Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Senses
What humans think of as reality is only a reflection of what their senses can detect, and only a fraction of what is there. Nonhuman animals reveal a wider sensory range. The idea that humans and only a few other animals are sentient is a myth.
MARC BEKOFF: Sentience, the ability to feel, is all around us, and almost daily we learn of the amazing sensory capacities of nonhuman animals (animals), many of whom most people likely wouldn’t include in the “sentience club”…
What humans think of as reality is only a reflection of what their senses can detect, and only a fraction of what is there. Nonhuman animals reveal a wider sensory range. For example, orb-weaving spiders show how our eyes sense not only space but the passage of time. The idea that humans and only a few other animals are sentient is a myth…
Jackie Higgins’ new fascinating book, Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses uses the latest data from comparative studies to interrogate our understanding of animal sentience and puts to rest the myth that only we and a few other animals are sentient beings. I’m pleased she could answer a few questions about her landmark book. Here’s what she had to say…
MB: Why did you write Sentient?
JH: Some 25 years ago, I worked at Oxford Scientific Films, a company now regarded as a pioneer in natural history camerawork. My first day in the office was far from typical; it entailed inflicting pain on my new boss. We were reconstructing a killer-bee attack for a National Geographic documentary and needed a close-up of a bee implanting its barbed sting. My boss rolled up his sleeve, showed me how to hold the bee and where on his skin the macro lens was focused.
That day, I learned how the bee released a scent—undetectable to my human nose—designed to summon other bees to strike. Thankfully, there were none nearby, but I would be reminded of this lesson on alarm pheromones when I started keeping bees. On another shoot, this time for the BBC’s Natural World, I discovered how butterflies see colours beyond our imagination.
We also used infrared cameras to give some idea of how rattlesnakes perceive warm-blooded prey and mosaic-like lenses to mimic how houseflies see their surroundings with multifaceted compound eyes. All these projects, and others, fuelled my fascination with how animals sense the world, but the inspiration for Sentient came from the man to whom I submitted my first essay as a university zoology undergraduate…
MB: What are some of the topics you weave into your essay and what are some of your major messages?
JH: I learned that the premise established over two millennia ago by Aristotle that humans have five senses—namely sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste—is a little more than a Greek myth. Today, the existence of a human ‘sixth sense’—once confined to the realms of pseudoscience, with tales of telepathy or other extrasensory perceptions—is scientific fact…
Irrefutably, our eyes, ears, skin, tongue, and nose support more than one way of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. It is beyond question that Aristotle failed to identify the many ‘secret’ senses working beneath his conscious awareness. In Sentient, an orb-weaving spider shows how our eyes sense not only space but also the passage of time. According to a bar-tailed godwit, they may even sense location, much like a compass…
The platypus relies on an electric sense to find its prey. Its bill is covered in tens of thousands of microscopic sensors that can detect the weak electric fields of another. We do not share this sense; electricity exists in the world, but unless it is at amplitudes sufficient to activate our pain sensors, it remains beyond our sphere of sentience. The platypus teaches us that what we think of as reality is only a reflection of what our senses detect and that that is a shockingly small fraction of surrounding reality.
We see only a ten trillionth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine extending our range to perceive infrared heat like vampire bats or ultraviolet like birds. Imagine experiencing the taste of a catfish, the touch of a star-nosed mole, the balance of a cheetah. Imagine opening our minds to the platypus’s improbable sense. Ultimately, the natural world might inspire a brave new world of human sentience. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: