>> Kirk R. Johnson: [Applause] 
Thanks very much.
I'm Kirk Johnson. I'm the
director of the Smithsonian's
National Museum of Natural
History.
And it's my tremendous pleasure
to be in conversation
with Ed Yong,
who has written yet
another amazing book about
natural history.
[Applause]
I had the pleasure to chat with
Ed a couple of years ago when
his book, "I Contained
Multitudes" came out and this
whole story about all the other
things that are part of our body
has really kind of blew a lot
of minds.
And reading this book to me was
great, because what it did was
it brought together
probably a thousand anecdotes
I've encountered in my life
and made them made some sense.
And amazingly enough, he was
able to summarize it in one
single word, a word I'd never
heard before.
It's sort of the word of the
book.
You know the word I'm talking
about.
>> Ed Yong: That's right.
It's, Umwelt
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Umwelt. 
I didn't know how
to pronounce it
that's why I let you do that.
>> Ed Yong: Well,
I only just about know,
so if there are any Germans --
native German speakers in this
room, I apologized profusely.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: So talk a
little bit about, Umwelt
>> Ed Yong: Right.
So it's -- it comes 
from the German word
for environment,
but it's used by biologists, not
to mean the physical environment
not say, the table or the chair
over here, but the sensory
environment, the specific set
of sights and smells and
textures and sounds that every
living creature is privy to, but
then may well be unique to it.
So the human Umwelt includes
a large number of textures that
I can feel with my very
sensitive fingertips.
It includes colors ranging
from red to violet.
It doesn't include ultraviolet,
a color that actually most
sighted animals can see, but
that we humans can't perceive.
It doesn't include the magnetic
field of the earth that a
migrating robin or a swimming
sea turtle can sense, but that I
cannot. So each creature has
its own unique sensory bubble,
its unique slice of the
fullness of reality that it can
perceive. And that's what the
Umwelt is.
It is a term that I think is at
once incredibly humbling, but
also beautifully expansive.
It's humbling because it tells
us that, despite the fact that
I'm sitting here with -- with a
sense that my perception of the
world is complete and they're
not glaring holes in my -- in my
perception that I -- that I'm
thinking about all the time.
And yet those holes are there.
There's -- there's so much
that I'm not getting.
But it's also expansive 
because it shows us how wider
the world truly is.
And I think it tells us that to
really appreciate the fullness
of reality, we need to think
about the experiences and the
senses of our fellow animals.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: You know,
as -- as I was reading the
book, I thought about that a
lot, and I was overcoming my
insecurity of not having a large
enough Umwelt
[Laughing] because --
you think that 
 I can't see those colors.
What's that new purple I don't
know about?
>> Ed Yong: That's right.
Umwelt envy.
It's a new problem.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: It's right. 
I'll leave for
the crushed umwelt.
The -- the thing that really
jumped out at me, though, is the
fact that I love the natural
world.
All the animals, the plants,
the insects, everything.
I'm intimately fascinated.
And I run the natural museum
where I have the number one key,
which lets me look at 147
million different individual
examples of the beauty of the
natural world.
And it didn't really occur to
me until I read the book that
when I look at an organism, I'm
seeing the manifestation of
it's umwelt it's like there's
some funny feature in an animal.
It's probably because evolution
honed it towards
what it looks like.
>> Ed Young: Yeah.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: So you're
seeing these things
and maybe you can
give a few examples of your
favorite, Umwelt expressions
in the physical bodies of
organisms.
>> Ed Yong: Yeah.
So one -- one.
So I love this question and
actually some of my favorite
examples are things that we
can't perceive, you know, so
there are -- so a lot of flowers
for example, have bright, vivid
markings in ultraviolet that we
can't detect.
So a sunflower looks plain
yellow to us, but actually has a
vivid ultraviolet bull's eye at
the center of it that bees and
other pollinating insects
can see.
A lot of flowers are like this.
And actually, if you look at
all the flowers that exist in
all their varied and wondrous
colors and you ask what kind of
animal eye is best at
discriminating these different
colors, what the answer is not
a human
eye it's an -- it's actually the
eye of something very much like
a bee that like us has three
kinds of color sensing cells.
But while ours do red, green
and blue, a bee's does
green, blue and ultraviolet.
And with that eye 
you become very, very good
at telling the colors of
flowers apart.
So the colors of flowers, even
though we might adore and be
fascinated by them, did not
evolve to delight human eyes.
