Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Animal Senses Reveal Hidden Realms with Ed Yong

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

All creatures, humans included, experience just a tiny slice of the full reality around us. Sharon chats with Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author Ed Yong about his book An Imme...nse World, which dives into the amazing and often unseen ways animals sense the world. Ed talks about how exploring these sensory worlds can lead to some pretty big, thought-provoking questions about life. Even if our own perception is limited, there’s so much we can discover when we stay curious and open to new perspectives. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:57 Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Hello friends, welcome. Great to have you with me today. My guest is somebody that I absolutely love. I love this discussion. I love his work. I'm talking today to Ed Yong, who is the author of Un Immense World. If you need a little break from all of the craziness and you need just like a little hit of wonder and fascination with the world, you've got to stick around for today's conversation. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. Well, anybody who has followed me for any period of time knows that I am an animal lover. And I actually
Starting point is 00:01:46 had your book, An Immense World, added to my cart in pre-order. I saw it coming out and I was like, that is a book for me. I absolutely loved it. It was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times. That's a huge achievement, first of all. Congratulations on that. And the subtitle of the book is, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. And first of all, the book is so aptly titled, it absolutely piqued my interest, made me very curious about what it was going to be about, and the book did not disappoint. I have often wondered, and I think this is like a normal human curiosity, how do animals do things like, well, I'm a salmon, and I will be returning to the stream where I hatched?
Starting point is 00:02:40 Like, how do you find it? How does a bird decide, you know, I'm going to migrate like 3000 miles. Right, right. Very casual. Yeah, it's so super easy. Like while the rest of us humans need a computer to say turn left at the light, how does a whale swim underwater from Alaska to Hawaii? You know, like, and just do that every year.
Starting point is 00:03:02 Repeat, repeat yearly. Clearly, there is an immense world around us that humans cannot experience. And I'm so curious, how did you become interested in this topic? Oh, so, I mean, I've been fascinated by animals since I was very, very young. You know, I was the kid who watched nature documentaries and insisted that my parents take me to zoos. I read a lot of wildlife books. So I've always been interested in animals. And when I started writing about science professionally about 15 years ago, I wrote about a wide number of topics, but how animals behave, how they
Starting point is 00:03:44 sense the world, was always chief among them. This has been a passion of mine for a long time, but the real idea for the book actually came from my wife. She was a marine biologist by training. She did her graduate work on the vision of fish that live in coral reefs, like what kinds of things they might see. And in 2018, in a rainy winter's day, we were sitting in a cafe, and I was morosely saying
Starting point is 00:04:11 that I had no ideas for a second book and that my well of ideas had run dry, and this was it for me. And she very calmly suggested that this wasn't true and that maybe the sensory worlds of other animals was an area that was rich for exploration. And she was right. And I think she was right for a bunch of different reasons. It is an area full of fascinating science, but it's also, I think, deeply philosophically rich. This question of what other animals think, how they experience the world, I think touches on big questions about consciousness, about subjective experiences. And I think, as you say, it is a thing that I think a lot
Starting point is 00:04:54 of people easily wonder about. It's not something that touches a lot of us in our day-to-day experience, but I think it is a thing that a lot of people have wondered about. And I like that the book seems to have resonated with that particular frequency, that little kindling of curiosity in a lot of people who read it. I am somebody who has always had sort of a lot of wonder for the natural world. And this absolutely heightened that. I just felt I found myself being like, dang, that's so interesting. So can you talk to us a little bit? You know, of course humans know what our senses are. We know how we experience things. Humans know that things like our sense of smell is very
Starting point is 00:05:35 intimately tied to our memories. Of course we know how we experience the world. And most animals also have senses like smell and sight. Although not all of them, some of them similar to ours. But yet there are many ways that animals perceive the world that humans have seemingly no capacity or very limited capacity to tap into. What are some of the ways that animals perceive the world that are different than ours. So there are several entire senses that we don't have access to. So you talked about birds migrating over long distances. So songbirds migrate partly with vision, which we do have, but also by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. It's as if they have a living compass inside their bodies that allows them to point in exactly the right direction even when all other landmarks are obscured.
