I never thought of it until now, but after all we’ve been through the last few years, “How’re ya doin’?” just doesn’t cut it anymore. Now a sneeze can mean the end of a conversation. If I want to find out about the other person, “How ya doin?” is the wrong question. Doing what? Usually when I ask someone how she’s doing, she’s just sitting or standing somewhere, not doing anything. I don’t really want to know how she’s doing her sitting or standing.
The better question, if I care, is “How’re you feeling, thinking, and sensing these days?” But that’s a loaded question for a casual greeting. And an honest answer might take us into tricky territory. Have you ever asked anybody “How’re you sensing these days?”
I never thought of asking such a weird question until early January this year when I noticed a ringing in my ears, like the sensation I used to wake up to the mornings after rock concerts. But with no recent concerts to blame and no fading of the ringing this time, I eventually had my hearing tested and found out that I have a mild hearing loss in the high frequency range, most likely due to being 71. For the rest of my life the sound of quiet will have a ring to it. This is only the beginning, I assume, of my adventures in ageing, during which my sensory world will bend or shrink in surprising and unwelcome ways.
So maybe it wasn’t just a casual choice that a month ago I started reading a book by Ed Yong, An Immense World (2022), about how different species perceive their environments, depending on their sensory organs. Yong’s word for the perceived environment is the German term “Umwelt,” borrowed from Jakob Uexküll, who coined it in 1909. Uexküll recognized that the same corner of the forest is experienced by an elephant mostly through vibrations and infrasounds (low tones we can’t hear, the opposite of ultrasound), by a brown bat as contours perceived though echolocation, and by a homo sapiens as a scene through distance vision, because these three species live by such different Umwelts.
Yong’s book invites us into leaps of the imagination about how the world looks and feels and sounds to animals, fish, insects, and birds. Imagine being a Nephila spider with little or no sight, sound, or smell who thrives almost exclusively by your exquisite sense of vibration in your eight legs, extended and amplified by your web, to catch and kill your dinner. On the other hand, you could be a brown bat who finds your dinner only by echolocation. Or an owl whose large asymmetric ears allow you from fifty feet above in the pitch dark to pinpoint the mouse scurrying in the leaves below, though you can’t see it with your owl eyes as you zero in for the silent kill.
These exercises in imagination guided by science raise the more interesting question of how people might differ in their Umwelts. Now that I’ve had a hearing test and a vision test years ago by an optometrist, I know something about two of my senses. But what do I know about my senses of touch, taste, pain, heat, vibration, proprioception, electric and magnetic senses? Nothing more than what my intuition tells me. And nobody else knows anything about my “sensescape.” Do we really have to settle for guessing about how we and others experience the environments we share?
Ed Yong gives us multiple accounts of scientists discovering how to measure the sensory capacities of animals and insects to create an understanding of their Umwelts. The same must be true of measuring specific sensory capacities in humans, with the added advantage that people can tell us what they sense and what they miss. Yet none of us is likely any time soon to get a comprehensive sensory profile of our own Umwelt, much less the Umwelts of others.
I’d like to know the Umwelt of my wife, who sometimes acts as if she doesn’t hear me. It would be handy to know the Umwelt of a child who doesn’t like to be hugged or the child who can’t tolerate loud music or the one who is a picky eater. Maybe some of what makes us anxious can be traced to central nervous systems that are unusually sensitive to some noises, smells, tastes, vibrations, or types of radiation.
I’d like to understand the Umwelts of my patients, most of whom are baffled by why their world doesn’t seem to work the way it ought to. Maybe some of them perceive the world around them in meaningfully different ways than the rest of us do. Think of how strokes, multiple sclerosis, or diabetic neuropathy can alter how we sense our bodies and our environments. Would we empathize more readily with others if we had some way of understanding their Umwelts?
When I started writing essays in 2013 about the art and science of making contact, one of the books that steered me in this direction was a large one by Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization (2009). This 616-page book spells out in convincing detail how for most of the 100,000 years of human history empathy has been a relatively scarce talent. The recent evolution of empathy over the past few centuries has come with the expense of the energy required for mass travel and communication, forcing us to confront the costs of connecting with distant people along our path to our global climate crisis. That was a new idea for me—that progress in our capacities for empathy had accelerated with the burning of fossil fuels. Connections across distances don’t come cheap.
Now that we’ve grown accustomed to how essential empathy is for peace in the kitchen as well as peace in Ukraine, we may be poised for a new wave in the evolution of empathy. It might take us a while to figure out how to measure and describe our profiles across ten senses—maybe a generation or two of good science. Then we might evolve from “How ya doin’?” to “How’s your Umwelt?” without cracking a smile.