They evolved to ideally tickle
the eyes of bees.
And it is that way around
because the bees came first and
flowers evolved later.
It wasn't that
bee eyes evolved to -- to best
perceive flowers.
It was that flowers did that to
attract -- the flowers evolved
their colors based on the eyes 
of the pollinating insects
who were already around.
And that's -- that's amazing to me 
because it suggests that,
you know, we talk 
about beauty being in the
eye of the beholder. It also
arises because of that eye.
If the senses feel like these 
passive intake valves, you know,
I'm sitting here, sound is
coming into my ears,
light is coming into my eyes.
But actually the sensors play
an incredibly active role in
shaping the world around them --
around us
just by dint of seeing and
hearing, animals change the
nature of colors and patterns
and songs.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: So -- so in
 a way, what that means is it
kind of gives you another way
to visualize how evolution
happens as well in
a very reverse kind of way.
Because I think people 
have a sense that evolution
happens because of random
events, but in ways the -- the
actual seeing adds another
component to that, which I never
even thought about it in that
sense, and it was very
compelling to me. If I was
sitting next to a tarsier and
it was yelling at me, what
would it sound like?
>> Ed Yong: It would sound like 
nothing, because so a tarsier is
a small primate 
that kind of looks like --
Do you remember that film
Gremlins, the Little Mogwai,
those little fuzzy things.
That's what 
a tarsier looks like.
It's -- It is one 
of many animals
that produces ultrasonic calls
too high pitched
for humans to hear.
And a lot of people have
discovered animals that have
ultrasonic calls because
they're opening their mouths and
they look like they're
screaming but no sound is
coming out. This is the case
for hummingbirds, for tarsiers,
and also for mice and rats.
You know, most of you probably
have never heard of a tarsier
before, but you know
what a mice or a rat is.
They have been mainstays of
laboratory research for,
I don't know, centuries.
And yet it wasn't until in the
middle of the last century that
people realized that these very
familiar animals were producing
sounds that we can't hear.
And until actually quite
recently, that we understood how
complex those sounds can be.
So courting -- courting rodents
will duet with each other
ultrasonically. If you tickle a
rat, it will make kind like
ultrasonic laughs like it will
kind of giggle.
And I think that's a wonderful
example of how this -- this
entire world, even in the most
familiar animals of -- of
information that we are not
privy to, but that, you know, is
fundamental to their lives.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: So it kind
 of  brings to mind the ultimate
like thousands of possible new 
New Yorker cartoons can emerge
from this situation.
>> Ed Yong: Right. [Laughs]
>> Kirk R. Johnson: But you 
work with scientists or you've
interviewed scientists who have
tools to make
these sounds audible.
I was particularly entranced by
the idea of people walking
around with special microphones
and recording what insects were,
the sounds insects were making.
>> Ed Yong: Yeah,
I'm glad you talked
about this because
I love this, too.
So I met a guy called Rex
Cockcroft who studies leaf
hoppers. They're small insects
that live on plants and that
drink, the sap of plants.
Leaf hoppers will vibrate their
abdomens and send vibrations up
through the stems and the leaves
of plants that can get picked
up by other leaf hoppers
standing upon them. These are
not classical sounds as we
classically know them.
They're not audible. Even if
you're standing next to the
plant and listening out, you
probably can't hear them.
But you can clip a microphone
onto the plant and convert to
those vibrations into audible
sounds.
And when you do that and Rex
does this a lot in his own
garden, in parks, wherever he
goes, what you hear are sounds
completely unlike what you
would imagine an insect would
produce. They are not the
simple chirps of crickets or
cicadas. They are haunting and
melodic and often beautiful and
very eerie. They can sound like
musical instruments or hooting
monkeys or birds or machinery.
They're very, very strange.
And the idea to me that the
plants around us in every
garden, in every park are just
thrumming with these vibrational
signals, these vibrational
songs that even if we put our
ear to them we couldn't hear,
is astonishing.
I went out with Rex to -- to his
local park, and he just clipped
a random, you know, after like
half an hour we just heard
coming out from his amplifier
this sound that sounded I don't
know, it was almost like a -- a
fairy hyena.
It was like -- it was a very
small thing going -- [Laughing]
And I asked him, "Have you ever
heard that before?"
And he went, well, the thing
is, so few people do this or
even understand that this world
exists, that there's a very
strong chance that if you do
it, you will hear a sound that
no one has ever heard before.
And that's -- that's
incredible to me.
