Ed Yong
Appearances
Something You Should Know
What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
When my dog sniffs a patch of pavement that another dog has peed on, it feels a lot to me like me checking a social media account. That dog starts sensing which other dogs have been around in the neighborhood. It can tell stuff about those dogs health, you know, maybe about what they've been eating recently. It's a it's a social update from a distance.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
And that's just one of many types of information that dogs are getting by sniffing the world around them. I think, you know, by depriving dogs of that, we're really severing them from a really important part of their life. It would be as if you and I went on a hike and every time I stopped to appreciate a beautiful viewpoint, you clapped your hands over my eyes and dragged me along.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
You know, I think that... Dogs, when they are allowed to smell and when they're allowed to have agency over what they choose to sniff, studies have shown that they tend to be happier. They tend to be less anxious, more optimistic. And that's something that dog owners can give to them by thinking about the way they sense the world.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Their hearing is very good. They're very good at localizing sound. So it's telling which direction a sound is coming from. But human hearing is also pretty exceptional. We have very decent hearing. We have good localization. We can hear over a wide range of frequencies. If you want to think about really incredible hearing, though, there are all kinds of examples around the animal kingdom.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
So most birds have much faster hearing than we do. So that is they can resolve very, very fast moving changes in pitch or volume that our ears can't pick up. So if you've ever listened to a songbird singing and wondered and had this strange feeling that there's probably more in that song than we can hear, then you'd be right.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
There are a lot of intricacies in the songs of songbirds that humans just can't pick out. and that they absolutely can. One easy example of this, there is a bird called the whippoorwill that makes a song that sounds to a human like it's got three syllables. It actually has five in it. It's just that they happen too quickly for us to pick out.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
But when a mockingbird mimics the song of a whippoorwill, it gets all five syllables because its hearing is that much faster. And then there are creatures that can hear sounds beyond what we can hear, either ultrasonic calls that are too high-pitched for us to hear or infrasonic calls that are too low-pitched for us to hear. Ultrasonic calls are really good for sensing the environment.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
So bats and dolphins use those to navigate with echolocation in environments that we couldn't navigate in. Infrasonic calls travel over very large distances. So whales, the biggest whales, like blue whales, can use infrasound to communicate over distances of kilometres, miles. Some people argue that they might even be able to hear each other over the span of an entire ocean.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
You know, let's go back to bats. Bats are a very famous example of this because the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote this essay called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? where he argued that
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Even if you imagined yourself using echolocation or flying through the air with leathery wings, you would never really be able to get into the head of a bat to really understand what its subjective experience of echolocation was like. And he's right. You know, echolocation is a strange sense because... bats need to produce sound in order to hear the rebounding echo.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
So by listening for the sounds that they produce, you can get a sense of what information they're trying to wrest from the world. When a bat is scanning open air, it's producing different kinds of sounds than when it is trying to hunt down a fast-moving insect. So by recording the bat's call, you can Kind of get at its intent. You can almost read its mind.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
And yet there is still that gulf that Nagel described where you still don't really know what it is like to be a bat, to get inside the head of a bat, to imagine the conscious experience of a bat. So science and technology can certainly take us a long way, but there is this gulf that we will never be able to cross.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
And the only way to cross it really is by making what one scientist, Alexander Horowitz described to me as informed imaginative leaps.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Yes, I think that's right. You know, my dog and I can communicate. We absolutely can. You know, I can tell him things and he doesn't speak English, but he obeys certain commands. He understands certain bits about my mood. I can do the same. I can take guesses about what he wants. I can tell when he's hungry, what he wants to play.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
And having learned about the senses of animals, I can guess what he gets when he sniffs as we walk, what he might hear, what he might feel. But I don't entirely know. And here is an animal that I love very deeply and that I spend every day with. There's always going to be that gap.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
But even if we'll never fully know the answer, it is glorious and beautiful to try and imagine, to try and cross that gulf, even if we'll never be fully able to. Because trying to do that teaches us so much more about the creatures that we share our lives and our planet with. And it shows our world in a new light.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
When I watch Typo sniffing his way along the street, it changes my understanding of the blocks that I walk along. It changes my sense of how quickly the neighborhood changes, what kinds of information are seeded in the very ground that I don't have access to. It makes the world and it makes my dog feel that much more miraculous to me.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Let me tell you the really cool thing about bees. So bees pollinate flowers, as we know. If you took all the colors of all the flowers in the world and you did an analysis and asked, what kind of eye would be best at seeing these kinds of colors? What kind of color vision would be best at discriminating all the flowers in the world? What you get is something very much like a bee eye.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
It is an eye that has three kinds of color-sensing cells, much like humans do, but that, unlike us, are most sensitive to green, blue, and ultraviolet. You would therefore think that maybe bees have eyes that are really well adapted to seeing flowers, but that's actually completely wrong because bees or insects that gave rise to bees came first and then flowers evolved.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
So what actually happened was that flowers evolved colors that ideally tickle the eyes of bees and other insects. And that's incredible to me because we often think of the senses as these passive receptacles for information, right? Like I'm sitting here, light is entering my eyes, sound is entering my ears. I'm not doing anything. They feel like they receive.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
But in doing that, the senses also shape the world around us in profound ways. The eyes of bees and other insects determined the kinds of colours that flowers eventually evolved. So beauty, as we know it, is not just in the eye of the beholder. It arises because of that eye.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
We cannot see ultraviolet light, which the vast majority of animals with eyes can see. We see very many fewer colors than almost every bird can perceive.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Something You Should Know
What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
So I'm sitting here experiencing the world around me, the sights, the sounds, the textures, the smells. And I think you're right that it doesn't occur to most people that that experience is only partial. And yet it is. There is so much about the world that we are missing. There are types of light, types of colour that we can't sense. There are smells that we don't smell.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
There are sounds that are below or above our range of hearing. Other animals can tap into that. And so each creature is really only perceiving a thin sliver of the fullness of reality. And I find that really fascinating. There's a word for this idea. The word is umwelt. It comes from the German for environment, but it doesn't mean the physical environment.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
It means the part of the world that each creature can tap into, that each creature can sense, can perceive. And that part is always limited. I find that idea, the Unwelt concept, to be incredibly humbling.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
It means that for all our vaunted intelligence, humans really are still only perceiving a small fraction of all there is to perceive, and that our understanding of the world could be greatly expanded by taking into account the senses of other animals.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Yeah, that's right. Evolution tunes an animal's umwelt, an animal's senses, to its particular needs. We humans have very good eyes, we have decent hearing, but we don't, for example, sense electric feels of the kind that every living thing inevitably produces. There are fish that can sense those electric fields. They tend to live in very, very murky water where vision isn't very useful.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
But an electric sense is very useful. These fish produce their own electric fields, like living batteries, and they sense the ways in which objects around them distort and deflect those fields. that allows them to navigate through these incredibly murky, often dark, waters without the need for vision.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Likewise, in a similar way, animals that tend to navigate over incredibly long distances, like songbirds or sea turtles, have the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field. It's almost as if they have living compasses inside their bodies.
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And that gives them a way of knowing the right heading, knowing where they are on the planet at any given time without the need for senses that could be more easily occluded, again, like vision or smell.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Yeah, that's a great question. So in a lot of cases, scientists do simple experiments where they expose an animal to a particular thing. Let's say a sound that is too high-pitched for us to hear, or a smell at concentrations below what we can detect. It's easy enough to do that, and then you can look at the animal's reactions. But then often it's the reverse.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
The discovery of these incredible senses comes from watching animals behaving in unusual ways and asking, how are they doing that? Bats, for example, can echolocate. That means they produce high-pitched calls and they listen out for the rebounding echoes and they use those to navigate through the dark world around them.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Echolocation was discovered when scientists watched bats flying through rooms that were so dark they couldn't possibly be seeing anything. And yet they were swerving around obstacles, they were plucking insects out of the air. How were they doing that?
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
At a point when people managed to create ultrasonic detectors, detectors that could recognize the very high-pitched calls that bats were producing, people realized that they were actually creating and listening to these sounds well above the range of human hearing. So that's a great example of how these sensors tend to be discovered.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
It's a mix of curiosity, of careful observation, and of using technology to compensate for our own sensory shortfalls.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
You can draw some comparisons. So vision is a good example. For example, humans have incredibly sharp vision. Our eyes have better resolution than the eyes of almost any other animal except for birds of prey like eagles. So we're very good at seeing things in great detail. A lot of the patterns that we can see on animal bodies... aren't actually visible to the animals themselves.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
A lot of the spots of butterflies or zebra stripes look like they just fade into grey to the eyes of a lion or another zebra. But There are always trade-offs with the sensors. So eyes can either have exceptional resolution or exceptional sensitivity, and they can never have both at the same time. So the trade-off for our incredibly acute eyes is that they fail very easily when light gets dim.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
So our night vision is very poor compared to other mammals, but the sharpness of our eyes is excellent. Our hearing is very good, but it's limited in its range. So things like bats and dolphins can produce high-pitched sounds that we can't hear.
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Even rats and mice, which humans have studied for centuries, have been having animated ultrasonic conversations that we have been completely oblivious to for most of that time, throughout all of that time. Our sense of touch is very good. Our fingertips are exquisitely sensitive. But there are other animals like sea otters that have hands that are just as sensitive but are also very, very fast.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
They not only have incredibly sensitive fingers, but they can use those fingers to detect food that's buried or hidden much more quickly than a human could. And then there are senses that we absolutely do not even have. We cannot sense the Earth's magnetic fields like a humble robin or even some kinds of insects can.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
We cannot see ultraviolet light, which actually the vast majority of animals with eyes can see. We see very many fewer colours than almost every bird can perceive. So we are very good in some areas, very, very poor in a lot of areas. And that's kind of the norm for the animal kingdom. Nothing can sense everything because, as we've said already, nothing needs to.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
So dogs live in a world that's dominated by smell. Smell is a primary sense for them. It's the way they explore. It's the way they socialize. They experience the world. And I think humans often forget this because certainly those of us who can see are so dominated by vision that we assume that other animals do the same. I have a dog. His name is Typo. He's a corgi.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
When we go on walks, I often see other dog owners yanking their dogs along. You know, to them, the walk is a means of exercise or travel from A to B. But that's a bit of a shame because if you actually let dogs do their own thing on a walk, which I try and do with mine, often what they want to do is they want to sniff.
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What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
They will spend a long time sniffing a random piece of pavement or a random fence post that another dog has just peed upon. You know, all dog owners, I'm sure, are very familiar with this feeling when you're walking along quite happily and their dog grinds to a halt and just starts... very intently exploring something around it. And that speaks to how important smell is to them.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I bought a pair of binoculars and would take it with me on like neighborhood walks or hikes. And, you know, I would have Merlin running while I was working and just look up occasionally and go, oh, that's interesting. It's an oak titmouse. I've never seen one before. And after I left my job, I fell hard into that world. To me, the difference between just being like
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah. So I spent a lot of the last four years reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. And I remember talking to public health experts for a story about how they are not okay. And hearing people say that they were feeling depressed, anxious, they couldn't sleep, and thinking, man, that feels very familiar. I sympathize extremely with this. And that was in
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I guess, casually bird curious and being an actual birder is making specific effort to go and look at birds. Right. It goes from passive to kind of active. Exactly. Yep. So, you know, early September of 2023 was when I made my first trip to a local wetland to specifically look at birds and nothing else. And that was honestly a life-changing moment. Birding is now my main hobby.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It's an endless source of joy and wonder. And I think all of these little moments arrived at a time in my life when I wanted more connection to the space around me.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah, I do. I went to a place called Arrowhead Marsh. It's this relatively small stretch of wetland that has a little boardwalk sticking out into this little chunk of bay. And on that day, I saw all these creatures. I am a science writer, right? At the time, I had already published my second book.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
