Pearce Buxton’s Reviews > An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us > Status Update

Ch. 5: Heat

The majority of this chapter discusses how a variety of animals, like Melanophila beetles, vampire bats, ticks, and pit vipers, use heat/infrared detecting organs/pits to survive (e.g., mate or find food).

"We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they'd be in discomfort because we'd be in discomfort" (pg. 140) - a note on how humans often perceive the life of extremophiles.

Ch. 4 Cont:

The discussion of pain introduces consciousness because pain is what we feel in response to harm.

“The evolutionary benefit of nociception is abundantly clear. It’s an alarm system that allows animals to detect things that might harm or kill them, and take steps to protect themselves. But the origin of pain, on top of that, is less obvious. What is the adaptive value of suffering?” (pg. 129).

Ch. 4 introduces Pain and the debate about whether animals can feel it. At the heart of the debate is the distinction of nociception and pain. In other words, “nociception is the sensory process by which we detect damage. Pain is the suffering that ensues . . . They are the sensory and emotional halves of a process that, to most of us, feel inseparable” (pg.120-121).

Last quote from Ch. 3 that I really like, and which serves as a reminder for the entirety of the book:

"This tension between reception and sensation, between what animals can detect and what they actually experience, exists for most of the senses. We can dissect a mantis shrimp's eye and work out what every component does, but still never really know how it actually sees" (pg. 116).

More Ch. 3 quotes:

"In viewing nature's paintings, eyes define its palette" (pg. 114).

"Sensing can feel passive, as if eyes and other sense organs were intake valves through which animals absorb and receive stimuli around them . . . Beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder. It arises because of that eye" (pg. 115).

Another favorite quote from Ch. 3:

"It's natural to expect that an extra dimension of color would be a spectacular thing to see. To learn that it could be taken for granted threaten to drain color of its magic. But of course, all of us . . . take the colors we see for granted . . . The real glory of colors isn't that some individuals see more of them, but that there's such a range of possible rainbows" (pg. 103).

In one of my favorite discussions of Ch. 3, Yong describes how some forms of human colorblindness really just entails those humans sharing the same color vision of other deuteranopes, i.e., dogs. Thus, "color-blindness shouldn't be a disability, but it can be because humans have built cultures that are predicted on trichromacy [i.e., traffic lights meaning red for "stop" and green for "go"" (pg. 88-89).

Ch. 3 is Vision Pt 2: Color

Whether it is the lack of seeing red or the gift of seeing UV, there are a lot of color dimensions visible possible across the animal kingdom.

This chapter was a little bit harder for me to get through because it was denser, and just so hard for me to imagine - due to my own Umwelt :(

Regardless, it was still engaging, especially the discussion about the mantis shrimp.

Chapter 2 is about light and the workings of vision across the daylight to darkness spectrum:

Humans (and birds of prey) have some of the sharpest eyes in the animal kingdom.

Some animals can see at different speeds (and probably experience the passage of time differently) (i.e., Killer Fly)

Lastly, the giant squid has the largest eyes in the darkest environment in order to see their predators: the sperm whale.

Ch. 1 shows how complex smell is. Smell “is diverse and often unquantifiable” (pg. 28), and used by animals to help them navigate the world (pg. 38).

Less astonishing is Taste, as it is the more simple chemo receptive sense:
“Taste is mostly a final check before consumption: Should I eat this?” (Pg. 48).