YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Yong

lines on the record: 51
first: 2022-07-15
most recent: 2022-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So it's been, so some of that had to get postponed. But I think most of the best, you know, all the best stuff is in the book. There are very few things that I found out about and had to cut. So yeah, I think the book could be like 10 or 20 times the length that it currently is. It's already quite long, but there's so much in each of these sensors, in each of these topics, in each of these stories instead. And, you know, I hope that reading it instills people enough curiosity to want to find out more about the lives of all the creatures they're in.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question You know, there are actually quite a few reporting trips that I wanted to do that were mixed by COVID. I did most of the ones that I wanted to do, but I'd like dreams of visiting like a falconry center and watching people fly birds of prey, watching them, like how they behave, you know, I wanted to watch sagegrass courting in the US. They're beautiful, ridiculous birds and they're being harmed by noise pollution too. So lots of, you know, I wanted, I wrote about scallops in the book. I wanted to go and actually watch them scallops and look at their eyes myself. A scallop in the eye is the thing I never”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Streets. What we need are policies that actually get vehicles to move more slowly, including ships, cars and the like, that restrict the amount of light that public buildings can shine at night, that change the wavelengths of the bulbs that we're using to wavelengths that are less harmful to other animals. The problem is something that is only really going to be solved by large scale action. And the sort of individual scale, one of the most important things we can do is to start talking about this, being more aware of it and to push for more action at bigger scale. The same applies to things like climate change. It's not like we're just going to individually recycle our way out of this. It's not like we're just going to our choices certainly matter. But this is a problem for all of society. to reckon with.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I think the answer is sure that there are things we could do. You know, I try and turn off lights at night if I can. When I go into natural spaces, I try and be quiet. But I think the real answer here is that the big wins in the space are regulatory. This is a political matter. And this is another common thread with my reporting on COVID. One of the biggest mistakes in the pandemic is treating it as a problem for a bunch of individuals to solve on their own. Whereas really this is a political matter. This is a matter of the structures and systems in our worlds that need to change. And similarly, for dealing with light and noise pollution, it's not down to a bunch of people just turning, switching lights on their homes off or like, you know, slowing down when they're driving.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's in the chapter about echolocation, there's a long section where we talk about people who can echolocate. And I meet a man named Daniel Kish who is blind, who can echolocate very, very well, not as well as a bat, certainly, but he has a very independent life. And a lot of that is because of his ability to echolocate. So yeah, I think that part of the tendency to think about the world solely through the human unvelt also treats the human umbelt as if it was like one thing. It's actually, you read a lot of the writing about the senses. There's a lot of like insidious ableism there. There's a lot of like humans are a visual species full stop and like millions of people are absolutely not, right? There are millions of people get on very well with that vision. So the book is a call to recognize.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, very much so. I note in the introduction that actually a lot of the sensory biologists who I talk to and who are sort of big names in this field are neurodivergent themselves. They're all certainly like in terms of their senses, they might be what you would consider atypical. So a lot of them are colorblind, for example. There's someone who has prosopagnosio face blindness where you can't recognize other people's faces. It's quite a lot of examples of people who fit this bill. And one of the folks I talked to, Sonka Jonson, made this point that maybe the difference in their perception gives them a more natural inclination to think about ways in which other animals may be different than ours. And because they're so used to their sensory worlds being a little atypical, there are definitely ways in which the human umbelt varies considerably from one person to another.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like whether you think like a fish experiences pain in a very human way, or whether you think it experiences something much simpler and more reflexive, like I happen to believe that the former is much closer to the truth. But regardless of that, very good reasons to avoid as much suffering as possible to try and give the animals as good an experience of the world as possible. So yeah, I think in some ways it was interesting to explore this, but I'm not sure my feelings of wanting to treat animals humanely has massively changed by doing this. I think it's more about that trying to evoke that sense of curiosity and empathy about what the experiences of other creatures.