Ed Yong

speaker

354 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 25 Sep

Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Vs · How to Smell like a Dog, with Ed Yong · 25 Sep 2025 podcast

becomes hypersensitive to stimuli.

It's as if like I stubbed my toe and suddenly like my elbow feels sore or like my neck kind of hurts.

And it sort of makes sense with the biology of a squid, right?

Here is an animal that the arms are actually relatively short and cannot explore most of the body.

So, you know, maybe it's useful for the squid to just behave as if the whole, you know, something is wrong.

right um octopuses behave in a very different way octopuses have very dexterous long arms that can reach all around the body including inside themselves and if you damage the arm of an octopus it very much knows that like this arm is hurt like it will cradle that injury it will kind of groom it in the way that i would if like my hand was um cut or broken um so you know octopuses

very much can feel pain.

Here are two animals from the same broad group that have, I think, radically different experiences of pain.

I think the same is going to be true across the animal kingdom.

I said earlier that we have the kind of eyes that we need

And I think the same is true for other animals.

They have the kind of sensations of pain that would be useful to them, given their needs, their ecology, their evolutionary history.

No, that's... I accept that.

I'll sign off on that.

I can give examples of,

where learning about the senses of other animals has led to technological advances, has, um, changed our understanding of ourselves.

So, you know, studying the senses of electric fish, um, has been foundational for neuroscience.

But I also don't want to, and I don't want to, because I think it's actually really important to, um,

understand that the main thing we get out of this and the main reason for knowing about any of it is that the lives of animals have value in their own right but i also don't um think that making that specific case that um

basic research into the lives of other creatures and what they're capable of the idea that that will lead to economic or medical benefits

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