How Animal Senses Reveal Hidden Realms with Ed Yong

Summary

Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Episode Summary

Title: How Animal Senses Reveal Hidden Realms with Ed Yong
Host: Sharon McMahon
Guest: Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
Release Date: June 2, 2025
Platform: Audacy Podcast

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Introduction

In this captivating episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting, host Sharon McMahon welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ed Yong to delve into the extraordinary world of animal senses. Drawing from his acclaimed book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Yong unravels the myriad ways animals perceive their environments, vastly different from human experiences.

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The Genesis of An Immense World

Sharon expresses her admiration for Yong's work, noting, “How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us” (04:22), highlighting her own curiosity about animal navigation and perception. Ed Yong shares the inspiration behind his book, crediting his marine biologist wife for suggesting the exploration of animal sensory worlds during a creative drought. He states, “This question of what other animals think, how they experience the world, I think touches on big questions about consciousness, about subjective experiences” (04:52).

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Unique Animal Senses

Yong elaborates on several extraordinary senses that animals possess, which remain inaccessible to humans:

• Magnetic Sensing in Birds and Whales: Yong explains how songbirds and sea turtles navigate vast distances by sensing the Earth's magnetic field, functioning as a “living compass inside their bodies” (07:39). He cites a study linking solar storms to increased whale strandings, suggesting whales’ reliance on magnetic fields for migration (22:17).

• Electric Field Detection: Many aquatic creatures like sharks and platypuses can sense electric fields generated by living organisms, a sense entirely absent in humans.

• Enhanced Whisker Sensitivity in Seals: Seals use their whiskers to detect minute water movements left by fish, enabling precise hunting abilities invisible to the human eye.

• Ultraviolet Vision in Animals: Most animals can perceive ultraviolet light, revealing patterns and markings on flowers that are invisible to humans. Yong illustrates this with sunflowers, which appear uniformly yellow to us but display a bright ultraviolet bullseye to pollinators (11:02).

Notable Quote:

“Most animals can see ultraviolet. So we're actually very strange in not being able to see this color.” – Ed Yong (11:02)

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The Complexity of Canine Senses

The discussion transitions to dogs and their remarkable sense of smell. Sharon posits that dogs likely do not have the same value judgments about smells as humans, preventing their sensory world from being overwhelmingly negative. Yong agrees, stating, “Dogs do exist in this wonderful rich world of smell that we not only don't access but also I think don't really respect enough.” (18:37)

He elaborates on the difference between human and canine olfactory experiences, emphasizing that dogs use their sense of smell actively for exploration and social interaction, akin to humans using social media.

Notable Quote:

“A dog sniffing patches of pee on the sidewalk is like me checking my Instagram feed.” – Ed Yong (19:33)

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Echolocation and Navigation in Dolphins and Whales

Yong discusses the sophisticated echolocation abilities of dolphins, comparing them to a combination of hearing and touch. He describes experiments where dolphins could detect minute differences in objects that humans couldn't perceive, demonstrating an “absurdly precise” sense (37:17).

When addressing whale migration, Yong mentions the possibility that whales use both magnetic sensing and low-frequency sound waves to navigate the vast oceans, although definitive evidence remains elusive due to the challenges of studying these magnificent creatures (22:17).

Notable Quote:

“Sound tends to reflect off when it encounters changes in density... a dolphin echolocating on a human likely can sense its skeleton.” – Ed Yong (31:36)

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Balance and Equilibrium in Animals

Sharon brings up the agility of cats, marveling at their ability to right themselves mid-fall. Yong introduces the concept of equilibrioception, the sense of balance, housed in the inner ear. He notes the scarcity of research on this sense across different species but provides intriguing examples:

• Cheetahs’ Superior Balance: Their incredible speed necessitates an exceptional sense of balance.
• Dolphins’ Minimal Need for Balance: Living in a three-dimensional aquatic environment reduces the importance of a balance sense compared to terrestrial animals.

Notable Quote:

“Equilibrioception... it's a sense of balance that tells me if I am the right way up.” – Ed Yong (26:44)

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Favorite Animal Senses Explored

When asked about his favorite animal sense researched for the book, Yong chooses dolphin echolocation. He is fascinated by its precision and the active role it plays in navigating and understanding the underwater world. He recounts an experiment where a dolphin could distinguish between two nearly identical cylinders, detecting minute differences unseen by humans (37:17).

Notable Quote:

“Echolocation is actually a little bit like a weird version of touch... it's an active way of exploring the world.” – Ed Yong (40:13)

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Dogs’ Recognition Beyond Faces

Sharon references a recent study indicating that dogs recognize their owners not by facial features but through scent, shape, and sound. Yong concurs, explaining that while humans rely heavily on vision, dogs prioritize their olfactory senses, often simultaneously sniffing and looking at their owners without humans realizing the depth of their recognition (41:11).

Notable Quote:

“When we dog sit other dogs, dogs will react if we walk past someone who is the kind of vague shape of their owner, but they won't react in quite the same way when they get close enough to smell or hear.” – Ed Yong (41:09)

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Conclusion and Reflections

Sharon shares her personal connection to Yong's book, expressing how it instills a profound sense of wonder about the unseen aspects of the natural world. Both agree that the mystery surrounding animal senses enhances the allure and appreciation of wildlife, making the exploration of these hidden realms all the more fascinating.

Notable Quote:

“What an immense world... there’s so much that I cannot even perceive that tiny little ants are out here doing stuff that I can't even imagine.” – Sharon McMahon (43:58)

Ed Yong concludes by emphasizing the importance of continuing to explore and question the complexities of animal perception, even if some mysteries may remain unsolved.

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About Ed Yong's An Immense World

An Immense World has been lauded as one of the New York Times' 10 Best Books of the year. Yong's meticulous research and eloquent storytelling offer readers a gateway into understanding the profound and varied sensory experiences of animals, challenging the limitations of human perception.

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Recommendations:

• For Animal Lovers: Dive into An Immense World to uncover the astonishing ways animals perceive their surroundings.
• For Curious Minds: Explore the intersections of science, philosophy, and consciousness through Yong's insightful narratives.

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Final Thoughts: This episode is a treasure trove for anyone fascinated by the natural world and eager to expand their understanding of animal cognition and sensory perception. Sharon McMahon and Ed Yong deliver an enlightening conversation that not only informs but also inspires a deeper appreciation for the hidden realms that surround us.

Transcript

[Sharon McMahon]

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[Ed Yong]

Sharon.

[Sharon McMahon]

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

[Unknown]

Well, anybody who has followed me for any period of time knows that I am an animal lover. And I actually had your book, An Immense World added to my cart in pre order. I saw it coming out and I was like, that is a book for me. I absolutely loved it. It was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times. That's a huge achievement. First of all, congratulations on that. And the subtitle of the book is How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. And first of all, the book is so aptly titled. It absolutely piqued my interest, made me very curious about what it was going to be about. And the book did not disappoint. I have often wondered, and I think this is like a normal human curiosity, how do animals do things like, well, I'm a salmon and I will be returning to the stream where I hatched. Like, how do you find it? How does a bird decide, you know, I'm gonna migrate like, 3,000 miles?

[Ed Yong]

Right, right. Very casual.

[Unknown]

Yeah. It's so super easy. Like, while the rest of us humans need a computer to, to say, turn left at the light. How does a whale swim underwater from Alaska to Hawaii, you know, like, and just do that every year, Repeat, repeat yearly. Clearly, there is an immense world around us that humans cannot experience. And I'm so curious. How did you become interested in this topic?

[Ed Yong]

Oh, so, I mean, I've been fascinated by animals since I was very, very young. You know, I was the kid who watch. Watched nature documentaries and insisted that my parents take me to zoos. I, you know, read a lot of wildlife books. So I've always been interested in animals. And when I started writing about Science Professionally about 15 years ago, I wrote about a wide number of topics. But, you know, how animals behave, how they sense. The world was always chief among them. So this has been a passion of mine for a long time. But the real idea for the book actually came from my wife. She was a marine biologist by training. She did her graduate work, work on the vision of fish that live in coral reefs. Like, what kinds of things they might see. And in 2018, in a rainy winter's day, we were sitting in a cafe and I was, you know, morosely saying that I had no ideas for a second book. And that my well of ideas had run dry. And this, this was it for me. And she, she very calmly suggested that this wasn't true and that maybe the sensory worlds of other animals was an area that was rich for exploration. And she was right. And I think she was right for a bunch of different reasons. It is an area full of fascinating science, but it's also, I think, deeply, philosophically rich. This question of what other animals think, how they experience the world, I think touches on big questions about consciousness, about subjective experiences. And I think, as you say, it is a thing that I think a lot of people idly wonder about. It's not something that touches a lot of us in our day to day experience, but I think it is a thing that a lot of people have wondered about. And I like that the book seems to have resonated with that particular frequency, that little kindling of curiosity in a lot of people who read it.

[Unknown]

I am somebody who has always had sort of a lot of wonder for the natural world. And this absolutely heightened that I just felt I found myself being like, dang, that is so interesting. So can you talk to us a little bit? You know, of course humans know what our senses are. We know how we experience things. Humans know that things like our sense of smell is very intimately tied to our memories. Of course we know how we experience the world. And most animals also have senses like smell and sight, although not all of them, some of them similar to ours. But yet there are many ways that animals perceive the world that humans have seemingly no capacity or very limited capacity to tap into. What are some of the ways that animals perceive the world that are different than ours?

[Ed Yong]

So there are several entire senses that we don't have access to. So you talked about birds migrating over long distances. So songbirds migrate partly with vision, which we do have, but also by sensing the Earth's magnetic field field. It's as if they have a living compass inside their bodies that allows them to point in exactly the right direction, even when all other landmarks are obscured. The same is true for things like sea turtles, which use a very similar magnetic sense to navigate around entire oceans. And this is a skill that by all accounts, humans do not have. Similarly, we do not sense the electric fields that living things generate. So all living things, especially in water, produce very minute electricity. Electric fields, we can't sense these, but a lot of fish can. A lot of fish produce their own electricity and can sense the electric fields generated by other things. Sharks, platypuses. Actually, quite a lot of animals can sense Electric fields. And then there are variants of senses that we have that animals take to a ludicrous degree. So if I'm swimming in water and someone is swimming next to me and kicks their feet, I can probably feel the currents produced by their legs. But that pales in comparison next to what a seal can do. A seal can detect the tracks left behind by swimming fish. You might not even think that swimming fish leave behind a track, right? That's a bizarre thing to think about water. But a fish, as it swims, creates a wake of swirling currents of turbulence that. That lasts for maybe up to a few minutes. And a seal with its whiskers can detect those tracks that are invisible to us and use it to follow a fish with incredible precision, to take vision. For those of us who can see, vision is a primary sense. It is our dominant sense. It is the sense that fills our culture, our language. A lot of our words for understanding the world, to see one's point of view, for example, are all based on visual metaphors. But our way of seeing the world is kind of weird. We have two eyes. They are on the front of our heads, and they point forwards. These are actually kind of weird things for the animal kingdom. They're animals with eight eyes, hundreds of eyes. A simple bird take a duck or a pigeon has eyes on the sides of their head, so they can see with almost a full arc around them. A duck sitting on a pond can see the entirety of the sky without needing to move its head at all. And that makes its sense of vision very different to humans. Similarly, there are other creatures that can see colors that are invisible to us. So just beyond the violet end of the rainbow lies ultraviolet, a color that we can't see. But ultraviolet is incredibly common in nature, and it is actually incredibly common among animal. In fact, most animals that can see can see ultraviolet. So we're actually very strange in not being able to see this color. And because we can't see this color, our view of nature is kind of weird. If you look at, say, a sunflower, like, what color is a sunflower?

[Unknown]

It's yellow.

[Ed Yong]

It's yellow, right? And it's kind of uniformly yellow. But if you can see ultraviolet, a sunflower has a bright bullseye of ultraviolet around its center. And those kinds of markings are really common on lots of flowers. And they're really visible to birds and to insects. So things that pollinate flowers see these extra symbols, these markings that guide them to flowers, that draw their attention, that are invisible to us. This all speaks to the core premise of the book, which is that every creature, humans included, for all our vaunted intelligence and abilities, are only really perceiving a very thin sliver of the fullness of reality. There is so much around us that we don't even perceive, let alone think about.

[Unknown]

It just makes the world that much more interesting, as if the world wasn't interesting to begin with. Knowing that this is out there, knowing that we are only experiencing a fraction of what actually exists in our immense world. I just find that so cool. Let me ask you a couple questions that I have long wondered about. Okay. We all know that dogs smell extremely well.

[Ed Yong]

Yes.

[Unknown]

My experience with smell is that most smells that are, like, relatively strong generate an immediate judgment in the human brain. It's a good smell. It smells so good in here. It's a bad smell. Like, what is that? You know what I mean? Like, we immediately make a value judgment about if something smells good or. Or bad. You either love the smell of gasoline or you hate it. If you are a dog and your sense of smell is your primary sense, and you smell so much more and so much better than humans do. And I. First of all, I think it's really fascinating that dogs can smell things like, oh, you're about to have a seizure, but it can't be. This is my hypothesis, and you tell me if I'm right or wrong. It can't be that dogs have the same value judgments about smells that humans do, because otherwise your experience of the world would be probably overwhelmingly bad.

[Ed Yong]

Right? So, okay. There's several interesting things to unpack here. The first is that actually our sense of smell. It is absolutely true that smell produces very, very strong and immediate emotional reactions to. People often say that just neurologically, just in terms of the wiring, Smell is the sense that has the shortest route to the brain. There's just, like, more direct connections there. And I think that's part of it. But that kind of immediacy and that strong emotional reaction can be misleading because it makes us think that smell. That a lot of our reactions to smell are very innate and universal. And actually, that isn't true. Smell is profoundly influenced by culture and by learning. So most things actually don't smell bad to, like, babies. Babies learn that some certain things smell bad because they are bad. And actually, there are very few things that possibly nothing that smells universally bad or good across human cultures. So the fact that we have strong emotional reactions to smell doesn't quite reflect some universality. It really reflects that it's very, very easy to learn about smell. And to attach emotional reactions to them. I think the same is likely true for something like a dog even, which exists in a much, much more smell oriented world. And when you see a dog reacting to certain things, I think it reflects the fact that dogs don't exist in human culture. Right. Or at least like, we can train them to avoid certain things. Right. But this is why, like, dogs will sniff poop, Dogs will sniff each other's pee. Like, my dog loves the scent of earthworms in particular, like, if he is rolling down on something in the street, like, 90% chance he has found an earthworm somewhere on the pavement and we haven't seen it yet.

[Unknown]

Like, yes.

[Ed Yong]

So weird. But I think that it is certainly true that there are a lot of things that most humans would find repulsive that dogs don't. Right. And poop is the obvious example of that. I've heard from dog scientists that citrus smells are often off putting to dogs. Like, not universally so. But that is an example of something that, like, I think most humans would be like, oh, like lemony scents are great. Dogs not so keen.

[Sharon McMahon]

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[Ed Yong]

Hi, I'm Josh. And I'm Nicole and we're the hosts of the podcast A Hot Dog is a Sandwich where we break down the Internet's silliest and and most controversial food debates. This week we sat down with Max Miller from Tasting History to decide where.

[Unknown]

We think would be the best place.

[Ed Yong]

And time to travel back to just for the food. From the Summer of love to 19th century England, whose destination was the best in this culinary time travel battle? Listen and find out. It's available now on the Odysee app.

[Unknown]

And wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sharon McMahon]

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[Ed Yong]

I think that the real point here is that dogs do exist in a very, very different sensory world than we do. One that is dominated by smell compared to the one that sighted humans have, which is dominated by vision. And that I think also dogs use smell in a very, very different way. Like it's, it's partly that their noses are just better. So they have, they have more hardware, they have just more of everything that's in our nose. More of the receptors, more of the neurons, more smell related genes, they just have more of all of it. But also they're just using their nose all the time. In the main, humans don't do like smell is sort of a, a passive thing. You know, I, I'm, I right, like I, I'm not going around sniffing a sidewalk, I'm not going around sniffing other people. And I think partly because of the hot. So partly because of the hardware and partly because it's the, of the way it's used. Dogs do exist in this wonderful rich world of smell that we not only don't access but also I think don't really respect enough. I write in the book that one thing I see in a lot of dog runners and I totally get it, is people will pull their dogs along as they walk because they see a walk as a means of exercise or a means of travel from point A to point b. But for a dog who wants to sniff, a walk is an act of exploration. It's a little adventure. They get to sense what has changed in this environment. I walk my dog three times a day. To my eyes, very little has changed in the blocks we walk along. It's just boring. But to his nose, a lot has changed. A dog he might know has peed on that patch of grass. What is that dog up to? How healthy is that dog? What has that dog been eating? So it's not just an active venture. It's also a very social activity. I often compare my dog sniffing patches of pee on the sidewalk to me checking my Instagram feed. It's his way of catching up on how the other individuals he knows have been up to, even though they're not right next to him at the time. It is a profoundly social thing, and it is a social experience that is predicated on smell.

[Unknown]

It's such an interesting point that you brought up that so much of human perception of smell is based on our culture, right? And where you grow up, the foods you grow up eating. And so those neurons then wire and fire together for the rest of your life. Very likely. Whereas dogs don't grow up in that same human cultural experience where they are like, it just reminds me of a campfire in September. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't have that same human emotional neuron component. It's such an interesting thing to think about. Do whales migrate with smell and sensing the earth's magnetic fields? Because this is one of the other things that I've been curious about. You mentioned that bird migration, One of the things they use is vision. But underwater is dark.

[Ed Yong]

It is dark. It is dark. You can't see very far.

[Unknown]

And you don't have landmarks of like, oh, coming up on the shores of the Atlantic, you know, like, eight. You don't have that same ability to use vision when you're swimming in the waters of Alaska. How do, like, gray whales migrate from Mexico all the way up to Seattle? Or humpbacks migrate from Alaska to Hawaii and they're back again every year?

[Ed Yong]

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that the answer is almost certainly that they use a bunch of senses, and a lot of them work pretty well underwater and over long ranges. So smell is certainly one of them, Although I can't say that for sure. The ability to sense the earth's Magnetic field. There is some really interesting evidence from actually, a very, very recent study from only about, like, three years or so ago, that whales might be able to sense the Earth's magnetic field, too. Now, the reason we know that things like songbirds can do this is that people did experiments where they put songbirds in cages, put the cages in a completely dark, sealed room, and then put, like little ink pads at the bottom cages, so the birds could hop on the ink pads and then would try and hop out of the cages. And every time they did that, they would step on, like, a piece of blotting paper that was lining the edge of the cage. And you could see very clearly that the birds were always trying to hop in the same direction, like they knew which way to go, even though they couldn't use any other sense. And if you put them in a chamber that allows you to alter the magnetic field, then they will hop in a new direction. So great experiments, very clear. You can't really do that with a whale.

[Unknown]

No, you can't keep them in captivity.

[Ed Yong]

You cannot. There's not really an ink pad large enough for it wouldn't work. So every now and then, the sun throws a massive hissy fit and does what's called a solar storm. And it produces a ton of radiation that, as a byproduct, messes with the Earth's magnetic field. And so you might think that if whales are navigating, using that magnetic field, on days when there's a lot of solar storm activity, they're more likely to go off course. And that is exactly right. So gray whales on days with lots of solar storm activity are four times more likely to strand on beaches than on days without solar storm activity. Now, that's not a smoking gun, right? There's maybe other ways of explaining that, but I think it's really compelling and I think it's probably the best evidence we'll get, because, as we said, whales are really, really difficult to study. So that might be part of it. I think that they also use sound in really interesting ways. So we know that a lot of animals like bats and dolphins can navigate using sound. So they produce high pitched calls and then they listen out for the rebounding echoes and they use the timing between the call and the echo to judge the distance between themselves and the objects around them. This is called echolocation. Now, big whales do not make high pitched calls. In fact, they make quite the opposite. They make very low pitch calls that are too low for us to hear. So they're not quite echolocating. In the same way. But it's also possible that those calls, which do travel over immense distances, might be used for navigation. A whale might be able to produce them, listen for an echo, and use that to kind of map the topography of the ocean. Do they do this? Well, we don't know for sure, but certainly human scientists can use whale calls in this way. Like we can use whale calls to map the seismic terrain of the ocean. And if we can do it, I think there's a reasonable chance that they can too. We can make a lot of educated guesses, but especially with creatures that are hard to study, that are very big, that are very intelligent, raising ethical questions about what kinds of research you can do. We might never know. But I do think it is kind of wonderful to make the attempt to try and think about these questions, even if you will never fully understand what the answer is.

[Unknown]

Totally. I wondered too about this reputation of cats that have, you know, cats have nine lives. They can always rescue themselves from weird situations. Or if you drop a cat upside down like this, they will always right themselves for sure. You know what I mean? Like, they're. I don't know what the explanation for that is, but there has to be some sense that we are not aware of. You know, if you think about a human, like, I'm going to drop you off a building back first. Humans are not like, oh, quick, let me rotate so that I land in a more advantageous position and I'll land on my feet and it'll be fine. It's just weird to think about. Animals are so fascinating and weird.

[Ed Yong]

So this is a really interesting question because the sense that's at play here is one that we also have and that people very rarely think of. So, you know, we think there are five senses, and we think that because of Aristotle and. And he was wrong. There are more than that. One of the ones we'd never think about is equilibrioception. It's a sense of balance, right? So it's the sense that tells me if I close my eyes and without any other cues that I am the right way up and. Or that if I was doing a handstand, I can't do a handstand, but let's pretend that I could, that I would be upside down. That sense lies in the inner ear. You know, it's why if you, if you spin around a lot, you get dizzy, equilibrium, reception. There are a few senses like this that are so kind of fundamental that it's actually hard to find research on it. And I Searched. You know, I was thinking about doing a whole chapter on this, but there's just not enough. There was just wasn't enough to write about. Few people study it, few people study it in other animals. But you would think that it's actually a very rich vein for study because as you say, let's think there are things like cats which have this incredible sense of balance, which can write, you know, landed their feet from a fall. How is a cat's sense of equilibrioception different from a human's? There are a few things that I found on this that weren't in the book but that are like little interesting tidbits. So like there was one study suggesting that cheetahs have a really, really good sense of equilibrioception because not only are there cats, but they are very, very fast cats. There was one that suggested that maybe things like dolphins have a terrible sense of equilibria reception because they frankly don't need it. Like, if you exist in this completely three dimensional world where you can move in any direction and where just a sense of, of am I the right way up? Maybe doesn't matter that much.

[Unknown]

Right? We absolutely know if we're right side up. If you go on a roller coaster that takes you upside down, that produces a very strong feeling in your body, very strong feeling of like, oh my God, like I'm upside down. Being upside down actually can feel a little panic inducing because you know it's wrong, it's wrong that I'm upside down right now, but that you're, you're absolutely right. That, that would not serve a dolphin. You, you wouldn't want them to be like, oh no, I'm upside down. You know, when they're, when they're constantly moving so agilely and powerfully through the water, being upside down would sometimes be useful.

[Ed Yong]

Yep, I agree.

[Unknown]

Oh my goodness. What is your favorite animal sense that you researched for this book?

[Ed Yong]

This is always a very hard question for me to answer because there are so many and it's like, you know, it's like forcing you to choose between all of your babies.

[Unknown]

Okay, how about this? If you could have one of them.

[Ed Yong]

So when I think about this, I try and think about something that I think you would have an interesting conscious experience of and that would give you a very different kind of conscious experience of what you have. Because when we talk about birds navigating with the Earth's magnetic field, it's not entirely clear to me that it's like a bird is flying along and going Ha ha. Over there, Right? Like, what is that feeling? Is it just a kind of a pull? Does it have like a kind of heads up display? I don't really know. I don't really know. So the one I tend to think of is echolocation as practiced by a dolphin. Because underwater echolocation, the ability to use sound to navigate, has some really interesting properties that it doesn't in air. First, it works over much longer distances because sound travels further in the water without losing energy. So a bat trying to echolocate can only really do so for maybe like max, a dozen feet or so in front of it. A dolphin can do it for like meters, maybe kilometers. And that would be astonishing to me, you know, like to have that much of a sense in water. Whereas you say like vision, really not very good. I think that would transform your experience of being underwater and underwater echolocation. So sonar also allows you to peer inside a lot of objects. It works a little bit like a medical scanner because sound tends to reflect off when it encounters changes in density. And because like our flesh is about the same density as water, our skin, our surface of our body is going to reflect much less sound than say, our lungs or our skeleton. So a dolphin echolocating on a human likely can sense its skeleton. A dolphin echolocating on a fish can sense the swim bladder inside the fish, the air filled organ that allows the fish to control its buoyancy.

[Sharon McMahon]

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[Unknown]

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[Sharon McMahon]

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[Unknown]

So if you you are tired of.

[Sharon McMahon]

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[Ed Yong]

Element of pairing inside an object that I think this sense gives you that most of the ones we have do not. And then I think finally, like dolphin echolocation is just kind of absurdly precise. It is almost more precise than human vision is, which is like kind of shocking to me. Like, one of the scientists I spoke to talks about this experiment where he worked with a false killer whale, a kind of dolphin, and he presented it with two cylinders. Her job was to try and tell the difference between the two cylinders and she would very reliably do this. Sometimes the cylinders would fill with like water versus alcohol or they would be slightly different in size. But there was one experiment where both the cylinders were supposedly exactly the same. And the dolphin was cueing the researchers that like, no, these are different. And they were like, no, these are the same. We ordered them to be the same. And they went back to the machinists that created the cylinders who checked them and found that actually they were different. Like one of them had like a tiny taper at one end. So it was like millimeters narrower in one point than the other cylinder. The humans looking at these things absolutely could not tell the difference. No dolphin totally could.

[Unknown]

That's amazing.

[Ed Yong]

Yeah. That just blows my mind.

[Unknown]

That is so cool. Yeah. Have you heard those stories just anecdotally of a dolphin trainer at a zoo? There was one who was pregnant and the dolphin could absolutely tell that she was pregnant and they had a relationship with each other. And the dolphin was constantly like nosing her belly. Apparently this dolphin knew she was pregnant before she did. I'm sure there's a smell aspect involved. I know that there's hormonal shifts with pregnancy.

[Ed Yong]

I think that that feels to be like just such an echolocation thing. Like I said, the dolphins can peer inside you. They absolutely can sense fetuses in pregnant people. Like, I would be sure shocked if they couldn't do that. So then the other skill that they have, and actually quite a lot of animals have with their respective senses, which I think is incredible, is thing called cross modal recognition, which is just a fancy way for saying you sense a Thing with one sense, and then you can recognize it with another. So I'm holding up a battery, right? Like, if I closed my eyes and I didn't know this was a battery, I could run it through my fingers and I could know, okay, it's a cylindrical object. It's got a little bumpy bit on one end. Right. I build up a representation of the object in my mind, and I opened my eyes and if there was a bunch of crap on the table in front of me, I could go, well, this is the thing that I just touched. That's actually quite a sophisticated skill. And a lot of animals can do it with senses that seem weird to us. So a dolphin can echolocate on an object that it cannot see and then recognize that same object, even if it was presented, like, on a computer screen. Which, again, is wild to me, because when you think about that, echolocation is just a souped up form of hearing. Right. Like if I heard the sound of a piano, for example, I am not going to create the representation of a piano in my mind. Right. There's nothing there that cues me to the nature of the thing creating the sound. And I think it shows us something special about echolocation, that it's not actually just a souped up form of hearing. It's actually a little bit like a weird version of touch. Like, it is an active way of exploring the world. It's almost as if the dolphin was reaching out with these invisible hands and grasping an object in front of it, exploring it, feeling it, getting its shape, and then creating this representation, which then translates to its eyes. You know, I think it, again, speaks to the very different nature of some of these senses and the different things that you can use that you can do with something like hearing. It doesn't have to be a thing where, like, I'm just sitting here and passively receiving sound into my ears. It can be a very active sense with which you explore the world.

[Unknown]

That's absolutely fascinating. That's such a great example that you just gave that as a human with a very sophisticated mammalian brain, you can close your eyes, feel an object, and then potentially, potentially recognize it on a desk in front of you out of many objects, if there were not too many objects that were similar. Right, right. Like if you have a Lego, a battery and a cup of coffee, easy. But what you're saying, like with the dolphins, is that they could perceive the differences between two batteries, the two batteries that seem identical to you. But actually this one, the bump, is 1/16th of a millimeter larger at the end than the other one. That's incredible. Have you seen the study that found that dogs actually do not recognize people's faces?

[Ed Yong]

No, I haven't seen that.

[Unknown]

So it was recent and it was trying to see. Do dogs actually recognize their owners? And of course they do recognize their owners, but they don't recognize their owners because of their owner's face. They use their owner's smell. They use their owner's shape, their overall body shape. Like, you're yay high and yay wide, and they use your sound the way that you sound, but they do not recognize you. Like, if you do nothing else but just put your, like, disembodied face on a computer screen, there is no recognition from dogs. They don't say, that's Ed. I'd know him anywhere.

[Ed Yong]

Totally makes sense. I've not seen this specific study you mentioned, but, like, absolutely checks out. Given what we know about dogs, I think dog owners will be kind of familiar with this. When we dog sit other dogs, dogs, those dogs will tend to, like, react if we walk past someone who is the kind of vague shape of their owner. Like, they'll be like, is that mum? But they won't react in quite the same way when they get, like, close enough to smell or to hear. I think that it's very, very easy to believe that dogs recognize your face because I think, again, we're so primed to think about vision. But, like, I come home, my dog is already at the door. He is wagging excitedly, and he is staring me in the face. But because we're visually oriented, we look at his eyes, we make eye contact. But what we miss is, of course, in front of the eyes is his nose. Right. So inevitably, as he's looking at me, he's also sniffing me. And that's the important bit. And I think that is the bit that we miss. It's a great example, and it's just one of many ways in which we misconstrue what animals around us are doing. And even the animals that we spend the most amount of time with. I spend every day with my dog, and I still don't fully know what's going on inside his head, which I think is kind of cool.

[Unknown]

I agree. The fact that we can't know the answers to some things, it just makes it that much more interesting sometimes.

[Ed Yong]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

You know, like the movie up, where the dogs may wear a collar that just says what they're thinking, you know, and what. What they're thinking is, I smell you. I just met you and I love you. Won't you be my best friend? In some ways it's actually, it's actually more fun that we don't know.

[Ed Yong]

I agree.

[Unknown]

Oh, Ed. I absolutely loved An Immense World. I absolutely read it and felt like, what an immense world. You know, what an immense world. And it made me feel like almost like that sense, you know, when you're looking at pictures of space, you know, the NASA picture, the James Webb telescope, where you feel like, dang, I'm small, you know, like that we're so tiny on this earth. And in some ways it produced the same feelings in me. Like there's so much that I cannot even perceive that tiny little ants are out here doing stuff that I can't even imagine. It just really produced that feeling of just wonder at what is all around us that we can't even sense.

[Ed Yong]

I'm really glad that was the intention, that was my hope and I'm glad it worked.

[Unknown]

It did. Thank you so much for being here today. I loved the book and I loved it chatting with you.

[Ed Yong]

Thank you much. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[Unknown]

Ed Yong's book An Immense World was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the year. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. This book is going to blow your mind.

[Sharon McMahon]

If you are at all interested in.

[Unknown]

The natural world, if you love animals, if you love understanding the how the universe functions, oh my goodness, you are.

[Sharon McMahon]

Going to get so much out of reading it. So pick up a copy wherever you buy books. Thank you so much for listening to. Here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much? I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is is Melanie Buck Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.