The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses by Jackie Higgins

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses by Jackie Higgins Perfect for fans of The Soul of an Octopus and The Genius of Birds, this “revelatory book” (Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author) explores how we process the world around us through the lens of the incredible sensory capabilities of thirteen animals, revealing that we are not limited to merely five senses. There is a scientific revolution stirring in the field of human perception. Research has shown that the extraordinary sensory powers of our animal friends can help us better understand the same powers that lie dormant within us. From the harlequin mantis shrimp with its ability to see a vast range of colors, to the bloodhound and its hundreds of millions of scent receptors; from the orb-weaving spider whose eyes recognize not only space but time, to the cheetah whose ears are responsible for its perfect agility, these astonishing animals hold the key to better understanding how we make sense of the world around us. “An appealingly written, enlightening, and sometimes eerie journey into the extraordinary possibilities for the human senses” (Kirkus Reviews, starred), Sentient will change the way you look at humanity.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from thechrisvossshow.com thechrisvossshow.com and if you don't know it's thechrisvossshow.com what the hell have you been listening to for the last 12 years? I mean, really, seriously. Like, do I have to tell you anymore what show this is?

Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. She's going to be talking about her new book, Sentient, How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. It comes out on February 22nd, 22. That's funny. We just had someone on the show yesterday who's the same day. So that's got to be easy to remember. 2-22-22. How's that for awesome? Jackie Higgins is on the show. She's going to be talking about her new book. You want to pre-order this so you

can get it wherever fine books are sold and take advantage of reading it first in your book club. But before we get into her and what she does, she's an Oxford University graduate in zoology. So when we're talking to her, it's going to be a really smart discussion. But to maintain, make sure you capture all that smartness, go to youtube.com 4chesschrisvoss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com 4chesschrisvoss.

See everything we're reading and reviewing. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. And also go see the massive LinkedIn group newsletter that we have. That thing is killing over there in our 132,000 LinkedIn group that's under the name of Jackie is going to be with us. She's a graduate of Oxford University in zoology, and she's worked for Oxford Scientific Films

for over a decade, along with National Geographic, PBS Nova, and the Discovery Channel. She has also written, directed, and produced films at the BBC Science Department. She lives in London with her family, but she took some time away from them to come on her show today. Welcome to the show, Jackie. How are you? Very well, Chris. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. We certainly appreciate it. You're coming from London right now? No, I'm somewhere near the Welsh Hills, So it's dark outside at the moment, but if you look out the window,

you can see a little river and a little wood and herons on the water and the occasional Kingfisher, if you're lucky. There you go. So it was still coming to us from across the pond as it were, as I like to call. So give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. So you can find me on Instagram and on Twitter. Awesome sauce. Do you want to give the Twitter handle name? Yes, JM Higgins or JM underscore Higgins. I should know this.

You just want to make people work for it. I see what's going on. Yeah, I'm there somewhere. So what motivated you to want to write this? So like you said in your fantastic intro of me, I studied zoology at Oxford. And I've always been interested in looking at the animal kingdom to better understand ourselves. So I think of zoology as a mirror that we can hold up to more clearly see ourselves. You and I are related. We're distant cousins. And we're

distant cousins of every other human that's walking the planet here today, in Ukraine, in London, in America, and past and present. But also the same goes for animals and my dog, the lettuce I had at lunch. And so it's this idea that I see the animal kingdom as one big sprawling or all life on earth is one big sprawling family and I use that in the book I use them to better understand ourselves so me in a salad is I'm eating my relatives yeah some are more close than others they're awful relatives I think they had it coming so on scum yeah well you got you got those the the people you don't talk to at the uh thanksgiving dinner at the uh family gathering there it's always uncle joe who wants to hug all the women a little too hard uh sit on and have

everyone sit on his lap yeah scars from my childhood anyway enough jokes oh well let's let's oh okay well no we'll get on with your book. Well, a sense of experience. So the reason, so sentient is about how we sense the world. And this myth set up by Aristotle in 350 BCE that we have five senses. So we all have learned to parrot this from nursery, that we see and we hear and we smell and we taste and we touch. And you think that those senses circumscribe our sensory experience. And this myth is commonplace today, both in conversations and nurseries, but also in scientific circles.

And yet we all know that scientists know that there are very many other senses that we use. The senses that we know and love have split and splintered into different senses. And also there are senses that we use that we're not so conscious of. So I explore this idea of the different senses. And I use animals because our every waking moment is circumscribed by these senses, we take them for granted. Most of the time we aren't really aware of what we're doing when we're seeing even colour, shadow. Anyway, so I use animals to get a bit of distance on ourselves so that we kind of take note about how we're seeing colour. Or we take note about how we're hearing and whether we're using two ears to hear. And so the animals give us a little bit of distance on ourselves to appreciate ourselves as well.

Yeah, because we're really animals when it comes down to it. Absolutely. Yeah. Especially some people on some of that. More than others. That one wing of the politics. I don't know. I'm just doing jokes.

But yeah, I mean, have you seen it really? No, I'm just kidding. So let's talk about exceptional animal senses. Actually, if you don't mind, I want to interject because off your bio. So are you one of the people who's responsible for all those nature things where they're like, and the wild animal is in the grass, you know, those sort of things? Absolutely. Yes, I used to make, I'm thing absolutely yes i used to make i'm afraid so

i used to make wildlife films so i used to make scientific films as you said making you know explorers and specials for nat geo i made a few films out in the states we made a wonderful if i don't say so myself a wonderful special on the sonora desert that was one of my favorites so yes and when i started making wildlife films, there was this amazing series called Super Sense over in Britain. I'm sure it came to the States. And that was about animals' extraordinary ways of sensing the world. So that also, so the colour of that,

the kind of the mantis shrimp's extraordinary color vision or the star-nosed mole's exceptional ability to feel its way through underground burrows or the octopus's exceptional sense of body and using these exceptional senses to understand less exceptional senses but when you think about them we too are rather wonderful well some of us some of us more or less than others so let's not let's not give some people too much credit so let's talk about these exceptional animal senses like what are some other examples of of sensory abilities that you find in the animal kingdom so so let me think so for example one of the chapters on touch is on the vampire bat. And the vampire bat is able with its nose leaf to sense such fine changes in temperature that it can actually detect from heat the vein throbbing beneath its victim's neck as it swoops in so as it's kind of clambering over its the its

prey's hide it's able exactly to target where the blood flows closest to the skin and that's through heat the chat amazing the chat just won a nobel prize wow yeah i'm gonna be wearing uh long-sleeve shirts now whenever i go to aust. In Austin, in Texas, they have a bridge, and there's a whole mess of bats that are protected that live underneath it. And during the day, they will just all fly out. And it's like, I don't know, a million bats. It's the most amazing thing if you've ever seen it. But, yeah, that just gives you…

They never hit you. You'll stand in the middle of this throng of bats, and they'll always avoid you. Isn't that amazing? And they're blind, right? They're running on radar? They're using echolocation. They are essentially seeing the world through sound.

And the wonder of that is that they're using peeps or pitch at such a high ultrasound that they'll be chattering merrily above your head. To them, a cacophony of noise. And to us, absolutely nothing silent, silent, sweeping, but echolocating and using that sonar to see us. I heard a translation of them one time and it was like,

look at this moron. Like what? Like get on a treadmill or somebody. And I was like, that's really rude. You guys are, you guys are asshole bats. Yeah.

You've got to get, you've got to, you've got to speak bats and cry back yeah well there's that so the human animal we of course are part of the animal kingdom what sort of research did you find out about us and our comparisons to the animal kingdom so i met people with with exceptional senses so take for example if we're talking about the very first chapter, I use the peacock mantis shrimp, which is this rather bonkers crustacean that you'd find in the Great Barrier Reef, whose size is exceptional.

He's got one of the fastest and most powerful punches in the world, gram per gram. If you size him up to the size of Mike Tyson, he'd definitely take on Mike Tyson in a heavyweight boxing match, probably punch his lights out so but he but he's got exceptional sensors in his light sensors that enables him to see color in a whole new way and so this enables me to talk about color in our eyes and how we see color and you and I unless you're, probably have, so I know that I have three cones. These are three types of cones in the back of my eye.

And with these three cones, I'm able to see every color in the rainbow. But there are some people, and they tend to be women, in fact, they are women, because these cones are inherited and coded for in the sex chromosomes. And they have a fourth cone. Instead of being a trichromate like us, they are a tetrachromate. And through this fourth cone, they have a whole new dimension of being able to see color. So the rainbow to them is something even more spectacular. Wow.

Yeah. That's the peacock mantis shrimp? That's the peacock mantis shrimp. I'm looking at it right now. I think there's a guy I see in TikTok who has one of these, and he's always throwing stuff in it, and it's punching the crap out of stuff. It'll just kill anything.

In fact, he's the one I learned from. You can't put your finger in there. It'll break it off. They're known as thumb splitters. They're known as thumb splitters. Thumb splitters, yeah, that's right. They are, I mean, they're not particularly big, but they have a big personality.

And they've been studied. Sheila Patek at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied the speed and the force of this punch, it's mighty um in fact they have to be made their shell has to be so strong because because they're so forceful and scientists are looking at the composition of the shell to create to create uh weaponry or kind of what is it that you wear when you're a knight in shining armor? Yeah, chain mail and armor. That sort of thing. That's basically impregnable.

Wow. That's the idea. Yeah, I've seen it at work. He like throws like little stuff in there and it goes up to him and then just whacks him. And it's just amazing how fast it is. But yeah, note to self, don't ever date a peacock mantis. It sounds like it's not going to end well.

Let's talk about the diversity of human experience. And you came across, I think, some people who see the world differently in Australia. Absolutely. So Conchetta Antico is one of these ladies I was telling you about. She has a fourth cone. She is a tetrachromate. Holy crap. So she sees, as I said, many more colors in the rainbow. What's extraordinary is

that her daughter has a rare form of colorblindness. And this really got to the heart of the matter for me with regards to perception. It's a very private experience. So Conchetta can paint these exceptional landscapes full of color in order to try and get you to understand what it is she's seeing. But you'll never be able to see through her eyes. And then for her daughter, who she spends time painting with and before she realised that her daughter had this colour blindness, her daughter could never see what it is that Conchetta is trying to share. Oh, wow.

And Conchetta, when she was born, of course, never realized that she had this exceptional vision because... It's like, I thought I was going to have this? Yeah, it's all today. Wow. So the chapter is the opening chapter of the book, and it talks about the private perception of experience. And Gabby Jordan, who is the scientist who dedicated her life to find one of these tetrachromate women. She knew about the genetics. She knew it would

be possible. But of course, no one had come forward saying, well, I see exceptional colors, because what they see is what they see. So she dedicated her life to finding and to building she's a trichromate she's got regular vision and she had to build a test to test for colors that she couldn't see and then she found this woman but she has no idea what it is this woman can see i mean it's it's my crazy it's according to according to our website she can see 100 million colors yeah i mean i think it's according to according to our website she can see 100 million colors yeah holy crap i think it's difficult to number them but she is in a she's in a whole new a whole new level she sees a whole dimension of color that is not accessible to our eyes i've been seeing this like meme or test passed around like social media where it's like, not everyone can see all the colors.

And it's like a thing where you can count the colors and it has like a palette. Yeah. Great. Whatever. And I wasn't sure if that was because it's the internet. So that was some sort of BS thing, but I guess some people can and some people can't.

So absolutely. So there was a dress that hit the headlines over in Britain. Have you, do you know the dress? The golden blue. Or the golden or the white or the black and the blue. And the population was divided because half saw black and blue and half saw gold and white. So yes, we see different worlds. My red might well be very different from your red.

That's really extraordinary. I've had girlfriends that they can go to the paint store and they can see a million different colors in those swatches that they give you. I'm just like, oh, this is blue, green, red. Yeah.

Maybe you're not interested either. That's a large part of it maybe you'd rather be out across the other shop yeah i remember one time we started one of our companies and hired these employees and and they came in and they go oh these the colors in the walls offend us i'm like they're fucking white uh like Like, well, I don't feel creative. And I'm like, well, paint it however you want. And if you paint it, I'll buy the paint. But other than that, get the hell to work.

And I just could never figure it out. Any office I worked at is always white. But, you know, I've had girlfriends that are like, this color, I don't know, affects me. And I'm just like, well, fucking get over it. Turn the lights out. I got shit to do, man. I'm not really worried about the colors and stuff. I know.

I mean, the painting industry, the wall paint industry of Britain is crazy. There's so many colors white, so many shades with silly acronyms. Yeah. But I do appreciate people that have an art thing. Like I've always created companies, but I've never created something that's like a design-based company. Like when you go into a really nice restaurant, it has that beautiful ambiance, the design.

I've always looked around and thought, man, you must have to hire somebody to come do this because I could never do this with a company. I could do like the food part and the, man, you must have to hire somebody to come do this because I could never do this for the company. I could do the food part and the business part, but I could never do putting roses up or making it look pretty and stuff. So some people really have a talent for that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And it's interesting looking at Conchetta's artworks because she did this whole series on Twilight when for us the world is leeched of color but for her the subtlety of color still remains so she's still seeing many colors and in what to us looks very bland wow that's going to be an interest maybe her world's better than mine then maybe that's more funner yeah because i don't know i'm just looking everything black and white pretty much at this point i might as well be a dog for all I know. What are some other aspects of the book we want to touch on?

Conservation, climate change. We could talk about the secret senses, these senses that you might not be aware that you have. So I talk about, for example, sense of balance with the cheetah, sense of time with a trash line orb weaving spider and sense of body. This is a very interesting one. This idea that when you close your eyes, Chris, where your body is, where your limbs are and what they're doing with such precision that you can. Can you do this? Can you bring your hand to your nose your fingertips oh i think i just missed i got i got it but i'm used to doing this with the when i'm drinking with the police officer

it's it's the it's the first test isn't it it's a lot of practice yeah this is the police are testing whether our proprioception or our sense of body is from addled it's easily addled with a glass of something nice and evil. But this is a sense that we call on all the time throughout the day, but unknowingly. It's so automatic and so familiar, we don't notice it. In fact, the only time we notice it is when it goes. And I met a gentleman who suffered a really nasty virus, high temperatures, felt completely strange, ended up in hospital, felt like he was floating above the bed. But they weren't normal fever dreams because when he came to, he could not feel his body.

And with his eyes closed, he had lost all sense of his body. Wow. He'd lost the feeling of touch. Oh, wow. Yeah. He couldn't feel things the feeling of touch. Yeah. He couldn't feel things. Couldn't feel being felt, but also he had lost his sense of body. So as if he was disembodied. Wow.

Wow. So it was like Friday nights at my house after a bottle of vodka. So there is, and he's never had it. He's never got it back really so never came back wow that would be awful it's incredible so he he he's a really amazing inspirational man and i met him and he basically through sheer determination and will he taught himself how to move again, because this sense enables us coordinated movement. It wasn't that he'd lost motion. He said, my arm would be backtracking off and I wouldn't know what I was doing.

It could be kind of saying hello to a nurse without him really realizing what it was doing. If he looked at it, he knew what it was doing. But otherwise, he couldn't feel where his limbs were wow so he hadn't lost motion he'd lost the ability to control motion with this sense of proprioception that's the excuse i have anytime i've accidentally you know bumped into somebody i don't know what that means but yes so so ian had to in order to learn to walk well to first of all sit up and then to kind of get his legs out of the bed to stand and then to walk he had to break down every single motion that we take for granted he had to learn how to do use his hands to make conversation more naturalistic he had to teach himself gestures

again. That's crazy, man. That's crazy. You're like trying to signal people and you can't do it. Incredible. So he had to reteach himself. It took years. I mean, the doctors didn't really know what to do with him because these cases are exceptionally rare. And today he uses vision. So his eyes take over from what this sense of body does for us. But should the lights go off, he falls like a rag doll. The moment his eyes lose contact with his body, he loses control of his body.

Holy crap. Even if he's watching fireworks up in the sky and that little bit of blackness you get just after the brightness of a firework, he staggers. A little bit of blackness has kind of interrupted his control over his body. That's insane. Now, you also talk in your book about COVID and sensory deprivation. Did you have COVID or are you starting to see how COVID people lose some other things too? I mean, sometimes smell and taste. Yeah, I did get COVID.

This time last year, I got COVID. And the first thing that went awry was my cup of coffee in the morning tasted abysmal. So, yes. So, I talked about, I mean, the nice story in the book about that is that what we think of as taste is actually mainly smell. So flavour, flavours generated by when you're chewing on your toast, or you're chewing on a piece of chocolate, your tongue will taste the sweetness of the chocolate. A lot of the aromas and the kind of chocolatiness of the chocolate, you chew and the smell molecules chocolatiness of the chocolate you chew and this

and the smell molecules travel around the back up into your nose and the brilliant thing is your brain then hoodwinks you to think that that was tasted on your tongue that retro nasal smell was tasted on your tongue the combination of smell and taste are amalgamated into flavor wow i didn't even know that that's a lot of work going on yes yes yeah so so the taste so taste was interesting so really i think when i got covid i didn't lose taste i lost my sense of smell because coffee just tasted bitter none of that coffee and chocolate the same i mean so that was that was all grim. But the reason I wrote an article actually for the UK press, because one of the scientists in my book, one of the touch scientists talks of touch as being, we're back on, talks of touch as being not a sentimental indulgence,

but a biological necessity. And he's very the um the isolation that many of us were in the elderly the young the demonization of touch really concerns him so in my book i talk about i divided touch into two senses um so the star-nosed mole with its little starry nose, which it uses to feel its way through burrows, that explains our sense of being able to feel the topography of the world, the lay of the land, feel something's texture, shape, size. But then there is the sense of being touched, the emotions, the pleasure, the pain involved in being touched. And those use different senses from the ones that I'm using to map the world. So different senses. And one of these senses, I mean, skin to me became this, well, scientists have called it the last great sensory frontier.

Because we're still finding out about the senses in our skin. Like I said, the chap who won the Nobel Prize, who'd done that study on the vampire bat, but also looking at our skin and understanding how we feel pain. These are receptors and senses within our skin that enable something to feel spicy or painful or hot or cold. And so backtracking to the COVID, the lack of touch and the worry that Francis McGlone is a scientist who worries about the lack of touch that we suffered during COVID. He's involved in studying a sensor only recently discovered in our skin that responds to a caress. And he thinks that this sensor is not just important in terms of social bonding and getting pleasure and touching your children but also is important perhaps when babies are in the womb and covered with this little lanugo hair and the warm swirl of the amniotic fluid in the warm

womb warm womb keeps the baby gives the baby a sense of itself. And the mother caressing the baby enables the baby to learn the difference between myself and someone. So he thinks touch is really important in ways that we have for our psychology and our mental health in ways that we have yet to understand. I would agree with that. I mean, when you hug somebody, you kind of get that, I don't know, what is it, goes to your brain, dopamine or something. You get that rush of like, I think we need each other as human beings to do that.

And maybe some of that comes from our experience in the womb and we need to, I don't know, it helps us somehow. So that would make sense. Yeah. And yet we were all we've we've demonized touch i mean i think only now in london are we getting back to this that idea of shaking hands or or this or it's still it's still there's still a distance between people but bit by bit i think maybe anyway i think we lost we we've lost something vitally human

throughout that period. Hopefully we can get it back and, I don't know, repair what it was. I know my sister who has MS, my younger sister has MS and dementia, was trapped in her care center. And for like a year, my mom couldn't visit her. And, you know, my mom goes almost every day to visit her. And it was really hard for my mom not to be able to touch her daughter and make her feel secure. We could talk over the phone or Zoom or sometimes go stand outside the window. But, you know, it was life or death and she ended up getting COVID anyway.

But these hospitals. She's okay. Weirdly enough, she was asymptomatic both times. She didn't know she had it. In fact, they just lied to her because she's got dementia. And they just said, we're putting you in a separate room because someone else has it. We just want to make sure you're protected. And she's like, okay, well, whatever. And it was a real blessing because she's a real mess with the MS and the wheelchair and everything.

We thought for sure she got it, that she'd be a goner. So we're really lucky. I'm sorry to hear about that, but I'm delighted she was okay. But not being able to touch her and stuff. That lack of touch for your mother, but also for her. I mean, has she talked about it? Do you think she reacted differently? She doesn't remember.

I mean, she can have lunch and not remember she ate. So, yeah yeah we're at that point but i think my mom really believes that that not having that touch not having being able to you know have her mom there and love and care for that she slid further under dementia and i think a lot of people did i think you mentioned that earlier in the show a lot of old people a lot of people just died because because they weren't getting contact with and love and affection. Yeah. We saw this.

Go ahead. Just to interrupt, that's something I found rather magical when I was researching touch. It's the first sense to come online in the womb. Oh, really? And the last sense to leave us when we die. Wow. Yeah. Wow.

So I just hope someone was holding the lack of touch, particularly when people were ill or passing away. That lack of touch must have been, well, that makes me feel very upset. Yeah. I know that a lot of the nurses, because you can bring the family in, a lot of the nurses would hold the hands of people when they would pass. And yeah, it's difficult and hard and i can see why it's important we get that with love and affection when we have a mate being able to hold them touch cuddle hug there's something that that gives you that feeling of even like as a man when my girlfriend would would sit beside me or sit in my lap sleeping or watching a netflix

or something and and i would feel have feel like a protector which is a male thing we feel like we want to be ah i got this i got i'm protecting my family we're we're into that sort of thing and that that triggers through that touch and that feeling of that of that modality and stuff so yeah the other sense that you don't have is smell because smell is super important in those interactions as well. Yeah. I mean, what we're doing right now is a little bit sterile. I mean, you're over wherever you are and all we've got is sound and vision to rely on.

No touch, no smell. I can't smell you. Well, you probably don't want to. I went to Taco Bell last night. And I would be smelling you and I would be making conscious decisions and also unconscious decisions well you know i mean you don't know i went to taco bell last night so it might there might be a smell over here you don't want to have a thing but i mean that's another that was another chapter in the book and the unconscious i used the giant peacock of the moth um and the discussion about pheromones

pheromones are a bit of a dirty word in human pheromones in scientific circles. But I looked at how smell has a privileged access to the amygdala in our brain, the emotional center. So one neuroscientist, Rachel Hertz, hijacked, brilliantly, Descartes' words and said, I smell, therefore I feel. So, again, back to being male protector, huggling up with your girlfriend, your mother, your sister. Smell is really important. Yeah, especially if they've had Taco Bell the night before. I know pheromones, yeah, are a big deal.

Are women attracted? I've heard this kicking around a little bit are can women tell how how much testosterone you have and it affects their attraction oh golly i don't know i don't know oh there you go there's your next book i mean i certainly like i earlier, I'll certainly be making conscious and subconscious decisions about. But I know pheromones on both sides, they're attracted to. Yes. And they put it in all sorts of perfumes and everything else. Yes. There's a big market making a little bit of a nonsense out of human pheromones.

I mean, they haven't yet been found or bottled. But I mean, they're found throughout the animal kingdom. And so one of my scientists, Tristan Wyatt, said, it's ridiculous to think that they won't be found in us at some stage, and they won't be involved in human courtship. The one example where pheromones are most likely to be, a human pheromone is most likely to be found, is between a mother and her baby. There's really interesting work coming out of normandy from benoist charles laboratory and mothers release a pheromone that newborn babies basically and it enables them to latch on and find food so breastfeeding and it's a pheromone that

is a pheromone basically is is a chemical so i could release it if i was breastfeeding. And it's a pheromone that is, a pheromone basically is a chemical. So I could release it if I was breastfeeding a baby. But you could give it to another woman who is having problems. The very same one that I released. It's not particular to a person. It's particular to a species. I've seen, I have huskies and my friends will breed huskies. I've seen videos where the huskies are like blind and somehow they're still able to find mom and they're able to find the nipples.

And so maybe there's some of that in that sort of thing. It's been proven in rabbits. I know that. So mammals, I mean, I wouldn't put it past the husky. Yeah. Because they're blind as a bat and somehow they know where mom is and and how to go find her when when the milk bar opens yeah it's always funny to see about 10 of them up at the and it would make evolutionary sense i mean it would make absolute sense a guide a

sensory guide to find food because whether you feed in those first few hours of life is critical to your survival so definitely definitely what are some other aspects of the book we haven't touched on electricity let's see there's a few different things you talk about how reality is neither true nor complete so so that's the very end of the book so i use the platypus as a cautionary tale so here's an animal with a sense that we don't have. So it is able, this creature, the bill of this creature is studded with thousands, tens of thousands of tiny electric sensors. Really?

Which it uses to detect the electric field of its prey. So it'll dive underwater, it'll close its eyes, close its ears, won't smell. And it's guided by, basically, like, have you ever seen metal detectors? Yeah. In the fields near where I live. Using their metal detector across,

back and forth across the rocky bed. The duckbill platypus will wave its beak back and forth across the rocky bed and underneath detect the little animals crustaceans and whatnot that it's going to feed on wow i did not even know that yeah that's crazy man they're pretty cool the platypuses so here is an animal with a sense that's completely and electricity unless we stick our hands in a socket, we're not going to feel it. Yeah. I might go try that with a pizza.

Stick my hand and see if I recognize the pizza. You can't feel the electric field given off by a living creature. That's crazy. So reality is only dictated by the senses that your body has. Wow. So here's a creature with a very different sensory reality to us. And that, so that's all, that's really,

it's a fun idea to leap out the book on because it shows you that your reality is neither true nor complete. But also, as a sci-fi way of looking at it, you could put various implants into yourself to boost your, to basically pick up sensory information that a human generally doesn't pick up. And because another aspect of the book is the neuroplasticity of our brain, our brain is absolute wizard at being able to take information

and use it. So the blind artist, Eshraf Armagan, is a chap I met who paints, draws, yet has never seen anything and says that he sees the world through his fingertips. And he, yeah, amazing. And he had his brain studied by neuroscientists at Harvard and they asked him when he was in the brain scanner, please fill this, Eshraf, and draw a picture. And they were looking at his brain as he did this.

And what they saw is that his visual cortex, the part of the brain that's lighting up in your head and my head right now, because we're looking at one another, the visual cortex, his visual cortex, when he was feeling the world, his visual cortex lit up. So your brain does not lie fallow. Our brain has been carved up. Our cortex has been carved up according to what scientists think, where you hear, your auditory cortex, your visual cortex. But if you can't hear and you can't see, those parts of the brain are being used by other sensory information.

And for Eshraf, because he used his hands so much, the visual core, he does see through his fingers, essentially. I mean, it kind of interrogates what you mean by sight. If you're talking about the fact that his visual cortex is lighting up, Eshraf can see. He's blind, but he can see anyway back to back to the platypus and the kind of sci-fi idea of inputting different senses into our um into our brain that is entirely possible because our neuro our brains are so neuroplastic in fact there's a brilliant book written by robert eagleman called live wired and he's very interested in in in this idea and he trying various plug-ins to enhance humans. Over the tech scene, I've bumped into various

people over the years that do biohacking to themselves. All sorts of different things. What do you think about that? Elon Musk is evidently working on a company where you can put something in your brain, you can plug it in. I mean,

I'd rather someone else tried it before me my sensory umbelts um i mean i'm curious i think it's extraordinary but i don't know that i would particularly want to gadget myself up app myself up so i can i can gps my way around or like or like the Bartels Godwit, you know, migrate across the sea from Alaska to New Zealand on the contact of feeling geomagnetic fields. I mean,

it's fun, but, but I find it a bit too sci-fi for me to kind of get up, get up on. I'm still trying to master this whole thing going on right now with myself. So, you know, I don't really need to add anything right now. I'm still trying to master this whole thing going on right now with myself. So, you know, I don't really need to add anything right now. I'm just trying to deal with this.

And the book is about, it's asking you to slow up a little bit and think about actually as we are, just as we are, the boring waking up in the morning, boring Monday morning mundane. The book is asking you to realize the the kind of wonders that are happening in the way that you're seeing color in the way that you're hearing the world in the way that you're smelling the world through two nostrils so you're going to kind of stereoscopic stereoscopic smellscape mean, so the book is We Are Wonderful As Is.

I've got this website. I'm going to watch some of her videos after we get off the Conchita and Tico. Am I pronouncing that right? But I kind of feel ripped off, eh? Like, I want to see a million colors. Like, I feel like I got a low-grade old model of iPhone put in my brain. I can't

see well. Like, what kind of crap is this? Can I ask for a refund or receipt or something like that? So you need to call Elon Musk and ask for the rainbow vision goggles. Oh, God. What the hell, man? You gave me a headache. Who knows? Too much.

That's true. I don't know. Maybe, yeah, maybe seeing too many colors would be, I don't know. If I want to see a lot of colors, I'll just drink a lot of vodka and drop some mushrooms or something. I don't know. Take some acid. Yeah. There are other ways. That's probably the way to do it. Yeah. There are other ways that you can wake up from. Yeah. We call it Wednesdays around here. So there you go. Anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go? Golly, I mean, I suppose one of the big messages that I'd like people to get

is back to the point I made at the very beginning, that we're one big family. I mean, conservation and looking after our planet is very much in the news. And I suppose the book brings home the point. I mean, what staggered me was all these similarities, sensory similarities, say, between us and the vampire bat in the proteins that enable us to feel heat or feel pain being the same. Or the opsins, the little proteins in the back of our eye that enable us to see being the same as all these creatures. I mean, I found endless echoes of ourself throughout the animal kingdom, or rather endless echoes of them in me. So that is one world. We are one family philosophy. Yeah. I'm going to still keep killing the family members that I have that are spiders and

mosquitoes, though. That's not going to end. Do you know, on Twitter, there were a couple of people who were a bit upset by my sense of Time chapter because it's a spider that tells the story. Oh, really? The phobes got upset. I mean, I'm a little bit scary. I've held tarantulas, but the smaller spindly ones still get me. But they were rather wonderful. I mean, I'm quite happy to see the wonder in a spider, I suppose.

Yeah, I mean, as long as they're outside my house, we're cool. When you come in without an invite, you don't wipe your feet, then we have a problem. Especially if you're poisonous, then, you know, that's kind of a weird thing. Because I've got dogs,

and so I don't ever want the dogs to get it. I remember one time I found a giant black widow right above my dog's water. It was a brand new puppy I had bought in two. It would have been really just not cool. But aside from spiders, now that we're running off everyone, everyone's like, so give us your plugs one more time so we can

find you on the interwebs and get to know you better. Thank you, Chris. So the book is Sentient and you can find me on Twitter and also on Instagram under JM Higgins. There you go. And thank you for coming on the show today. We certainly appreciate it.

I've learned a lot and I'm going to go. I have to call God and get angry with him that I'm not getting a hundred million colors on my TV. I'm going to try adjusting my radar or something or my antenna. I think you're wonderful just the way you are. Oh, well, thank you. You're the only one. Even my mom doesn't like me.

So thanks for coming on the show today. Thanks for tuning in. Go over to the book wherever fine books are sold as Sentient, How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses,

February 2-22 coming out. That's, or let's see, let me do this right. 2-22-22 coming out. That's a proper palindrome, let me do this right. Two, 22, 22 coming out. That's a proper palindrome. Let's make this lucky. There you go. There you go.

So order that baby up. You can get it. So what's today? Today's the 12th. So yeah, you can get ahead of time for your book club. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness,

Chris Voss, see the bell, see everything we're reading, reading over there. YouTube.com, Fortuness, Chris Voss, bell notification,

our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Stay safe, be good to each other, and we'll see and reviewing over there. YouTube.com, Forge.com, Chris Voss, Bell Notification, all our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Stay safe, be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. Chris, thank you.