Starting point is 00:06:31 The same is true for things like sea turtles, which use a very similar magnetic sense to navigate around entire oceans. And this is a skill that by all accounts humans do not have. Similarly, we do not sense the electric fields that living things generate. All living things, especially in water, produce very minute electric fields. We can't sense these, but a lot of fish can. A lot of fish produce their own electricity and can sense the electric fields generated by other things. Sharks, platypuses, and actually quite a lot of animals can sense electric
Starting point is 00:07:06 fields. And then there are variants of senses that we have that animals take to a ludicrous degree. So if I'm swimming in water and someone is swimming next to me and kicks their feet, I can probably feel the currents produced by their legs. But that pales in comparison next to what a seal can do. A seal can detect the tracks left behind by swimming fish. You might not even think that swimming fish leave behind a track, right? That's a bizarre thing to think about water. But a fish as it swims creates a wake of swirling currents of turbulence that last for maybe up to a few minutes.
Starting point is 00:07:48 And a seal with its whiskers can detect those tracks that are invisible to us and use it to follow a fish with incredible precision. To take vision, for those of us who can see, vision is a primary sense. It is our primary sense. It is a dominant sense. It is the sense that fills our culture, our language. A lot of our words for understanding the world, to see one's point of view, for example, are all based on visual metaphors. But our way of seeing the world is kind of weird. We have two eyes.
Starting point is 00:08:22 They are on the front of our heads and they point forwards. These are actually kind of weird things for the animal kingdom. There are animals with eight eyes, hundreds of eyes. A simple bird, take a duck or a pigeon, has eyes on the sides of their head. So they can see with almost a full arc around them. A duck sitting on a pond can see the entirety of the sky without needing to move its head at all. And that makes its sense of vision very different to humans. Similarly, there are other creatures that can see colours that are invisible to us.
Starting point is 00:08:58 So just beyond the violet end of the rainbow lies ultraviolet, a colour that we can't see. But ultraviolet is incredibly common in nature and it is actually incredibly common among animals. In fact, most animals that can see, can see ultraviolet. So we're actually very strange in not being able to see this color. And because we can't see this color, our view of nature is kind of weird. If you look at say a sunflower, like what colour is a sunflower? It's yellow.
Starting point is 00:09:27 It's yellow, right? And it's kind of uniformly yellow. But if you can see ultraviolet, a sunflower has a bright bullseye of ultraviolet around its centre. And those kinds of markings are really common on a lot of flowers and they're really visible to birds and to insects. So things that pollinate flowers see these extra symbols, these markings that guide them to flowers that draw their attention that are invisible to us. This all speaks to the core premise of the book, which is that every creature, humans included, for all our vaunted intelligence and abilities, are only really perceiving a very thin sliver of the fullness of reality. There is so much around us that we don't even perceive let alone think about. It just makes the world that much more interesting, as if the world wasn't interesting to begin
Starting point is 00:10:21 with. Knowing that this is out there, knowing that we are only experiencing a fraction of what actually exists in our immense world. I just find that so cool. Let me ask you a couple questions that I have long wondered about. Okay. We all know that dogs smell extremely well. Yes. My experience with smell is that most smells that are like relatively strong generate an immediate judgment in the human brain. It's a good smell.
Starting point is 00:10:54 It smells so good in here. It's a bad smell. Like, what is that? You know what I mean? Like we immediately make a value judgment about if something smells good or bad. You either love the smell of gasoline or you hate it. If you are a dog and your sense of smell is your primary sense, and you smell so much more and so much better than humans do, and I first of all think it's really fascinating
Starting point is 00:11:20 that dogs can smell things like, oh, you're about to have a seizure. But it can't be, this is my hypothesis, and you tell me if I'm right or wrong, it can't be that dogs have the same value judgments about smells that humans do, because otherwise your experience of the world would be probably overwhelmingly bad. Right. So, okay, there's several interesting things to unpack here. The first is that actually our sense of smell, it is absolutely true that smell produces very, very strong and immediate emotional reactions to us. People often say that just neurologically, just in terms of the wiring,
Starting point is 00:12:05 smell is the sense that has the shortest route to the brain. There's just like more direct connections there and I think that's part of it. But that kind of immediacy and that strong emotional reaction can be misleading because it makes us think that smell, there's a lot of our reactions to smell are very innate and universal. And actually that isn't true. Smell is profoundly influenced by culture and by learning. So most things actually don't smell bad to like babies.
Starting point is 00:12:38 Babies learn that some certain things smell bad because they are bad. And actually there are very few things, possibly nothing, that smells universally bad or good across human cultures. So the fact that we have strong emotional reactions to smell doesn't quite reflect some universality. It really reflects that it's very, very easy to learn about smell and to attach emotional reactions to them. I think the same is likely true for something like a dog, even which exists in a much, much more smell-oriented world.
