Understanding Umwelt

Imagine sitting in an empty room with an elephant, a golden retriever, and a rattlesnake. While you might perceive the sight, sounds, and smells of the room, the other creatures would gauge the experience in remarkably different ways: the elephant would emit low-frequency rumbles that a human ear cannot hear, the snake would sense the body heat of the animals around it, and the retriever would smell the lunch you ate three hours prior.

The German biologist Jakob von Uexküll called the sensory bubble through which we each view the world our umwelt, and science journalist Ed Yong recently published a book that explores the new dimensions that we can experience when we open our eyes to how other humans and animals around us view the world.

What is surprising about the room described above, Yong argues, is that each creature believes that its experience is true and complete: “I’m sitting here in this room, and I don’t feel as if my perception of the world is incomplete," Yong explains. "I’m not sitting here marveling at the gaps in what I’m perceiving. But this feeling of getting everything is such an illusion, and it’s an illusion that every animal shares. It tells us that even the most familiar parts of our world are full of unknowns and extraordinary things.”

If we each believe that our umwelt -- the world we perceive through our senses -- is the full picture of reality, how are we limiting our understanding of the world? How are we limiting the ways we communicate with one another or the means by which we understand God? What if we embraced our senses more fully, recognizing both their enormity and their limitations as we linger a little longer to smell the rain, feel the cool in the air, or watch the leaves as they begin to flutter to the earth?

O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are humans that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

-- Psalm 8:1, 3-4

While our umwelt may limit our reality to the immediacy of what our senses perceive, the Holy Spirit can open us to the mystery of what others perceive, reminding us of the work of God's fingers across the heavens and across the room.

God bless,

Jennie