“The real guide to reality It’s not that pigeons are stupid. Well, they are, but that’s not the point. This gulf between how we see the world and how a pigeon sees the same world reveals something fundamental about our relationship with reality, and how we understand our place in the cosmos. Our eyes powerfully illustrate the fact that our experience is a heavily edited version of reality. Evolution has found a way for us to harvest, process and interpret elementary packets of light in the dark cavities of our skulls. Our minds navigate the many constraints of anatomy to make it work—frame rates, blind spots, faulty cones, colorless peripheral vision. We don’t even notice the limits of our eyes as we construct our subjective world view in our heads. Like all creatures on Earth, our bodies are carefully tuned to ensure our continued survival. But it would be a pointless waste of ego to think that they make us capable of experiencing reality as it really is. We are each locked into our own umwelt, profoundly limited by our senses, constrained by our biology, shackled by the inescapable bounds of our evolutionary history. We’re hopelessly tethered to what we can uncover while stuck on (or perhaps near) this planet, a speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos. We see only the merest sliver of reality. We’re peering at the universe through a keyhole.”