That sort of speaks to, 
you know, the subtitle
of the book that the senses 
of animals reveal to us,
all of these hidden realms
 all -- all around us.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: You know, 
it's so  great,
because I often tell visitors
in the museum
that there is close
to infinity
as they're ever going
to get, because we have all the
remains of the biological world.
But, of course, most of the
animals we have in the museum
are deceased and their
behaviors are deceased with
them. So these talk about
infinity times infinity in
terms of what you might
encounter with 2 million species
of life that we know about out
there, all of them living in
their own Umwelts
and -- and inaccessible.
Unless you go through the
portal which you've discovered,
which is the portal of obsessed
scientists.
>> Ed Yong: Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, the -- 
the scientists in the book
are really important, right?
They -- they -- I think they 
act as a gateway characters.
They--they show people who
haven't been thinking about the
Umwelt concept, what it is like
to be obsessed by it, to -- to
really spend a lot of time
thinking about what an electric
fish senses when it sends
electric pulses into the water,
what a spider feels when a fly
lands on its web.
And I think that much is
in the first book I wrote where
the scientists who are obsessed
with microbes give people a sort
of very obvious, like, if you
think that something is gross or
uninteresting, one really great
gateway into it is to learn
about people who care about it.
Now that's -- I had 
to do less work there writing
about the sensory worlds 
of other animals.
Like, you know, if I'm writing 
about my dog, I don't
need to make a special effort
to tell people dogs are great,
but I do when it comes to things
like spiders, snakes, scorpions,
sharks, many -- bats,
many animals that I think
a lot of people have put off by
have incredibly--
incredible sensory
abilities and feature very
heavily in the book.
In -- in the section -- in the
chapter on vibrations in a
section about spiders, I meet a
woman named Beth Mortimer who
studies spiders
 in -- in England,
and I asked her
to -- I met up with
her and asked her to show me
the spiders and I thought
that she would take me to a
small room in which there would
be like some glass cages and
there would be some spiders in
there. But instead we walked
into this quite sizable hangar
like space in which were many
free range spiders, about the
size of my ear with like meter
wide webs and also flies buzzing
around because how do you feed
free range spiders?
You just have a ton of flies
flying freely around the room,
they're landing of my hair,
on my notepad
and my recorder and -- and
she is in heaven.
She loves it.
And -- and I think that's
delightful and charming.
You know, I think
it -- it shows --
I think it shows
people that even -- even in
corners of nature that
I think most of us would find
offputting. There are wonders --
there's wonders
and magic to be had.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Many of 
those corners actually exist in
the Natural History Museum.
I have a parasite expert
who has invited me 
several times to go
collecting leeches with her.
>> Ed Yong: [Laughing]
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Which --
which involves waiting
 into a pond until the leeches
fix themselves.
>> Ed Yong: Is that -- 
is this Anna?
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Yes, it is.
I have not 
accepted the said invitation
at this point in time.
>> Ed Yong: I -- so she gave me
a tour of your
parasite collection for a piece
that I wrote in The Atlantic
called Washington, DC is home to
the nation's largest collection
of parasites. [Applause]
Every story is a metaphor.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: That's 
right. It's the rare
double entendre
that's true at both ends.
>> Ed Yong: [Laughing] Yeah. 
Not that way but also
yes, that way.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: [Laughing]
So this -- I do curious
because like you talked to 
a lot of scientists
in writing this book.
I was really impressed 
that you're throwing us
in finding your way to the
various little caverns where 
they kept their spiders or
their bats or their whales or 
whatever they were.
But two things about this. 
One is, I think it's interesting
that you collect scientists 
and I'm curious what you do
with them when you have them, 
because you have--you have
a small relationship now with a
number of scientists.
>> Ed Young: Right.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: I'm curious
if -- if you do this book 
and you have those
relationships and you move on
or do you actually have a
growing cadre of scientists who
you interact with on a variety
of reasons, or do you -- 
or you're kind of one
and done as you extract
a mold and move on.
>> Ed Yong: [Laughing] Wow. 
This makes it feel so much
like -- so much more parasitic
 than -- than I--then I
used to think about it.
I think that there are some
people who I'm continually
delighted by,
but you know for -- its.
So it's a couple of things.
I write about a lot of
different topics, and I do try
and make sure that I'm
continually finding new people
to talk about 
with every new story.
Like in my pandemic reporting
every story at least half of the
sources are people who are new.