an immense world which is about how animals perceive the world around them I've been writing about animals since I've been writing about anything and I've been in love with them and fascinated by them since I've been in love with anything but a lot of my knowledge of the natural world If you want to be maximally reductive and ungenerous about it, it's just a lot of trivia, right?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It's knowledge about facts, right? Like fun facts. Whereas the knowledge I gained from birding and that started on that boardwalk... feels very rooted in the lives of the birds themselves in time and in space. And the thing that I felt very palpably at that place on that day, that I still do now every time I go birding, is this incredible sense of being present. It's centering.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It's meditative in a way that actual meditation is not for me. I struggle to achieve that when I try and meditate. I achieve it without any effort when I'm birding. And I think that it is... I've come to see it as an act of respect and of care. It comes back to everything we've talked about, about empathy and caretaking. How is it an act of care? Yeah.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Because at its core, what it says is, this little brown sparrow that I would normally ignore is worthy of attention. Under normal circumstances, it would be very easy to say, here's a little brown bird. It looks the same as all the other brown birds.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
But no, I know through birding that it's subtly different to the other brown birds around it and that those differences matter and are rewarding to know about. That feels to me, to be an act of respect, everything is worth looking at.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah, I fully agree. I mean, I think that is a beautiful pricey of basically my entire body of work. Nailed it. Right. I can go home now, right? All of it, including work that doesn't
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
obviously fit into this bracket, like all the pandemic stuff we've talked about, is about the idea that much of the world is hidden from us, that we don't perceive it and we don't understand it, and that it is worth understanding and it is necessary to understand.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
june of 2020 oh that early okay so um you know i want to talk about the the word burnout in a little bit more depth but just to answer your question about how it manifests um you know by the middle of 2023 um i was certainly struggling with anxiety and depression i remember not sleeping very well so most nights um most nights i couldn't sleep
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So, you know, I'm now working on book three, and I really see all three of them as part of a trilogy that all touch on this same theme. So, I Contain Multitudes, the first book, was about the microbes that live inside our bodies and those of other animals and the enormous influence that they play in our lives.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Book two, An Immense World, is about how other creatures perceive things that we miss, whether it's ultraviolet light or electrically magnetic fields. And it's about how each of us is only perceiving a thin sliver of the fullness of reality, which, as you say, I think is a wonderfully humbling concept that
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It tells us that regardless of our technology or our intellect, we really are perceiving only a thin fraction of all there is to perceive. That our sense of the world, though it seems complete to us, is an illusion. But it is an illusion that we share with all other species.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
This is a great question, right? And I think one that I can directly speak to because I had written half of An Immense World before the pandemic happened, and I took a small break after the first year to finish the second half of the book. But I can say that, personally, thinking about these ideas constantly really helped me.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It felt like a salve to all of that moral injury and to all of the despair that I was feeling. I don't see it as a kind of direct antidote, right? It doesn't cure it in that one-to-one way. But it fills my life with wonder and with joy. And I think that acts as a buffer against all the other existential dread and fear that we have to grapple with. And I mean, here's how I think about it.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
For a lot of the time I've been a science writer, one thing I've said about science as a field is that it is one of the only areas of human endeavor that takes us out of ourselves. And I think we exist at a time when... We are being crunched ever inwards, whether it's through a novel virus or through frayed social connections or algorithms that feed us more of what we already were seeking out.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
You know, there is a kind of implosive effect of the modern world. And I think the kind of science and nature writing that I'm prioritizing and the birding that I do in my spare time are all counters to that. They are a way of radiating your attention outwards. And yes, I'm still wrestling with the curmudgeonly question that you asked. Does any of that matter?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And sometimes when I go out and look at birds, there's a little voice in my head that says, is this really the best thing you could be doing with your time? Do you not have work to Yeah, is it like a dropout solution to the world? Totally, right? Like, because often people talk about birding as escapism.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And I was getting irascible and difficult with people I care about. And I think I realized that I was doing my best work at severe cost to all of the other parts of myself. I actually dislike the word burnout. I use it because it's convenient shorthand, but it conjures up quite the wrong impression, I think.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And I think there's something about the word escapism that has a slight negative connotation, you know, right?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yes, absolutely. And I had a conversation with a really good friend about this. And what she said was... I think it's more important than ever to be out in the world right now. And I agree with that. I think that these have been difficult weeks. Many of the...
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
people in my life are suffering and i feel that keenly and i know that i am more useful to my community if i myself am whole and yeah being out in nature gives me that so
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
They are, frankly, tiny assholes. They are small bundles of sass and fury, and I love them for that.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
To be honest, it hasn't, because I think it is often very reasonable to be skeptical of scientific authority. I've seen plenty of what I've reported on be refuted later. So, you know, to a degree, skepticism is warranted, and I don't really find it useful or... accurate to be talking about skepticism of science as if it were a single coherent entity.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Like, yes, you have the very obvious and commonly discussed ones like climate change denial and vaccine misinformation. But to me, this bracket also includes things like the dismissal of long-term chronic illnesses like long COVID.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It includes the massive attacks on trans rights and healthcare right now, attacks which are completely against our current understanding of the fluidity and non-binary nature of sex and gender. To me, all of this, it's part of the same thing, but we often don't think about the latter when we talk about science skepticism.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So these things are better characterized not as being anti-science, but being pro-power and pro-profit. And I think that to me is... a more useful frame for it because it more correctly describes the actual problem and who the opponents are.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So to me, it's not like I'm trying to pummel a reader with the idea that my views are necessarily correct, but I am trying to espouse a moral stance in the work. And I am trying to use the work to expand our moral imagination. I think that's the heart of it. It's to show the full scope of what is possible. You know, I think...
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It creates this image that the person in question did their job, the job was really hard, and And they couldn't stand how hard it was, which I don't think is actually correct. What a lot of the healthcare workers I spoke to said was that it wasn't that they couldn't handle doing their job. It was that they couldn't handle not being able to do their job.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Readers might certainly recoil if they feel that a writer is moralizing at them.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Or implicating them somehow. But I think that you especially run the risk if it seems like you are... hitting people with a message, you know, if you are going moral first. What I tried to do in my pandemic pieces was to walk people through a line of argument, to show my working, to say, here is why I think the things that I do and why the people I talk to think the things that they do.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And I think that that approach is, surely is also going to put a fraction of readers off, but I think is just inherently more persuasive than just saying, do this because.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So how do we... Got any advice for how to get through that? Right. A nice softball question, the... There are three ideas that come to mind when I think of this question. One is a quote from the amazing abolitionist Maria Macaba, who says, "'Hope is a discipline.'" She argues that hope is not this sort of nebulous, airy thing that we sometimes think of it as.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It is a practice that you cultivate through active effort and day-in, day-out practice. I think of a line by the great and late global health advocate Paul Farmer, who spent his whole life advocating for the world's poorest, who said that he fought the long defeat, by which he meant that he was often swimming against the current. against forces that were extremely powerful.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And in his efforts to allay himself with the most vulnerable and least powerful people, he knew that he was going to suffer defeats and setbacks and that he was going to fight nonetheless. And then the third one is... An idea called the Stockdale Paradox, which was named after Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war after Vietnam.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
When he was finally released after a long time in captivity, he was asked how he managed to survive, what he endured. And he talked about how he made it because he was able to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in his head at the same time. One was the full and brutal realization of... his situation, combined with the indomitable hope that things could get better. I think all of these ideas...
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
You know, they saw around them all of the institutional and systemic factors that prevented them from providing the care that they wanted to provide. for them, it was more about this idea of moral injury, this massive gulf between what you want the world to be and what you see happening around you. And I think that's much closer to my experience of pandemic journalism, too. Like,
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Anchor me in these moments when it feels like the gulf between what we hope the world should be and what it actually is and is going to be seems vast and growing. I think that that gulf is agonizingly difficult to bear. But, you know, I think we bear it nonetheless today.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
What am I going to pick? Yeah. I'm writing a section of the book that is about hummingbirds and the fact that hummingbirds have iridescent colours, colours that are especially vivid at certain angles. The Anna's hummingbird that lives in my neighbourhood is a great example of that. In some angles, it looks like this vivid colour capital M magenta jewel.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It just gleams in the bright sunlight and then, you know, it might turn its head and look black and dark. Those colors... are not inherent to the feathers themselves. Like, if you took those feathers and ground them up, the dust would not look magenta. Those colors are structural. They occur because the feathers have rows of tiny disk-shaped structures that are arranged perfectly at the nanoscale.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
The light they reflect interferes with and amplifies each other specifically in red wavelengths and specifically at certain angles. In some ways, just staring at that hummingbird, you're staring into the nanometer world and seeing the effects that just a tiny bit of structure and organization can have on this entire beautiful animal. You know, every time I look at a hummingbird,
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I think about stuff like that. I think about how when the Anna's Hummingbird dies for its courtship flight, it sustains more G-forces than a fighter jet pilot. I think about how every time it flicks its tongue into a flower, the tip of that tongue splits open and small finger-like flanges unfurl from the tips of only to close again as the tongue retracts.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So the hummingbird is literally grabbing a small bolus of nectar with two hand-like projections at the tip of its tongue. I think about all of that I've learned through scientific papers, but I also know all the things I've learned from watching hummingbirds as a birder. The fact that they are, frankly, tiny assholes. They will challenge and intimidate crows, hawks, even humans on occasion.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
They are small bundles of sass and fury, and I love them for that. I love that if I see two of them next to each other, I'm pretty much guaranteed to watch a fight within the next few seconds. This is sort of what I meant when I said that My world now is this wonderful mix of the academic and the experiential. It's all these sides of nature colliding in every single experience.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And I think it's wonderful.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It's shouting about the kinds of things we need to do and watch us again and again fail to do any of that. It's all of those conflicts between what you hope will happen and what actually happens that just crushes you.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
This is a great point because you don't even have to go to that extreme of folks who are, you know, struggling to get by, folks who are in the middle of war zones. Let's just talk about the people whose stories I'm trying to tell and who I'm interviewing on a day-in, day-out basis.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
What right do I have to say, I have listened to your stories, and I'm trying to write about them, and that, for me, is too hard? Like, doesn't that sound a little bit pathetic? Yeah.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
100% there is. And yet it's real. The feelings are real. And yet it's real. Right. I've had this conversation with friends and with my therapist a lot. And I think that if we, as journalists... do our job correctly, what we end up doing is extending as much empathy we can to the people we are writing about so that we can correctly characterize and convey their experiences to the world at large.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And empathy really does mean, for me, spending days listening to the worst moments of the dozens of people's lives, having them run through my head again and again so that I can make sense of them and turn them into something that might shift the needle in the head of someone who has never thought about those experiences. And I'm sitting here now answering this question because
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Still questioning myself about whether it's ridiculous to say that that's hard. But what I can tell you is that I know it's hard because I felt it. And I think that that's enough, you know?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah, I think that objectivity is one of the most oversold concepts in journalism. I think it allows a lot of people to pretend that they have no biases, when they absolutely do. You know, that idea that you've laid out of how journalists think about objectivity often is just a hot skip and a jump away from
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
licensed to be an asshole you know it's like I think much more important are concepts like fairness and honesty and accuracy and I think that what the pandemic reporting has taught me is and especially the reporting on COVID, is that journalism can very much act as a caretaking profession. We usually think of it in terms that are antagonistic. We hold people to account. We speak truth to power.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And we absolutely should do all those things, But the mindset that accompanies those doesn't work if the people you're writing about are not the powerful ones. In that instance, empathy becomes my touchstone. It's how I do a good job. It's that softer, emotional, empathy-driven side of the craft that I think, as you've correctly noted, is often...
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
denigrated or seen as antithetical to what journalism should be. I think that if you think that that's antithetical to journalism, you're in the wrong business here.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah, I do it for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, I have learned that I enjoy not being sick. I know that the cost of long COVID is real and substantial and that I don't want to run that risk lightly. I also know that I have many friends and people I'm close to who are immunocompromised. So for the sake of the people around me, I also don't want to get sick.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
When I do events, I wear a mask for all of those reasons. And also because I know that every time I do a talk, While the vast majority of people in the audience have probably moved on, there are going to be other people who haven't. And I think it makes a huge difference to them to have the person at the front of the stage wear a mask. It tells them it's fine. It's not weird.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So I do it for that reason too. In terms of, you know, holding this line at a point when a large swath of society has moved on, I have written a lot about the panic-neglect cycle. Oh, what is that? So the idea is... A crisis happens, let's say a new epidemic. Attention and resources flow towards that. People take it seriously. People freak out.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And then once the problem is over, once it abates, so too does everything else. So the resources dwindle, the attention goes away. And we lapse into the same level of unpreparedness that led to the panic in the first place. So round and round in circles we go. This is very real, right? I've seen it through my reporting. I've seen it here. I've seen it for Ebola, for COVID, you name it. Bird flu?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Sure. Why not, to take a topical example? Sure. All of which is to say, for all of those reasons, I don't feel self-conscious about still being cautious at a time when most people aren't. I personally don't want to lapse into the neglect phase because I don't think it's warranted.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
You know, I try not to answer questions like this on things that I haven't specifically reported on, right? Because it is hard to make sense of all this. I didn't come to these views on COVID lightly. I came to them through talking to hundreds of people online. with a wide range of expertise over the course of many years. So, you know, specifically, how worried am I about bird flu?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Like, right, on a scale of 1 to 10, I don't know.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
That's an even harder question, right? Because how worried I am is something that I can actually reasonably answer. What I will say is, It is a threat that we should absolutely take seriously, right? It's a long brewing threat. In all likelihood, the next pandemic will be a flu one, whether it's H5N1 or something else. And so the specifics of my level of worry about this particular pathogen...
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
are kind of subsumed in this ambiency of worry about everything, right? Like we just sort of live in an era of heightened pandemic risk because it's intertwined with all the other great existential problems we have. We live in a world and at a time where new viruses will have an ever easier time of jumping into us.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
and where I think that the infrastructure of our societies continue to be poorly suited to handling those threats. So if you think about what happened with COVID, why did the U.S. fare so badly? You know, there's all of these things that I think people very rarely think of in terms of pandemic preparedness.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
You think of, like, vaccine-making infrastructure or, you know, our capacity to create new antivirals. But it's all that social stuff, and crucially, a lack of trust in government and each other, that turns... a pandemic into a true disaster. And all of those problems are still with us, and I would argue are worse than they were in early 2020.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So I say all that because I think that we sometimes frame the problem in not quite the wrong way, but not the important way, right? The way that it's often framed is like... Tell me on a scale of 1 to 10 how worried you are that H5N1 is going to go pandemic. I think the more important question is, if it does, how screwed are we?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And the answer is really, like very, very, because of all of those fundamental frailties that I just listed.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Okay, so in the spring of 2023, just before I left the Atlantic, I moved to Oakland from D.C. And one thing that immediately happened was I started paying attention to the birds around me because they were just omnipresent in a way that they weren't before. So my first day in my new house, there was an Anna's hummingbird in the garden, and I
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I would go for walks and just hear birdsong everywhere, the melodious sound of a Pacific wren in our nearby redwood forest. And I downloaded the Merlin app, which allows you to identify the songs of birds that are singing around you. And I started noticing how much exists in my neighborhood that I would previously have overlooked. And so all this happened very slowly.
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'The Interview': Senator Ruben Gallego on the Democrats’ Problem: ‘We’re Always Afraid’
It's meditative in a way that actual meditation is not for me. I struggle to achieve that when I try and meditate. I achieve it without any effort when I'm burning.
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The way that it's often framed is, tell me on a scale of 1 to 10 how worried you are that, like, H5N1 is going to go pandemic. I think the more important question is, if it does, How screwed are we? And the answer is really, like, very, very.