David Eagleman

Imagine you've got this long snout with 200 million scent receptors in it, and everything for you is about smell, and you've got these wet nostrils that attract and trap, you know, scent molecules, and you've got floppy ears to kick up more scent.

Everything for you is about scent.

And what it would be like if one day you looked at your human master and you thought, what is it like to have the pitiful little nose of a human?

You might imagine erroneously that there's sort of this missing 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 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 studying 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 50, 100 years when someone realizes, oh my gosh, it turns out antelope are picking up on this thing that we didn't realize was a thing.