has happened on earth, it’s probably more likely to happen elsewhere. Mantis shrimp color vision is completely different from mammalian, involving both color-sensitive light filters and at least eleven kinds of photoreceptors. And while ours was probably driven by the need to distinguish edible fruit and leaves from inedible, theirs is probably driven by the prey available in a coral reef. But despite the enthusiasm over “shrimp colors,” their brains don’t match their eyes for visual complexity—they actually seem to collapse the incoming data down to about twelve color bands, some setting off attack behavior, others mating behavior. You can imagine, though, a species that starts at this level and gradually evolves the ability to pull more detailed information from those eyes…
Then there’s the fishy electrical sense. The same basic capabilities are used by 350 different species for attack, perception, and communication—depending on how well they can modulate or focus their specialized, battery-like organs. (In fact, these organs were a natural inspiration for the first batteries.) Electric eels are known for their ability to stun their prey, but they precede their 860-volt attacks with smaller pulses that “force the muscles of its prey to twitch, giving away its position.” This is another ability that has evolved multiple times—first in an ancient lineage shared by all living vertebrates and retained by some fish—then lost and regained by platypuses and echidnas, Guiana dolphins, and another group of electric fish. All senses are converted into electricity in the brain (or ganglion), so this is perhaps one of the easiest senses to develop. It’s not limited to vertebrates, either; many insects use it for pollen detection or navigation—showing that it isn’t limited to the more conductive marine environment. So it seems very likely to show up on any planet where electricity-based nerves have developed.
New Growth: What Else to Read
If An Immense World is a tasting flight, many books focus on the sensory and cognitive richness of single species or families. My shelf includes Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus and Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (I just learned that Montgomery’s book has a sequel—Secrets of the Octopus is now on my TBR list.) There’s also a book about corvids in there somewhere—I’m embarrassed to say that it hasn’t yet appeared in our moving boxes and I can’t recall the title. It might be John Marzluff and Tony Angell’s Gifts of the Crow? But I can’t swear to it. To further appreciate your own perceptual capabilities, I also recommend Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses.
I haven’t yet read Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters, but it looks like a promising take on plants to go along with Yong’s animals and Sheldrake’s fungi—a multicellular trio.
The new subgenre of octopus cognition books includes Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, and Erin Hortle’s The Octopus and I. You could also just reread Watership Down any time.
Got more good species-specific stories to suggest, or favorite alien senses? Share in the comments below!
I loved this book and I Contain Multitudes. I’ll check out your other suggestions.
For corvids, I like the books by Bernd Heinrich: Ravens in Winter and Mind of the Raven. His other books, like Why We Run (on humans and our weird physiology that makes us long-distance runners), are also recommended.
I haven’t read this book, but I am now on the waiting list for it at my library.
I have read The Light Eaters and it was wonderful–all about the latest research into plant behavior with side notes on how scientists do science and how ideas change. Highly recommended!