By Noah Stein
One of the best books I read in 2024 was An Immense World: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us by Ed Yong. In it, Yong described how each and every animal experiences the world in their own unique “sensory bubble.” In other words, the way animals use their senses determines how they interpret their surroundings, and every animal uses their senses differently.
I thought a lot about dogs while reading this book. I love dogs and proudly wear the title “dog person.” While I’m currently a dogless dog person (hopefully I will fix that soon), I grew up with dogs and they have a special place in my heart.
If you’ve spent any time with dogs, you’re familiar with their sniffing habits. All of us dog people have had the experience of heading out on a walk and our four-legged companion finds something interesting to sniff in the grass or next to a fire hydrant. If you’re like me, you give them a few seconds to sniff and then pull the leash to keep walking, not thinking twice about the effect of cutting their sniffing time short. An Immense World had me thinking twice.
Imagine you walk down to the waterfront for G-swim. It hasn’t quite started yet so you’re standing on the beach waiting to flip your tag. I bet that when you close your eyes and imagine that moment, what you’ll experience in your mind is the sight of the beautiful bottle of sunscreen sitting invitingly on the swimming bench. No? You’re seeing Lake Nebagamon glimmering in the sunshine? Not the beautiful bottle of sunscreen? Ok, well just roll with it and take this as your first reminder for the summer of 2025 to please wear sunscreen!
Anyway, sighted humans typically rely on vision first. We won’t immediately recall the feel of sunscreen, or the smell of sunscreen, or the sound of sunscreen as it leaves the bottle, or the taste of sunscreen while diligently applying it to our faces. While each of our senses is important for its own reasons and we use them all to understand the world, sighted people tend to rely heavily on vision.
But not our dogs, according to Yong. When dogs head down to the waterfront for G-swim, their surroundings are painted not by their vision but in large part by their smell. They can smell into the past by picking up traces of left-behind scents. They can smell into the future, noticing the odor of rain on the way (though camp dogs will tell you they rarely smell rain on the horizon during the summer). While they too utilize all of their senses (they have great hearing for example), they rely heavily on their sense of smell in a similar manner to how humans lean on vision. So when we pull that leash as our dogs sniff… ok, I’ll spare you the guilt trip.
Yong offered countless examples of how other animals experience the world using their own senses, some that humans don’t have at all like electric or magnetic fields! He even talked about how other vision dominant animals use sight differently than we do. Some have panoramic sight, some can see colors that we cannot.
I was amazed as I learned about the astounding variety of ways that animals use their senses, and according to Yong, learning about the “sensory bubbles” of other species is really important. For instance, he talked about light pollution. Usually a minor inconvenience for us humans (though really sad that so many people can’t see the Milky Way), light pollution has a deadly impact on birds. It can drastically compromise migratory patterns leading birds off course which drains the energy that they need to safely reach their destination.
It’s hard to view the world from anything but a human perspective, but if we did and we were all able to recognize that birds have evolved to navigate the skies in very specific ways which are influenced by light, perhaps we’d all take steps to help them, and the same concept holds true for other animals! Imagine if we took some time to be curious about how other animals experience the world. Imagine how we’d be able to build our world so that all animals could thrive.
Yong also wrote about the differences in how humans perceive the world. He told the real life story of David Kish, a person who is blind and learned to use echolocation, a sense that most humans never use, by making clicking noises with his mouth and listening as the noise reflects off objects to navigate. (Look it up if you’re not familiar; it’s really cool.) The way each of us humans perceives the world with our senses is unique.
Yong concluded his book (sorry for the spoilers!) by emphasizing that we humans have a superpower that other animals don’t possess. We are able to use all of our senses and build tools to help us gain a deeper appreciation of the sensory realms of humans and animals around us. We can learn about the smelling power of dogs and how light can change bird migration patterns. We can never actually experience the world in a different “sensory bubble” than our own, but we can learn an awful lot about other “sensory bubbles.”
We can use our superpower to learn a lot about the differences in how humans use their senses too, like in the case of David Kish. But maybe we can use this superpower to understand more than our sensory differences. Maybe we can also use it in our daily lives to understand all of our differences. Each of us has a different background, and different life experiences which shape how we see the world, just like our senses. Sure, we can’t fully place ourselves in another’s shoes and live the same experiences as someone else, but we can try our best to understand. We can use our curiosity to ask questions, to learn about one another.
The more we understand one another, the more we gain empathy which allows us to support one another and resolve conflicts. Empathy allows us to build communities that celebrate our diverse experiences and to recognize that all of our unique differences can unite us. How do I know that? I see it every day at Camp Nebagamon.
Have a great new year, and please resolve to let your dogs do some extra sniffing in 2025!