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shrug off things that we would find intensely painful. Like birds, for example, can't react to capsacin, which is the substance that makes chilies hot. And there are other kinds of animals that feel pain in a very different way. A squid, if you injure it on part of its body, will probably feel that pain, but it won't have a sense of like where the pain is localized. It's as if I would stub my toe and suddenly my entire body becomes very hypersensitive to touch. So even here, there is a lot of variation in what animals experience. And I think that the sort of crude question glosses over our ability to truly get at what animals are feeling. But I also feel like this question of, you know, do animals feel pain or not is not really the sort of central animating question to the factor to deciding how well we should try.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh gosh, tough question. Right. So I think that there's actually a whole chapter about animal pain, about whether animals feel pain or not, but more specifically, like how they feel pain. The question of pain is difficult because as Image had hinter, this is a sense that has huge implications for how we treat animals, like experimentation, for farming, all the rest. And because of that, we tend to collapse the study and understanding of animal pain into this very simple questions. Do they feel it or not? Yes, no. As if the answer really could be restricted to a yes or a no. And actually, it doesn't. There's a huge amount of variety here as there is with other senses. So there are animals that”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The importance of imagination, the only way of truly experiencing what these animals are experiencing is to try and imagine it. A Netflix had a great series called Night on Earth, which showed, was talking about nocturnal animals. And you could put on night vision goggles, right? and get a sense of what it looked means to see the world crisply in total darkness. But even then, that's not really going to tell you what it's like to be a nocturnal animal, being able to move around with full confidence in the middle of the night.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're not going to get it. You could put on a headset that took the image of what's behind you and put it in a place you can see, but you're still going to be mapping that onto the forward-facing eyes that you have. There's no headset that's going to push your eyes to the side of your head and give you true wraparound vision. Similarly, like birds, most birds can see like a hundred times more colors than we can see. You can't represent that with a human visual palette, but you could take one of those colors maybe and recolor what we're seeing in our environment with the bits that look like this new color to a bird, but you can't do that for all of the colors they can see because four into three simply won't go. There are a lot of these things are actually impossible for us to achieve. The only, and it takes back.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I originally, it's in my book proposal, I had a plan of doing a chapter about this, about ways in which technology can expand our own senses. And I ultimately decided against it because part of the thesis of the book is that it's actually very hard. And you can do some way. You've got like gloves and vests that can give people who are blind, like tactile information that might sort of approach something like echolocation. But I found myself like uninspired by a lot of the examples that I saw and was reading about. And actually there are many cases in which we simply can't do it. You know, you talked about mallards like wraparound division, right? So you might imagine like you could put on some kind of virtual reality headset that would give you something close to that. But even then you're not.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it would actually be really interesting to follow him on the street and understand what it is that he's paying attention to, what it is that he's perceiving, being able to step into his world more directly would, I don't know, maybe give me a newfound appreciation for his life.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I feel like my answer to this question changes all the time. I have previously said the magnetic stuff, so some animals have a kind of biological compass that allows them to migrate over long distances, sadly doesn't work too well over shorter distances. It wouldn't be very good for getting home, but it would be very good if getting home meant like traveling across continents. I've talked about sensing electric fields. That would be really interesting, doing what sharks can do, like finding hidden prey by detecting the electric signals that they inevitably give off. I talked about dolphin echolocation, which can see through living tissue. Dolphin echolocating on you can probably perceive your skeleton inside your body. I think the answer I want to give today is just the same kind of sense of smell that my dog”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been really especially thrilled that a lot of the reviews and early press has been from people who not only liked the book, but sort of get it. They kind of get the themes and the ideas and the calls in it. That makes me happy. It means it makes me feel like this work can still make a difference in these dark and uncertain times.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is going to sound a little self serving, but I think that the fact that the book actually has had a really nice reception gives me a bit of hope. I wasn't sure whether people would want to read about this, to be honest. The first book that I wrote, I contain multitudes, was a natural history book sort of with a human health coat to it and actually was the natural history stuff that I was most interested in. And an immense world doesn't have that coat at all. The promise of the book is not how you're going to make yourself live longer or be smarter or anything like that. It's really just, you're going to look at the world in a different way. And I wasn't sure whether that would be something that people would be into. But people do seem to be into it. The reaction has been lovely.