I think that's really good.
 I think it exposes you to new
ideas, a more diverse pool of
sources.
And I think as -- you know, as a
journalist, I do feel the need
to maintain a certain amount of
distance from the people I talk
to. You know, I'm not--I'm not
cheerleading for science.
I'm also meant to be acting as
a watchdog for it when
necessary. And, you know -- and
in immense world, a book largely
about like positive things that
doesn't come into play so much,
but also it does a little bit.
You know, there's a whole
chapter about Magneto reception.
So the ability to sense the
Earth's magnetic field, an
ability that songbirds have,
that sea turtles have, that many
animals probably have.
This is a highly controversial
area for a number of different
reasons. It's very difficult to
study magnetic fields.
They're very counterintuitive.
No one knows what the organ is
that detects those fields
because those fields permeate
living tissues.
The organ doesn't have to be an
iron.
It doesn't have to be on the
surface.
It could be in my thigh, it
could be in my armpit, it could
be anywhere. I do not have a
magnetic receptor in my armpit.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: I do.
>> Ed Yong: I just want to
clarify that thing.
Dear C-SPAN viewers, it's not.
But so it's -- it's hard to --
it's hard to study.
It's also -- for that reason, it
also becomes incredibly
compelling. Right? People want
to be the first to find the
sense organ, find that receptor.
You know, there's talk of like
the person who solves this will
get a Nobel Prize, right? This
is the -- the last truly unknown
sense. And as a result, there's
a lot of shoddy work published
about it, a lot of things that
get retracted like a few years
later, things that don't add
up.
You know, people there's --
there's -- people have terrible
anecdotes of like being shouted
down in the middle of
conferences. So this story is
not just a story about animals,
it's a story about science as
an enterprise, as a social
process in some -- something 
that is done by people
and is subject to all
 the foibles that people have,
like, you know, ego, 
power, money, all of that.
And I think that's part of the
book, too.
You know, the -- the -- the way
in which the sausage gets made,
the way in which we know 
the things we know,
I think is a vital part 
of any science story.
And I think to tell that piece,
well, you do have to be a little
bit distanced from the people
who you're talking to.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Yeah,
 fair enough.
And it's interesting 
because there are
so many scientists now. 
I mean, there's, what, like
10 million scientists 
in the world.
And the word itself was only
invented in 1829.
>> Ed Yong: That's right.
Yeah.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: There was 
a time when there
were ten of them and now
 there's 10 million of them.
And one of the things that's
interesting about that is they
get more and more focused in
their knowledge.
They get very divided.
So one of the nice services the
book provides is sort of a broad
field wide survey really of -- 
of the different senses and who
is working on it. And I would as
you were talking about before, I
think you're right that people
who are in the book will learn a
lot about their field by
reading your book, even though
you're a journalist and they're
the scientist because you're
giving them this broad view of
an area where they've tunneled
in very deeply.
>> Ed Yong: Yeah. And I think --
I think two things on that.
Firstly, yeah, I hope that
the book will be useful to even
people who study the sensors of
other animals because as you
say, a lot of them focus on one
thing, that there are people who
study vision or people who
study sound, people who study
magnetic reception.
And this book is an attempt to
synthesize all of that and
actually draw threads between
the different senses.
I actually had -- 
like one of my --
one of my moments 
when I thought, I've
actually done a good job with
this was when a scientist named
Eric Warren, who literally
wrote a textbook
on animal vision, had a look 
at the Vision chapter
and pointed at one footnote 
and went, I don't think
that's right.
And I said, "No, Eric, I can
show you like the reference for
this part." And he looked at it,
and went, "Oh, I've actually
learned something new from this.
So that was -- 
that was reassuring.
But I think my -- my other point
is that yeah, the -- the in --
in the chronicles
 of human history, the use of
scientist is relatively young.
But I think in that Western
conception of it, right, as a
profession, I think like the
act of observing and making
sense of the natural world is,
you know, old and, and has been
going on since time immemorial.
And that's part of what I
encourage people to do through
the book.
Now, I want people to be
curious.
I want them to extend the full
force of their empathy to the
lives of other creatures, other
creatures around them.
I want dog owners to be
thinking about what their dog is
doing when on a walk.
I want people to think about
what that spider in the corner
of their bedroom is feeling
through its web instead of
simply brushing it a web away.
I want to inspire that sense of
curiosity about the world,
because I think that it is full
of endless wonders.
