David Eagleman

Yeah, it's, yeah.

Cool.

Well, the easiest way to think about the umwelt is that looking across the animal kingdom.

So, you know, for a tick, for example, all it can detect is temperature and body odor.

That's its only signaling mechanisms.

And so its world is built out of that.

Or for the blind echolocating bat, its world is built out of these echoing sound signals.

Let's out a chirp and it gets an echo back.

And that's how it figures out the three-dimensional structure of the cave it's flying through.

Or for the black ghost knife fish, it has electrical fields around it, and it's detecting when that gets perturbed by, let's say, a rock or some predator there.

And those are the only signals that it has that it can pick up on from the world.

And so that's this concept of the umwelt, which is, you know, that's how it constructs its reality.

And what I've always found interesting is that presumably...

We all, you know, every animal species accepts its reality as the entire reality out there, because why would you stop to ever question or think that maybe there's something beyond what you can detect?

But what you said is also correct.

And this is actually the topic of my next book, which is the difference from human to human has been fascinating to me, just as one example.

Well, an easy example is colorblindness, right?

So let's say...

This person's colorblind, this person's not.

They're actually seeing the scene differently.