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book does make my life a bit better. I'm still covering the pandemic. Less who are more vulnerable than we are, I think that's what this phase of the pandemic demands of us. And it gives me hope that there are still people who are pushing for that, that they are vocal, they're numerous, and they are committed. And, you know, I think actually...”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it helped that I was halfway done with the book before the pandemic started. I was actually on book leave and I was meant to finish the manuscript in, I think, August 2020. And I stopped halfway through to start covering COVID with the Atlantic and then took a break at the start of 2021 to write the second half of the book. And I've joked before that. I'm probably the only person in the world who decided to write half a book for a mental health break. But that's exactly what it felt like covering COVID is just so miserable and so difficult that I was pretty shredded at the end of 2020 and it really helped to think about something joyful. I feel that now, you know, like two and a half years later, I'm more burnt out than I was then. But, you know, doing events like this and thinking about the book and getting to talk about.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just sort of sitting there like with flies everywhere just thinking about the core of the book, right? You can be sharing the same room with these other creatures and have radically different experiences of it. And I had many such moments throughout reporting the book where I went to places to meet scientists and to have interesting, you know, one-on-ones with them. But really what I got away with it was a chance to actually think hard about the lies and the umbolt and of the creatures that those scientists study, which was just wonderful. I hope it makes for a more entertaining read for people who pick up the book.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Beth is just beaming and like rhapsodizing about how wonderful she thinks spiders are. And I'm watching her and I'm looking at everything else and I just sort of have this profound realization that spiders, we might as well not be there to our whole, our presence in the room really comes down to our voices creating vibrations in the web or the flies landing on the web and buzzing in their struggles. If a fly flies over the spider's head, the spider probably doesn't care. The fly, meanwhile, probably can't see the fine silken threads of the spider's webs, which is why they blunder into them. We, the humans with sharp eyes, can see the strands of the webs. We can see the fly. We can't feel the vibrational world in the room and the way the spiders can.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, temperature is, it matters a huge amount to them. And there were just lots of little moments like that where the themes that I was trying to explore in the book came out through these little mini adventures. You mentioned Beth Mortimer, the scientist who studied spiders. When I went to visit her, I asked her, like, can I go see your spiders? And I thought she would take me into a small room, you know, maybe there'd be a shelf with some spiders, like in small terrar area. Instead, she takes me into this giant hangar with a huge steel door leading into it. And we're in this cavernous room with several dozen free-ranging spiders that are each like the size of my ear with like a meter, with meter-wide webs. And there are flies buzzing all around for the spiders to eat. And I'm just sitting there with like flies landing in my hair and my pen and my note.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had a really fun, so a couple like standard my mind. Liz and I went to somewhere in California and went like tromping around searching for rattlesnakes, which is not really something one does. Usually people walk in the opposite direction of a rattlesnake, but we tried to find them. And it was kind of a delightful experience. It was an unseasonably cold morning. We were told by the researcher who led us on this trip that morning's a good time. The snakes are usually out, they're basking in the sun, but this was very cold and gray and the snakes were hidden. They were quite hard to find. But that's sort of the point. You know, I was writing this chapter about heat, about the ways these snakes sense the body heat of their prey. And just this experience just drives home like how closely the lies of reptiles is tied to the temperature of their surroundings.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The centers are the topic itself is really rich. It's really beautiful. It's sometimes ludicrous because animals are like inherently a little bit absurd sometimes. They do daft ridiculous things, but they also do beautiful, profound things. And I think that the writing sort of has to live up to that promise. It has to capture both sides of it. I think of nature as having these two extremes. And some of my favorite nature writing does sort of oscillate between them. It catches the ridiculousness of it, but also just the immense beauty of it.