You know, I give this example a
lot, but like on every walk
around my neighborhood, I will
always tend to see the same
animals, right? So there's
always going to be pigeons,
sparrows, starlings.
And they seem boring and -- and
trivial just but they're
spectacular. Each of those
birds can see behind its head,
which I cannot do.
So their experience of the
visual world is the world moving
towards them like mine is, but
also moving away from them,
which I can't imagine.
They can see an entire
dimension of colors that I do
not have access to and also
cannot imagine.
They can hear qualities in
their own songs that fly by too
quickly for my much slower ears
to hear.
So, you know, in the -- in the
sort of baseline existence, some
of the most obvious and
familiar creatures around us are
also magnificent.
And I hope that, that's
something that readers of the
book will take away with them.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: You know, 
I think I really admire your
desire to make that one of the 
outcomes of this book.
And I think you're such a good
and compelling writer that
you're going to be successful.
And I sort of take you as an
ally of the Natural History
Museum is how do you grow the
curiosity in the natural world?
And I will take this moment as
an aside to say that Ed, the
writer has a dog named Typo,
which I just loved.
>> Ed Yong: His typography when
he's being bad.[Laughing]
>> Kirk R. Johnson: So you 
jumped from the obvious senses
of sight and -- and sound to the
magnetic zone at the very end.
So my penultimate chapter, but
the echolocation thing, I really
this guy was named Dan --
>> Ed Yong: Daniel Kish.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Daniel Kish, 
who was not born blind
but became blind very
early in his life
has learned how to click 
and echolocate himself.
That to me was fascinating to
think that here's a human who is
actually invading the umwelt of
of other animals.
>> Ed Yong: Yeah.
 And -- and this is fascinating.
So Daniel -- Daniel is an echo
locator, so he makes loud clicks
with his tongue and he uses
that to perceive the world
around it. And I've gone on
walks with him where he's using
a cane and he's getting tactile
information in the usual way,
but he's also clicking and he
can sense like when there's a
tree branch across his path
when he's walking by a lawn or a
house or a fence.
He's remarkably independent and
his echolocation is part of
that. A lot of people don't
know that.
Most people, I think, don't
know that humans can echolocate,
including a lot of scientists
who study echolocation.
But actually, if you look back
at like the very first paper in
1944 where Donald Griffin
coined the term echolocation,
that paper is about bats and
humans.
This idea of human echolocation
has been around for a long time,
and certainly the people who've
done it, you know, are aware
that they're doing something,
even if they're not you branding
it with this term.
So I guess there's 
a bunch of things that --
that section does. 
Like, I think it establishes
that even within a species,
there's a huge amount of
variation. You say early on that
an immense world is not a book
about superiority, it's about
diversity. And I think that
even -- even within the human
umwelt there is not just
one.
There is a -- there are -- 
 there's a wide variety of them.
I think it is really interesting
because Daniel can give voice to
certain things that like Bat or
Dolphin researchers will say
about echolocation that he also
experiences.
So echolocation is incredible
skill.
If we turned off all the lights
in this room, a bat could still
snatch a moth that was flying
around simply by making these
high pitched calls and
listening out from the
resounding echoes.
It's amazing in the dark.
What it's very bad at is
finding small objects against a
large background.
So a bat will struggle.
Most bats will struggle to find
an insect perched on a leaf
because the large echoes coming
back from the leaf drown out the
much smaller echoes coming from
the target.
Similarly, Daniel is often
asked to do party tricks where
he's like, "Can you echolocate
like the water bottle on this
table?" And that's really hard.
So he can -- he -- 
he can give voice
to like these really interesting
commonalities between the skill
in him and other animals.
But the -- the thing that really
fascinates me is that even
though we have the same line,
we have something in common
language and the same language.
I still don't know really what
he experiences when he
echolocate, because even though
he lost his sight from close to
birth, he lives in a culture
full of sighted people using
sighted language, and his
language has been influenced by
that. So he will describe his
echolocation in terms using
visual terminology.
He will talk about flashes or
brightness, and I don't know
whether to him those mean the
same thing as they do to me.
The American philosopher Thomas
Nagel wrote this classic essay,
What's it like to be a bat
where he argued that the
subjective world of another
creature, like a bat because of
echolocation, is fundamentally
inaccessible to us?
Like, we can do as much science
as we like, but we there's
always going to be this gulf
between -- this gap between
what I -- what we experience 
and what it experiences.
That is basically impossible.
