Dogs are breaking reality

But we kind of always suspected, right?

I stumbled upon this thing in a Norman Mailer book a few weeks ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Mailer’s in Zaire in the 70’s, capturing the upcoming fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. He spends his off hours getting drunk at the local bars with the other journos. In one such late-night caper, a colleague offers a theory on how dogs see the world.

Photo by James Barker on Unsplash

Humans' primary sense is sight. For us, a person’s existence is binary. They are either here or not here. Dogs' primary sense is smell. So, a person’s existence is on a spectrum. People—and all things—are on a spectrum of here-ness. A person may have just left a room, but they are not gone for the dog because their scent remains.

This also changes their perception of time. The past is present—it can be smelled and felt. For a dog, everything has a manifest shadow. They walk into a room and ‘see’ the present and the recent past in various shades and shadows. They experience it as one thing.

It conjures up the work of Ed Yong, whom I first found in a podcast and have followed ever since. Yong’s science journalism has wrestled with microbiomes and other natural phenomena, but his most recent work on animal senses is mind-bending.

Take fish and sea creatures, who sense their world in 360 degrees and whose primary sense deals with temperature sensation. Their worldview pulses with information on the relative heat of what’s around them, giving them information on prey, predators, and nesting grounds. Think also of birds, who most likely sense the earth's magnetic pull just as strongly as they experience vision.

Vision itself is hardly fixed. How much light can a creature take in? What colours on the spectrum can they sense? Take jumping spiders, for example, who are born with their lifetime’s supply of light-detecting cells, which get more significant and more sensitive with age. “Things would get brighter and brighter,” a scientist told Yong. For a jumping spider, getting older “is like watching the sun rising”.

Reality becomes too slippery to grasp once you mess around with these ideas long enough. Firstly, most of us are under the erroneous presumption that we have five senses. We have a lot more: balance, temperature, digestion and the spooky sense—felt by migraine sufferers worldwide—of a migraine ‘approaching’ (felt because the muscles around the eyes feel a change before the nerves do, as explained here).

What of the supernatural, paranormal, and spooky feelings that almost all humankind has experienced? As Yong himself states, ‘senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations’.

Our limitations, our sensorial bubble, may be defined as an Umwelt—defined and popularized by a Baltic-German zoologist named Jakob von Uexhkull in 1909. An Umwelt is our environment as we experience it. A mosquito or tick may sense mammal blood, body heat, hair touch, and skin smell. It doesn’t care about trees, fruit, or an LED light. This doesn’t stop those things from existing; it’s just not built to sense those things.

Humans are perhaps the only creatures that can attempt to capture what it is like to experience something outside our ordinary senses. We long to be taken outside of ourselves and transcend our sensorial bonds. This is art and culture and spirituality and sex and pain and meditation—the technologies we have found to gain transcendence. The more we do, the less certain ‘truth’ becomes.

Everything is perception. What else could it be?

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I talk more about the Norman Mailer book and other reading in my latest reading vlog. Or you might want to pair this week’s newsletter with other thought-provoking reads, such as this one on attachment theory or this one on geriatric psychology.