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go on this journey of imagination and it makes like what could be a little bit abstract feel more One of the best ways of getting people excited, interested in something is to get them interested in the people who are interested in that thing. And, you know, that was a very important thing in my first book, I Tay Multitudes. It's still an important thing here in an immense world. It's a really good way of pulling people into this world slowly. And then also, I think just because they bring a lot of joy and character to this, making the book funny and joyful was a really important part of the process for me. And I think”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think for a few reasons, it feels incomplete to me to not reveal how we know this stuff, the story of how this knowledge was acquired is as much part of our understanding of the senses as all the stuff that the animals themselves, partly I think the scientists often act as wonderful gateways because they're so curious and so passionate about these creatures. And a lot of that is stripped out of the papers that they publish. If I wrote a book simply just by reading the papers, I miss out a lot about how they got to know the stuff they know, but also like how they think about it. If you ask a researcher like, how do you think an electric fish censors the world? I guarantee you they'll have an answer to that. And that answer won't be in any of the textbooks or the papers that they write. And that answer is fascinating to me. It helps you.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same kind of sense proprioception of like what its body is doing at any moment senses that do that, the sense organs that do that are distributed all over their bodies and are very easy to turn into ears, which is why ears just sort of crop up everywhere. And again, like we think of ears as two things on our heads, just two of them, they're right here. But no, they don't have to be. You can build an ear out of lots of other body parts and they can show up in lots of weird places.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't hear. It's weird to us, right? We think of sound as being quite important. Obviously a lot of people are deaf and get on just fine without a sense of hearing. But I think one assumes that with that's framed as a disability, we think of hearing sound as being crucial, but actually a large number of animals, maybe the majority of animals don't do it. And when insects do it, what happens is they build ears in all kinds of weird body parts. They have ears on their knees, they have ears on their abdomens. They have ears, some butterflies of ears on their wings, preying mantis has one single cyclopean ear in the middle of its chest. And that's partly the reason for that is that the ears evolve from these other organs that typically sense like the insect's body position. So in the same way that like if I close my eyes, I know where my arms are. And an insect has...”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's, I think this whole field, like everything I write about in this book is testament to the messy chaotic creativity of evolution. There really isn't a plan, there isn't like a march towards progress. There's a lot of bootstrapping solutions based on historical, the randomness of history. There's a lot of trade-offs every sense comes with trade-offs. Animals can do amazing things, but they're limited in other ways. And I think it shows, I think it sort of shows the evolution of its finest. Just to take an example, you talked about hearing. One of the really interesting things I think about hearing is that it's really not necessary. A lot of insects.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eyes of that size are really only good for seeing one specific kind of light, which is a distributed set of pinprick lights, like say a star field in what would otherwise be blackness. And for a giant squid, that's really useful because that allows them to see sperm whales that are their main predators. Like in the deep of the ocean, there's no light. The only light comes from bioluminescent animals that make their own flashes. If a sperm whale is charging at a giant squid, it disturbs those animals and creates like a kind of sparkly outline. And that seems to be what a giant squid's disproportionately massive eye has evolved to detect. I just love this idea that in a place with almost no light, the largest eye in the world has evolved to detect the outline of a sparkling.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then their brains, yes. So, yeah, tasks are these little primates that look a bit like gremlins. They've got giant eyes that are larger than their brains and that give them excellent vision even at night. And the weird thing about them is that they're not even the largest eyes in the world. So the largest eyes in the world belong to the giant squid, which have eyes as large as I nearly said soccer balls, meaning in America too long, nearly as they're large as footballs. And they are notable not only because they're huge, but because they're so much bigger than the next biggest eyes, which belong to things like swordfish. So a few scientists I talked to were fascinated by this question, like not just why are giant squid eye so big, but why are they so much bigger than literally everything else? And the answer seems to be that”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. You know, that line, like all you do is sniff, yes, because it's a dog. It's like saying to a person all you do is look at stuff”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the animals that are closest to us, if we ignore their sensory world, if we ignore their umbelt, then we can sometimes pull them or deprive them of this very important part of their lives.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're in keeping jet all of that social information with his nose. And I think that's kind of wonderful. And we know through interesting work on dog cognition that dogs tend to be happier and they're less anxious, more optimistic if they're given a chance to use their nose. And often like a lot of dog owners don't give them that chance. You see people like pulling their dogs along because the walk is seen as just simply a form of exercise rather than or a means of getting from A to B. I've seen dog owners pull their dogs away from like sniffing other dogs genitals, which if a human did that would be really weird. But for a dog, it's completely normal. It's a very social way of exploring another dog. It's like two humans looking each other in the face. So yeah, I think even”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Him with his nose, he explores plans, he explores railings and fire hydrants and he explores everything. And it's quite delightful watching him do this because, like I said, to me, these are streets and areas that I have seen thousands of times over. They seem like pretty unchanging to me. They'll change from one season to the next, but certainly not from like an hour to the other. But to his nose, they absolutely do. You know, I've compared his sniffing to me like checking my Instagram and Twitter. It's a very social activity. I look at Instagram and I can see what all my friends have been doing over the last 24 hours. That's what he gets when he sniffs. You know, he knows where all the other neighborhood dogs have been, you know, he probably gets an idea of what they're up to, you know, what sort of conditions.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. Is typo grateful for his newfound fame? He seems a little bit non-plused, to be honest. But he does feature throughout the book, and he's in the nice photos spread in the middle. And yeah, I got typo last January, so he's very much a pandemic puppy. And I actually got him after writing the bit in the book about smell and about dogs, which was nice because I got to apply everything that I wrote about in raising him. We try and make sure that whenever we go and walks, at least once a day, he gets one walk that is completely his to control and to set the pace for. And when he gets to control a walk, what he does is sniff. Like he walks slowly. He's not intent on getting anywhere. He wants to explore the world around.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is typo on the front? Yep. Did I write this entire book just as a convoluted ploy to get my dog on the cover? Can't comment. He is also.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a gift and it comes with a profound responsibility, I think, to really think hard about these other worlds and to try and preserve and care for them.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sensory pollution doesn't last. You can switch it off. It's actually quite a relatively easy thing to fix if we had the societal and political will to do so. And I think building up that will requires us to actually understand that this is a problem in the first place, which requires us to step out of our sensory bubble and into the umbelton of other species. And that's what the final chapter of the book is about. This ability to understand the umbelt of another creature is a very human thing. It's possible that it seems to me likely that we're the only species on the earth that's capable of doing that. I might not ever know what it is like to be a bat, but at least I can ask the question and I can get some way towards answering that. And that ability”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Darkness, lights at night attract pollinating insects away from the flowers they're meant to service. They can pour baby hatchling turtles up a beach with fatal results and away from the ocean. They can waylay migrating birds forcing them to go on these distracting pit stops at a time when they need all the energy they can get. Noise pollution does something similar. Noise in otherwise pristine wild areas can push animals out of habitats they need. It can drown out the calls that they use to communicate, to sound alarms, to find mates. Light and sound actually have quite substantial effects on a lot of the species around us and they make parts of nature that would otherwise be great for animals to be very hard to live in and to tolerate. But the neat thing about sensory pollution is that unlike Like other”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The final chapter is about this concept of sensory pollution, the idea that we have flooded the world with light and sound and other stimuli that are distracting and diverting and befuddling the other animals around us, often with fatal and detrimental results. And this is a huge problem and that one that paradoxically we ignore, which should be obvious to us, we should be able to see the light, we can see the sound, we can hear the sound, but we don't think of these things as pollutants. We think of them as just average normal parts of our lives. But in doing that, we are forcing other animals to live in our umbelt rather than theirs. So nights at night are breaking this billions of years long streak of regular cycles of light and”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's that classic planet Earth move, isn't it, where you spend like several episodes showing you people how wondrous things are in the world and then in the last episode you're like, and it's all doomed. Yeah”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like some of the most familiar aspects of it. And, you know, I think that At its core, the book is a call for more empathy. You know, as you said, it's very hard to put yourself in the perspective of even another person and like arguably a lot of our biggest problems at the moment stem from that catastrophic empathy failure. I think it is even harder then to imagine what it would be like to be a bat or an elephant or a whale or what have you. But I think that empathy is a muscle and we can build it. And by trying hard, making effortful work to take on the perspectives of other creatures, we become a little bit more predisposed to stepping out of our own shoes and imagining what the world is like to others.