![]() Against this strobe assault, it became impossible to detect predator or prey. Suddenly, a single patch of visible space could vary in brightness a hundredfold from moment to moment under the flickering rays. Some 500 million years ago, once our primordial ancestors moved from the depths to the shallows of the sea, they confronted something profound confusing from the vantage point of a creature with primitive monochromatic eyes only capable of distinguishing degrees of darkness: sunlight dancing on the surface of the rippling waves, rapidly refracting into the water. To see at all, ancient animals developed a type of protein receptor called opsin, which patrols the surface of the cell that contains it - a type of cell called a cone - and grabs at light-absorbing molecules, forming a partnership that sparks the chemical reaction of electrical signals that carry vital information to neurons - information which resolves in what we call vision. Although the theory was falsified by science and revised by the very scientists whom it inspired, this particular statement from it stands as an apt description of the evolutionary history of color vision. “Color itself is a degree of darkness,” Goethe wrote in his poetic theory of color and emotion. One of Goethe’s geometric studies of color perception No corner of the house of the senses is more fascinating - for its aesthetic gifts, its evolutionary convolutions, and its almost spiritual effects - than color. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity… When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. With the perspectival felicity that science singularly confers, Yong writes: We are insentient to myriad realities readily available to our fellow creatures - the temperature currents by which a fly, Blake’s supreme existentialist, navigates the air the ultrasonic calls with which hummingbirds hover between science and magic the magnetic fields by which nightingales migrate. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. Our Umwelt is still limited it just doesn’t feel that way. ![]() With an eye to the Umwelt - that lovely German word for the sensory bubble each creature inhabits, both limiting and defining its perceptual reality - he adds: (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Color wheel based on the classification system of the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul from Les phénomènes de la physique by Amédée Guillemin, 1882. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?Ī quarter millennium of science after Blake - a quarter millennium of magnifying delight through the lens of knowledge - Yong writes:Įarth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, That is the invitation Ed Yong - one of the most insightful science writers of our time, and one of the most soulful - extends in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us ( public library), appropriately titled after a verse by William Blake: In that limitation lies a glorious invitation to fathom the fundaments of our humanity and step beyond ourselves into other sensoria more dazzling than our consciousness is even equipped to imagine. Our perception of color, like our entire perceptual experience, is part of our creaturely inheritance and bounded by it - experience that differs wildly from that of other species, and even varies vastly within our own species. I mean this both existentially and evolutionarily: Color is not only our primary sensorium of beauty - that aesthetic rapture without which life would be a desert of the soul - but color is how we came to exist in the first place.
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