Starting point is 00:13:17 And when you see a dog reacting to certain things, I think it reflects the fact that dogs don't exist in human culture, right? Or at least like we can train them to avoid certain things, I think it reflects the fact that dogs don't exist in human culture, right? Or at least like we can train them to avoid certain things, right? But this is why like dogs will sniff poop. Dogs will sniff each other's pee. Like my dog loves the scent of earthworms in particular. Like if he is rolling down on something in the street, like 90% chance he has found an earthworm somewhere on the pavement and we haven't seen it yet. Yes.
Starting point is 00:13:48 So weird. But I think that it is certainly true that there are a lot of things that most humans would find repulsive that dogs don't, right? And poop is the obvious example of that. I've heard from dog scientists that citrus smells are often off-putting to dogs, like not universally so, but that is an example of something that I think most humans would be like, oh, lemony scents are great. Dogs not so keen. Summer is Tim's ice latte season.
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Starting point is 00:16:19 I think that the real point here is that dogs do exist in a very, very different sensory world than we do. One that is dominated by smell compared to the one that sighted humans have, which is dominated by vision. And that I think also dogs use smell in a very, very different way. It's partly that their noses are just better, so they have more hardware, they have just more of everything that's in our nose, more of the receptors, more of the neurons, more smell related genes, they just have more of all of it. But also they're just using their nose
Starting point is 00:16:55 all the time. In the main, humans don't do. Like smell is sort of a passive thing, you know, I'm right, like I'm not going around sniffing the sidewalk, I'm not going around sniffing other people. And I think partly because of the hardware and partly because of the way it's used, dogs do exist in this wonderful, rich world of smell that we not only don't access, but also I think don't really respect enough. I write in the book that one thing I see in a lot of dog owners, and I totally get it, is people will pull their dogs along as they walk because they see a walk as a means of exercise or a means of travel from point A to point B. But for a dog who wants to sniff, a walk is an act of exploration.
Starting point is 00:17:48 It's a little adventure. They get to sense what has changed in this environment. I walk my dog three times a day. To my eyes, very little has changed in the blocks we walk along. It's just boring. But to his nose, a lot has changed. A dog he might know has peed on that patch of grass. What is that dog up to? How healthy is that dog? What has that dog been eating? So it's not just an active venture, it's also very social activity. You know, I often compared my dog sniffing patches of pee on the sidewalk to me checking my Instagram feed. It's his way of catching up on how the other individuals he knows have been up to, even though they're not right next to him at the time.
Starting point is 00:18:32 It is a profoundly social thing and it is a social experience that is predicated on smell. It's such an interesting point that you brought up that so much of human perception of smell is based on our culture, right? And where you grow up, the foods you grow up eating. And so those neurons then wire and fire together for the rest of your life, very likely. Whereas dogs don't grow up in that same human cultural experience where they are like, it just reminds me of a campfire in September. You know what I mean?
Starting point is 00:19:05 Like it doesn't have that same human emotional neuron component. It's such an interesting thing to think about. Do whales migrate with smell and sensing the Earth's magnetic fields? Because this is one of the other things that I've been curious about. You mentioned that bird migration, one of the things they use is vision, but underwater is dark. It is dark. It is dark.
Starting point is 00:19:31 You can't see great fun. And you don't have landmarks of like, oh, coming up on the shores of the Atlantic. You know, like it's, you don't have that same ability to use vision when you're swimming in the waters of Alaska. How do, like, grey whales migrate from Mexico all the way up to Seattle? Or humpbacks migrate from Alaska to Hawaii and there and back again every year? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that the answer is almost certainly that they use a bunch of sensors and a lot of them work pretty well underwater and over long ranges. So smell is certainly one of them, although I can't say that for sure. The ability to sense the
Starting point is 00:20:14 Earth's magnetic field, there is some really interesting evidence from actually a very, very recent study from only about like three years or so ago that whales might be able to sense the Earth's magnetic field too. Now the reason we know that things like songbirds can do this is that people did experiments where they put songbirds in cages, put the cages in completely dark sealed room and then put like little ink pads at the bottom of the cages so the birds could hop on the ink pads and then would try and hop out of the cages. And every time they did that they would step on like a piece of blotting paper that was
Starting point is 00:20:48 lining the edge of the cage. And you could see very clearly that the birds were always trying to hop in the same direction. Like they knew which way to go, even though they couldn't use any other sense. And if you put them in a chamber that allows you to alter the magnetic field, then they will hop in a new direction. So great experiments, very clear. You can't really do that with the whale. No, no, you can't keep them in captivity. You cannot. There's not really an ink pad large enough for it. Wouldn't work. So every
Starting point is 00:21:20 now and then, the sun throws a massive hissy fit and does what's called a solar storm and it produces a ton of radiation that as a byproduct messes with the Earth's magnetic field. And so you might think that if whales are navigating using that magnetic field on days when there's a lot of solar storm activity, they're more likely to go off course. And that is exactly right. So grey whales on days with lots of solar storm activity are four times more likely to strand on beaches than on days without solar storm activity.
Starting point is 00:21:55 Now that's not a smoking gun, right? There's maybe other ways of explaining that, but I think it's really compelling and I think it's probably the best evidence we'll get because, as we said, whales are really, really difficult to study. So that might be part of it. I think that they also use sound in really interesting ways. So we know that a lot of animals like bats and dolphins can navigate using sound. So they produce high-pitched calls and then they listen out for the rebounding echoes and they use the timing between the call and the echo to judge the distance between themselves and the objects around them. This is called echolocation.
Starting point is 00:22:35 Now big whales do not make high-pitched calls. In fact, they make quite the opposite. They make very low-pitched calls that are too low for us to hear. So they're not quite echolocating in the same way, but it's also possible that those calls, which do travel over immense distances, might be used for navigation. A whale might be able to produce them, listen for an echo, and use that to kind of map the topography of the ocean. Do they do this?
Starting point is 00:23:02 Well, we don't know for sure, but certainly human scientists can use whale calls in this way. We can use whale calls to map the seismic terrain of the ocean. And if we can do it, I think there's a reasonable chance that they can too. We can make a lot of educated guesses, but especially with creatures that are hard to study, that are very big, that are very intelligent, raising ethical questions about what kinds of research you can do. We might never know, but I do think it is kind of wonderful
Starting point is 00:23:36 to make the attempt to try and think about these questions, even if you'll never fully understand what the answer is. Totally. I wondered too about this reputation of cats that have, you know, cats have nine lives, they can always rescue themselves from weird situations. Or if you drop a cat upside down like this, they will always right themselves. For sure. You know what I mean? Like, there, I don't know what the explanation for that is, but there has to be some sense that we are not aware of.
Starting point is 00:24:06 You know, if you think about a human, like I'm going to drop you off a building back first, humans are not like, oh, quick, let me rotate so that I land in a more advantageous position and I'll land on my feet and it'll be fine. It's just weird to think about. Animals are so fascinating and weird. So this is a really interesting question because the sense that's at play here is one that we also have and that people very rarely think of. So we think there are five senses and we think that because of Aristotle and he was wrong.
Starting point is 00:24:40 There are more than that. One of the ones we'd never think about is equilibrioception. It's a sense of balance, right? So it's the sense that tells me if I close my eyes and without any other cues that I am the right way up. And or that if I was doing a handstand, I can't do a handstand, but let's pretend that I could, that I would be upside down. That sense lies in the inner ear. You know, it's why if you, if you spin around a lot, you get dizzy. Equilibrioception. There are a few senses like this that are so kind of fundamental that it's actually hard to find research on it.
Starting point is 00:25:12 And I searched, you know, I was thinking about doing a whole chapter on this, but there's just not enough, there just wasn't enough to write about. Few people study it, few people study it in other animals. But you would think that it's actually a very rich vein for study because as you say, let's think there are things like cats which have this incredible sense of balance which can land on their feet from a fall. How is a cat's sense of equilibria perception different from a human's? There are a few things that I found on this that weren't in the book, but that are like little interesting tidbits.
Starting point is 00:25:47 So like there was one study suggesting that cheetahs have a really, really good sense of equilibria reception because not only are they cats, but they are very, very fast cats. There was one that suggested that maybe things like dolphins have a terrible sense of equilibria reception because they frankly don't need it. Like if you exist in this completely three-dimensional world where you can move in any direction and where just a sense of, am I the right way up? Maybe it doesn't matter that much. Right. We absolutely know if we're right side up.
Starting point is 00:26:20 If you go on a roller coaster that takes you upside down, that produces a very strong feeling in your body. Very strong feeling of like, Oh my, like, I'm upside down? Being upside down actually can feel a little panic-inducing because you know it's wrong. It's wrong that I'm upside down right now. But that, you're absolutely right, that that would not serve a dolphin.