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“understand that these streets are full of information that I don't tech with my nose and that they are constantly changing even though to my eyes they're just the same or boring neighborhoods that I've seen a thousand times over. If you think about the way albatrosses smell like what looks like featureless ocean now becomes like this rolling topography of odor if you think about insects that sit on plants and send vibrations through those plants you understand that a quiet meadow is actually thrumming with song and signal. So there are so many aspects of the world that seem mundane and familiar and quiet and still that are actually full of information and full of wonderment and awe. And I think that's what I want people to understand. I want them to come away with this changed view of the reality around them.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so going back to what you said earlier, I do hope that the book is so relentlessly fascinating that it turns people into either the best or the worst dinner party guests in the world. I deliberately wrote it so that every page, maybe every paragraph is full of at least one knockout tidbit of knowledge. But I think more than just being a parade of facts and trivia, I really wanted the book to stoke a sense of joy and wonderment about the world. I want people to feel this almost trippy sense that the creatures around them are more magical than they thought and that the world around them is richer and more profound than they thought. I think the subtitle of the book speaks to this, how animal centers reveal the hidden realms around us. When I walk my dog typo along the street, by watching him sniff, you know, I”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think that the sensory worlds of animals have value only when they surpass ours. I think they value just in their own right because they are so very different. And that's why I said quite early on in the book that an immense world is a book about diversity, not superiority. It's about those differences, though I think are fascinating. And there are many examples in which we have animal, in the book of Animals whose censors are actually less sophisticated ours, but are so in a very, very interesting way that I think is still worth thinking about and understanding.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think so I knew about the Umvault idea and I knew it was going to be the central idea of the book and it sort of was clear early on that the obvious way to structure the book is by Arranging the chapters around particular stimuli, so light and sound and vibrations and so on. But one of the lovely things about just delving into a book like this is you really start to understand this concept in a deeper way. You know, I think I've been thinking I've been interested in this area for a very long time. I remember watching a BBC documentary called Super Senses. Super Cents when I was a kid And that actually is the way a lot of people think about the senses. The animals become interesting when their senses exceed our own, when their eyes are sharp or their noses are more sensitive or their hearing can detect frequencies.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely mispronounced it to be very clear. I mangle his name in a slightly different way every time I say it. And my apologies to all German speakers listening now.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the animal's senses. Through those windows, it looks out and gets a particular view of the garden, but it's not a total view. And are the houses around the same, in the same neighborhood might get a slightly different one? That's what it's like. If I was sharing this room with a dog or an elephant or a platypus or a snake, we would all be in the same physical space, but we would all have a radically different experience of that space. And that's the Umwalt concept. And that's the central idea of the book, that you can go in these great adventures just by thinking about what other creatures in the world around you are experiencing.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the word Umwalt is German for environment. But the scientists who popularized it, Jakub von Upskull, the 20th century zoologist, he didn't use it to mean an animal's physical environment. He used it to mean its sensory environment. That's the sights and sounds and smells and other bits of information that it can detect, but that other creatures might not be able to. And this idea, the Umbuild idea tells us that all of us is trapped in our own little perceptual bubble. We think that we are sensing everything. The senses give us the very powerful illusion that our perception of the world is complete and total. And that is an illusion. We're actually only perceiving a thin sliver of all there is to perceive. So Vanutskul imagined an animal as a house overlooking a garden. And all the windows of the house.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a mentor world actually came from my wife, Liz Neely, who started a PhD in sensory biology. She was working on the ways in which coral reef fish see colors. And in one rainy London evening several years ago when I was bemoaning the fact that I didn't have any good book ideas for a follow-up to multitudes, she said she gave me a bit of a pep talk and suggested that the senses of other animals might be a good thing to try and explore. And she is always right. So here we are.”
2022-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Magical World of Animal Senses, with Ed Yong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT