David Eagleman

You might imagine erroneously,

that there's sort of this missing, you know, black hole of smell.

And we all realize we have this missing smell, but of course we're all trapped inside of our own umwelt.

And so we think, oh yeah, I've got a great umwelt.

I'm detecting everything out there.

We don't realize typically that there's so much that we could be sensing.

Now, lots of animals have magnetoreception, which means they're picking up on the magnetic field of the earth and

And that's how they navigate.

That's how they know north and south.

So insects, birds, they've all got this.

Turns out cows have good magnetoreception as well.

There's, you know, some animals see in the infrared range.

So rattlesnakes, for example, they have these heat pits and they're picking up on infrared radiation.

Others like honeybees see in the ultraviolet range.

These are things that are just totally invisible to us.

We don't pick this up at all.

And I've been stunning this for many years because I'm fascinated by the idea that there may be things that animals are picking up on that

We can't even get, we're not even going to know for the next, you know, 50, 100 years when someone realizes, oh my gosh, it turns out, you know, antelope are picking up on this thing that we didn't realize was the thing.

So when you really study the biology across the kingdom, you find that there's lots of information out there and we are extremely limited.

And I think this is a very counterintuitive thing to think that your biology actually constrains your perception of reality.