Starting point is 00:26:44 You wouldn't want them to be like, Oh no, I'm upside down right now. But that you're absolutely right that that would not serve a dolphin. You wouldn't want them to be like, oh no, I'm upside down. When they're constantly moving so agilely and powerfully through the water, being upside down would sometimes be useful. Yep, I agree. Oh my goodness. What is your favorite animal sense that you researched for this book? This is always a very hard question for me to answer because there are so many and it's like forcing you to choose between all of your babies. Okay, how about this?
Starting point is 00:27:16 If you could have one of them. So when I think about this, I try and think about something that I think you would have an interesting conscious experience of and that would give you a very different kind of conscious experience of what you have. Because like when we talk about birds navigating with the Earth's magnetic field, it's not entirely clear to me that it's like a bird is flying along and going ha ha over there, right? Like what is that feeling? Is it just a kind of a pull? Like does it have like a kind of heads up display? I don't really know. I don't really know. So the one I tend to think of is echolocation as practiced by
Starting point is 00:27:55 a dolphin because underwater echolocation, the ability to use sound to navigate has some really interesting properties that it doesn't in air. First, it works over much longer distances because sound travels further in the water without losing energy. So a bat trying to echolocate can only really do so for maybe like max a dozen feet or so in front of it. A dolphin can do it for like meters, maybe kilometers. And that would be astonishing to me, you know, like to have that much of a sense in water, whereas you say like vision really not very good. I think that would transform your experience of being underwater. And underwater echolocation, so sonar, also allows you to peer inside a lot of objects.
Starting point is 00:28:46 It works a little bit like a medical scanner because sound tends to reflect off when it encounters changes in density. And because like our flesh is about the same density as water, our skin, our surface of our body is going to reflect much less sound than say our lungs or our skeleton. So a dolphin echolocating on a human likely can sense its skeleton. A dolphin echolocating on a fish can sense the swim bladder inside the fish, the airfield organ that allows the fish to control its buoyancy. There's this element of peering inside an object that I think this sense gives you that most of the ones we have do not.
Starting point is 00:29:27 And then I think finally, dolphin echolocation is just kind of absurdly precise. It is almost more precise than human vision is, which is kind of shocking to me. One of the scientists I spoke to talks about this experiment where he worked with a false killer whale, a kind of dolphin, and he presented it with two cylinders. Her job was to try and tell the difference between the two cylinders. She would very reliably do this. Sometimes the cylinders would fill with water versus alcohol, or they would be slightly different in size.
Starting point is 00:30:03 But there was one experiment where both the cylinders were supposedly exactly the same, and the dolphin was queuing the researchers that, like, no, these are different. And they were like, no, these are the same. We ordered them to be the same. And they went back to the machinists that created the cylinders, who checked them and found that actually they were different. One of them had a tiny taper at one end, so it was like millimetres narrower in one point than the other cylinder. The humans looking at these things absolutely couldn't tell the difference.
Starting point is 00:30:38 The dolphin totally could. That's amazing. Yeah. That just blows my mind. Mm-hmm. Mm hmm. That is so cool. Yeah, have you heard those stories just anecdotally of a dolphin trainer at a zoo? There was one who was pregnant and the dolphin could absolutely tell that she was pregnant
Starting point is 00:30:56 and they had a relationship with each other and the dolphin was constantly like nosing her belly. Apparently this dolphin knew she was pregnant before she did. I'm sure there's a smell aspect involved. I know that there's hormonal shifts with pregnancy. I think that that feels to be like just such an echolocation thing. Like I said, the dolphins can appear inside you. They absolutely can sense fetuses in pregnant people. Like I would be shocked if they couldn't do that. So then the other skill that they have, and actually quite a lot of animals have with
Starting point is 00:31:28 their respective senses, which I think is incredible, is this thing called cross-modal recognition, which is just a fancy way for saying you sense a thing with one sense and then you can recognize it with another. So I'm holding up a battery. right? Like if I closed my eyes and I didn't know this was a battery, I could run it through my fingers and I could know, okay, it's a cylindrical object. It's got a little bumpy bit on one end, right? I build up a representation of the object in my mind and I open my eyes and if there was a bunch of crap on the table in front of me, I could go, well, this is the thing that I just touched.
Starting point is 00:32:04 That's actually quite a sophisticated skill. And a lot of animals can do it with senses that seem weird to us. So a dolphin can echolocate on an object that it cannot see and then recognise that same object even if it was presented like on a computer screen, which again is wild to me because when you think about that echolocation is just a souped up form of hearing. If I heard the sound of a piano for example, I am not going to create the representation of a piano in my mind. There's nothing there that cues me to the nature of the thing creating the sound.
Starting point is 00:32:46 And I think it shows us something special about echolocation, that it's not actually just a souped up form of hearing. It's actually a little bit like a weird version of touch. Like it is an active way of exploring the world. It's almost as if the dolphin was reaching out with these invisible hands and grasping an object in front of it, exploring it, feeling it, getting its shape, and then creating this representation which then translates to its eyes. I think it again speaks to the very different nature of some of these senses and the different
Starting point is 00:33:23 things that you can use that you can do with something like hearing. It doesn't have to be a thing where like I'm just sitting here and passively receiving sound into my ears. It can be a very active sense with which you explore the world. That's absolutely fascinating. That's such a great example that you just gave that as a human set with a very sophisticated mammalian brain, you can close your eyes, feel an object, and then potentially, potentially recognize it on a desk in front of you out of many objects,
Starting point is 00:33:54 if there were not too many objects that were similar. Right. Right? Like if you have a Lego, a battery, and a cup of coffee, easy. But what you're saying like with the dolphins is that they could perceive the differences between two batteries. The two batteries that seem identical to you. But actually this one, the bump is one sixteenth of a millimeter larger at the end than the other one. That's incredible.
Starting point is 00:34:26 Have you seen the study that found that dogs actually do not recognize people's faces? No, I haven't seen that. So, it was recent, and it was trying to see, do dogs actually recognize their owners? And of course they do recognize their owners, but they don't recognize their owners because of their owner's face. They use their owner's smell, they use their owner's shape, their overall body shape, like you're as yay high and yay wide, and they use your sound, the way that you sound. But they do not recognize you. Like if you do nothing else but just put your like disembodied face on a computer
Starting point is 00:35:14 screen, there is no recognition from dogs. They don't say that's Ed. I know him anywhere. It totally makes sense. I've not seen the specific study you mentioned, but like absolutely checks out given what we know about dogs. I think dog owners will be kind of familiar with this when we dog sit other dogs. Those dogs will tend to like react if we walk past someone who is the kind of vague shape of their owner. Like they'll be like, is that mom? But they won't react in quite the same way when they get like close enough to smell or to hear. I think that it's
Starting point is 00:35:51 very, very easy to believe that dogs recognize your face because I think again, we're so primed to think about vision, but like I come home, my dog is already at the door. He is wagging excitedly and he is staring me in the face. But because we're visually oriented we look at his eyes, we make eye contact. But what we miss is of course in front of the eyes is his nose. Right? So inevitably as he's looking at me, he's also sniffing me and that's the important bit and I think that is the bit that we miss. It's a great example and it's just one of many ways in which we misconstrue what animals around us are doing and even the animals that we spend the most
Starting point is 00:36:47 amount of time with. I spend every day with my dog and I still don't fully know what's going on inside his head, which I think is kind of cool. I agree. The fact that we can't know the answers to some things, it just makes it that much more interesting sometimes. Yeah, I agree. Like the movie Up where the dogs wear a collar that just says what they're thinking. And what they're thinking is, I smell you. I just met you and I love you. Won't you be my best friend? In some ways, it's actually more fun that we don't know.
Starting point is 00:37:20 I agree. Oh, and I absolutely loved Unimmense World. I absolutely read it and felt like, what an immense world. Thank you. What an immense world. And it made me feel like almost like that sense, you know, when you're looking at pictures of space, you know, the NASA picture, the James Webb telescope, where you feel like, dang, I'm small, you know, like that. We the James Webb telescope, where you feel like, dang, I'm small. You
Starting point is 00:37:45 know, like that, we're so tiny on this earth. And in some ways, it produced the same feelings in me. Like, there's so much that I cannot even perceive, that tiny little ants are out here doing stuff that I can't even imagine. It just really produced that feeling of just wonder at what is all around us that we can't even imagine. It just really produced that feeling of just wonder at what is all around us that we can't even sense. I'm really glad that was the intention. That was my hope and I'm glad it worked. It did. Thank you so much for being here today. I loved the book. I loved chatting with you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Ed Yong's book, An Immense World, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year.
Starting point is 00:38:31 He is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. This book is going to blow your mind. If you are at all interested in the natural world, you love animals, if you love understanding about how the universe functions. Oh my goodness. You are going to get so much out of reading it. So pick up a copy wherever you buy books. Thank you so much for listening to here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode,
Starting point is 00:38:58 would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.

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