And Daniel emphasises that
that's true because even with
language, even, you know,
I can't ask a bat what it's
like to be a bat. 
I can't ask Daniel Kish
what it's like to be Daniel Kish.
But are we even -- when
we're using the same words, are
we talking about the same thing
or are we talking past each
other? I think that's -- that's
core to the book that there's --
there's always going to be an
element of the unknown that
requires an active effort of
imagination to cross, and that
is kind of uncrossable, you
know, the -- the glory.
And thinking about animal
senses is not like peering into
like the secrets of the universe
 I think it -- it's that
you're attempting a task that
is actually -- that actually
can't be completely achieved,
 but you're making the effort
nonetheless. And I think
there's kind of wandering glory
in that.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Yeah, what 
is so cool about the book
is that it gets you 
a little bit way down the road.
You can never get to get there,
but the book actually opens your
eyes to thinking about it in an
interesting way.
And there's this -- this new 
thing they call the Internet of
Animals. Are you familiar with
this where they basically are.
>> Ed Yong: That's my Google
history, I think. [Laughing]
>> Kirk R. Johnson: I think 
the idea is you attach sensors
to various animals like
transported whales or birds or
whatever, and -- and like take
an albatross where you can put a
sensor on the albatross that
shows you where 
it's been flying.
And it'll fly around for a
couple of months and it'll dip
and feed on the water as it's
going and -- and as it's flying,
its wings are growing.
And so the wings are being
constructed out of what it's
eating. And so when it flies
back to the roost and you get it
and you take a feather, you can
actually see where it's been,
but you can also see what it's
been eating by looking at the
isotopes in its feathers.
>> Ed Yong: Right. 
Yeah
>> Kirk R. Johnson: The --
that's going to get more
and more and more.
There's more of these sensors
on animals.
And so to some degree, we're
going to start watching the
world of animals play out in a
way we've never seen them
before. And I imagine there's
going to be some insights that
get back to how they see the
world from that kind of
approach. I got to say, I love
the bat section the most, maybe
because I love bats and just
the detail you put into the bat
section about how they zero in
on their prey and they increase
the rate of things like zero
and the poor little bug has to
go out of chance, basically.
But I -- I'm a paleontologist
by training and we know that
bats sort of appear pretty
rapidly in the fossil record
around 56 million years ago.
There's a beautiful fossil bat
from Wyoming, nearly perfect
thing that is like a nearly
fully formed bat and they don't
live much before that.
So they imagine how an animal
evolves, you know,
all of these things are evolved
 to traits and behaviors based
on something that was 
happening to their ancestors
and the world they were in.
>> Ed Yong: Yeah. And right
so echolocation is such an
advanced skill that it is hard 
to think about how everything
necessary for it came into
being, you know,
like an echolocating bat has
to do a lot of things, right?
Like -- just -- just 
think about it.
So sound loses energy very
quickly in the air.
So to create a core loud enough
to travel from a bat to an
insect and then bounce back, it
has to be really loud.
And so a lot of bats absolutely
scream like, if we could hear
those frequencies, they would
be actually quite painful.
They can be like jet engine
loud.
How then is that a bat
which can hear its own calls
avoid deafening itself.
It has -- it has a special setup
where it's basically switches
off its own hearing in time
with every call and then puts it
back into place when the echo
comes back.
And it's doing this up to like
200 times a second, that's
ridiculous. [Laughing] 
And yet it occurs, right, now
you might think, then how does
something like that happen?
But there are -- there are a lot
of animals that do a much
simpler form of echolocation.
I mean, humans obviously are
one of them.
But -- but other creatures too,
like these weird cave dwelling
birds called oil birds, a group
of mice, I think sometime during
the pandemic were revealed to
also possibly be echolocators.
It's quite a lot of creatures
that probably do this, but
no one would know that they do
it unless they recognize that
echolocation is a possibility
at all.
And there's -- this is I think,
one of the wonderful things
about studying the senses, like
our senses close us off to these
other worlds, to these
abilities that animals have.
And every time you push against
that barrier, you open up the
possibility for more
discoveries.
So the fact that Donald Griffin
and others show that
echolocation exists in bats in
the 1940s then allowed
scientists to look for the same
ability in other animals.
And low and behold dolphins
have it.
And once you know that bats
can echolocate?
It becomes much easier to try
and work out that dolphins and
other creatures do it.
Similarly, once people realize
that robins could sense the
Earth's magnetic field in
again, like the mid
20th century, they could start
looking for the same ability in
other creatures.
Donald Griffon, the bat
echolocation guy talked about
echolocation as being the sort
of magic well, that from which
you could endlessly draw new,
amazing insights.
And, yeah, I think that -- 
I think that's one of the things
that I love about this area 
and one of the things I hope
the -- the book does too 
to people who are interested
in sort of going into this space
you know, I think I talked
about the importance of these
active feats of imagination.
I think that's -- that's true 
for researchers in this field as
well as for everyone else.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: You know, 
the -- the one that really
sticks really too is the story 
of the big whales, the ones that
can sing across entire oceans or
in theory. And that's, you
know, I guess I'll make a point
here that I came into the book
with the impression that some
animals we did know why some
animals responded to the
magnetic field.
And I left the book thinking,
oh, we don't really know why
they do.
>> Ed Yong: Right.
Kirk R. Johnson: But it's a
little bit better known the
story of the great whales and
that their low frequency calls
that can go for thousands of
miles.
>> Ed Yong: Yeah. Yeah.
So Roger Payne and some of his
colleagues and colleagues of his
did these calculations in the
'70s showing that big
whales like blues and fins can
make these very deep infrasonic
calls that travel over vast
distances in the water oceanic
distances. And he was ridiculed
for this idea.
You know, he -- he people just
didn't buy it.
And then once scientists had
access to, like Navy
hydrophones, they realized
that, no, you absolutely can
hear a whale that's calling off
the coast of Europe from the
coast of America.
Now, there's an open question
then about whether the whales
themselves do this right.
Are whales like listening into
each other's calls over those
distances? We know the calls
can travel over those distances.
Are they actually being used
for communication?
It's really hard to -- to answer
that question, especially for an
animal as big and as elusive
and as hard to work with as a
blue whale, the largest animal
that is ever existed.
Right, so how do you -- how do
 you prove that hypothesis?
I think it's really hard, but
at least I think there's -- there's
something magical about even
the possibility of it.
And it makes you think like
even if -- even if you're not
talking about oceanic scales,
even -- even the idea that whales
and great whales can
communicate over huge distances,
it changes your understanding
of what these animals are like.
Like what is a whale pod, like
if you saw one blue whale
swimming alone in the ocean, is
it alone or is it in acoustic
contact with other whales in
far -- far away that you can't
see? So we would define a group
based on something that is
visually coherent, some animals
that appear visually next to
each other, because that's the
sense that we're prioritizing.
But if you think about sound,
then a group doesn't have to be
animals like swimming like
this.
And -- and I think that's one of
the there are lots of concepts
that I think change radically
when you think about
the umwelt concept.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: You're able
to really I mean, you had
a lot of fun with this clearly, 
because you're able to
stretch metaphors that are 
usually one for -- for one sense
and wrap them around other
senses. And there's many little
side things in the book where
you talk about hearing with
your eye or various things where
you're like mixing up the
metaphors. I want to get back to
eyes too, because I'm so used
to having two eyes that I can't
imagine having a lot more eyes.
It turns out a lot of
things do have a lot of eyes.
>> Ed Yong: Oh, eyes? 
Yeah, I think so.
The vision chapter.
It was actually quite difficult
to write because, you know, a
lot of people I mean, not
everyone has sight, but for
those who do, it is a very
important, very primary sense.
And yet, as you say, sites
still manifest in very, very
different ways in other
creatures.
We are quite unusual in that we
have two eyes.
They're both forward facing.
They're both on our head.
None of these things need to be
true in other animals.
Starfish have eyes at the tips
of their arms.
Scallops have rows of eyes up
to 100, up to a few hundred,
around their edge edges of
their shells.
There are, you know, eyes come
in such an immense variety.
And that's just like the number
and location.
Right? Then there's -- there's
ways of distributing functions
that we all have in just our
two eyes across different eyes.
So jumping spiders have four
pairs of eyes, two pairs face
forward. So there's two big
ones in the middle and then two
small ones on the side.
The big ones in the middle do
acute vision and probably colour
the ones just on the right side
of them do movement.
So if you block those two eyes,
the spider can't track an object
moving in front of it.
Which is so weird because I
track movement and do colour and
do focus vision with my eyes
because I only have two.
But if you have more then you
can distribute the labor among
different organs.
And how does that work?
I have no idea.
It also gets weirder when you
think about the creatures that
have like very simple nervous
systems.
So I said a scallop has, you
know, dozens of eyes around its
shell. Does that mean that it
has this beautiful wraparound
image? Like, could it see, like
all of you here, but also like
the sign to the side or like
Kirk?
Probably not.
It seems its nervous system is
incredibly simple.
Its brain is very simple.
It's -- one of the scientists I
talked to, Donald Spicer, who
studies scallops, was saying
that his views that probably the
information that the eyes give
to the animal's brain is
incredibly simple.
It's not an image.
It's more just something is
happening here in this part of
space. And that kind of seeing
without scenes is also I mean --
it's basically unimaginable.
I don't know what it's like to
imagine it.
The metaphor I use in the book
is that imagine you have a
security guard with a bank of
monitors in front of them.
Each monitor is connected to
actually pretty good camera,
a motion sensitive camera.
But the camera isn't actually
feeding any images to the
monitor. It's just saying
something is happening here you
should pay attention to like
your 5:00.
That seems to be what the
experience might be like.
But again, I really struggle 
to -- to get and it's ironic.
I really struggle to get my
like my mind to imagine what a
scallop might be experiencing.
And, you know, I don't think
that I'd ever in my life thought
that I would be really
struggling to -- to empathize
with a scallop. But--but here--
here we are.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: Well, 
you know, many of us
last one or two years ago
I saw this film called,
My Octopus Teacher,
which was an odd film, but
at least, an interesting film.
But you kind of run aground on
the octopus, definitely
such a different kind
of cephalopods.
And it seemed like at that
point, it was like you were
struggling to catch various
organisms and worlds, and then
you got to this one and it's
like, wait a minute, this is a
different situation altogether.
>> Ed Yong: Yeah. 
Right.
So the -- the octopus appears 
in the penultimate chapter,
which is how we bring 
information from all of
our senses together.
And, you know, there's a lot of
literature, you know, a lot of
mythology about people being
able to, like, transfer their
consciousness into another
animal.
I'm often asked, like, if you
could inhabit the umwelt of
another creature, what would
you pick?
I think the point of that, the
octopus section is to say that
that wouldn't work because our
experience of the world is
heavily influenced and
completely influenced by our
senses. The way our nervous
system works, the way our bodies
work. So it's not just that the
octopus has a different umwelt.
It's not just that it is
sensing different kinds of
things. It's also that it is
not putting all that
information together in
completely different ways,
you know, it has -- an octopus 
has more neurons in its arms
than in its central head
 and those arms have
a degree of autonomy to them.
You know, they can --
they can do things and perform
actions like reaching out and
bringing objects in without
actually requiring control
from the brain
or even really needing to
bother it.
It's definitely cross-talk
between the two, but there's
also a certain degree of
independence.
So you have this animal with
like a head that has an umwelt
that is -- that is connected to
its two very good eyes.
The rest of the body has its
umwelt that has -- that is
dominated by taste and touch.
And there's some connection
between those two.
But -- but it's not the same as
what we have.
You know, it's -- it's a
completely different kind of
organization. And it's really
hard then to think about the
kind of consciousness that the
results from that.
You know, there's -- there's so
many stories about like octopus
is displaying their
intelligence by finding a crab
in a jar and unscrewing it and
taking the crab out.
To what extent is that
intelligence as we know it?
Because here is a creature
where, like if the arms can act
relatively independently and if
they're doing their own little
explorations, then is that a
sign of like problem solving or
is that the sign of the arms
just kind of going arm
on this -- this new thing?
I think we -- it's really
 hard to say.
And I think part of the
argument here is that everyone's
really fascinated by these big
questions about consciousness
and intelligence and so on.
The senses are like the first
step of that, right?
They are -- they are the basic
they give -- the -- the --
they give all the information 
that --that feeds
into the rest of it.
And we -- we often forget that.
We're often not thinking about
that first step.
And even at that first, there's
so much variety across the
animal kingdom.
>> Kirk R. Johnson: And what
I've managed to do is hog all
of the time with that 
for myself and not leave
a moment for the Q&A because
 I think it's a rare opportunity
to talk to Ed, who is clearly
one of the finest science
writers writing at the present
time, and I urge you all to
purchase his book.
He's signing at 6:30 tonight,
and it's been a real pleasure
to be up here on the stage and
to chat with Ed
and to see all of you.
I want to thank also all
the people that helped make this
happen. It's been an amazing
thing and come again next year
and go buy the book 
and read it. [Applause]