Something You Should Know
What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice
Sat, 08 Mar 2025
What if I told you that being left-handed or right-handed has a powerful influence on decisions you make? Listen as I begin this episode by explaining how this works. http://casasanto.com/papers/Casasanto&Chrysikou_2011.pdf There are colors all around you that you can’t see. But birds can see them. Many birds see colors that are unimaginable to you. Dogs smell things everywhere that you can’t smell. Other animals have the ability to sense the magnetic fields of the earth – but you cannot. These are just a few of the interesting ways that other creatures perceive the world differently than humans. And it gets even more interesting than that. If you would like to hear how, listen to my conversation with Ed Yong, a Pulitzer prize winning science journalist, staff member at The Atlantic and author of the book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us (https://amzn.to/41vZ2Qa). People sure talk about productivity a lot. By all accounts, we all need to get more done in less time – that is the key to efficiency and success. Yet have you noticed that when you don’t get everything done you think you should, you feel guilty – which never feels good. Maybe what we need is to stop worrying about being productive and enjoy living life instead. And by doing that, you may be even more productive than ever! Here to explain how is Madeleine Dore, author of the book I Didn’t Do That Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt (https://amzn.to/3ILawYE). Food, drinks and candy at a movie theater are usually very expensive. In fact, I bet you have toyed with the idea of bringing your own snacks to save money. But is it right to do that? After all, they ask you not to. Listen as I discuss this interesting dileman. Source: David Callahan author of The Cheating Culture (https://amzn.to/3lYq1Ue) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off QUINCE: Indulge in affordable luxury! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What role does handedness play in decision-making?
Hello, welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know. Thank you for joining me. I don't know if you knew this or not, but the upper right side of a menu or a web page or even a newspaper, the upper right side is often considered prime real estate. It's the first place people look if they're right-handed. Left-handed people actually see the left side sooner.
Cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto says our hands and eyes have everything to do with how we interact with the physical world, and our handedness can have a lot to do with the decisions we make. Dr. Casasanto asked participants in a study to decide between two products to buy, two job applicants to hire, or two alien creatures to trust.
Right-handed participants regularly chose the one on the right side of the page, while lefties chose the one on the left side of the page. People tend to prefer things they see or experience on the same side as their dominant hand. That's apparently because they're easier to reach, perceive, and interact with.
And you can use that phenomenon to your advantage by catering to someone's dominant side in professional or personal situations. And that is something you should know. As you travel through life on this planet, you see the world as it is, right? Well, not exactly. What you see is the world the way humans see the world.
But other creatures on the very same planet see a very different world in very different ways. And so what makes this so interesting to me is that if animals see things so differently than we do, who's right? What is real? And does it even matter? Here to discuss this and give us some understanding of exactly how other creatures perceive their own reality is Ed Yong.
He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and staff member at The Atlantic. And he's author of a book called An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us. Hey, Ed, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.
So when I look out the window, what I see isn't necessarily all that's there. It's just all that's there that I can perceive, which is a little hard to get your head around. So help me get my head around that.
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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Chapter 2: How do animals perceive the world differently than humans?
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.
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.
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.
I would imagine that the reason creatures see that little slice that is uniquely theirs of the bigger reality is because that's what they need to see. That's what they need to perceive in order to survive.
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.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 3: What is the concept of 'Umwelt'?
So one of the things that interests me about this is if there are other creatures that smell things we can't smell or see things that we can't see, how do we know that? Because if... If we can't see them, how do we know that they can see them?
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.
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.
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?
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.
It's a mix of curiosity, of careful observation, and of using technology to compensate for our own sensory shortfalls.
When you look at our ability to perceive the world compared to, say, other, well, any other animal, I mean, do we tend to do better than most? Do we see and perceive less than many? Where are we on the scale?
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.
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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Chapter 4: How do scientists discover animals' unique senses?
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.
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.
And I've also heard that dogs' hearing is very good. It's certainly better, I guess, than human hearing in the sense that they can hear sounds, hear frequencies that we don't hear. But is a dog's hearing spectacularly good or is it just a little better than ours?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you understand how some of these other creatures perceive their reality, does it give us any real insight in what it's like to be them?
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Chapter 5: How do dogs perceive their environment through smell?
It does. You can really spiral in these feelings of productivity guilt and you can write off the whole day and deem it a failure because of that one thing that you didn't get done or perhaps several things that you didn't get done. And so I think that where that really can stem from is this idea that in our society, we've tied productivity to our sense of self-worth and
and when we do that it what we do is never enough we never quite reach that feeling of being complete our to-do list is never complete and so i think we're set up to fail a little bit here because we're told that productivity is a measure of our worth but it's never quite enough and so we never quite get there and we pile on these feelings of guilt and shame at the end of the day and so i think it's really about untethering that idea that productivity is the sole measure of our worth
And we can find some other things in our days to count amongst the doing. And so it's always curious to me that you can get to that end of the day and have that guilt feeling and focus solely on the thing that you didn't do and overlook all of the treasures and all of the perhaps moments of connection that you had or the moments of kindness or what you learned, even the mistakes you make.
Well, I find it interesting that it seems like there's two kinds of time. There's either the time that you're being productive. Or you're wasting time. I mean, and there aren't a lot of other categories. It seems like just because you're not being productive doesn't mean necessarily that you're wasting time.
Yes, I agree. I think that there's many, many categories in between. And even what we deem wasted time, I think is worth getting curious about because we're quick to call ourselves lazy or we're quick to say that we're wasting time. We're quick to say that we're procrastinating. But when we inspect that, we can actually see that
sometimes it's those moments that are incredibly valuable are we procrastinating or are we actually thinking about the problem in a deeper way are we letting ideas sort of roll around in our minds before we take that action and i think it's an interesting thing because we we tend to worry about the time that we're wasting and
If anything, I think the surest way to waste time is to worry about wasting it. So if we take away the worry about wasted time and we get curious about those moments, maybe we can see that the time that we enjoy wasting is actually not wasted time, or we can see that it's thinking time, or we can see that it's an all-important moment of rest and downtime.
Well, I love what you said, that there is no bigger waste of time than spending time worrying about wasting time.
Yes, exactly. And something that's been really helpful for me is actually returning to one of my favorite books by Arnold Bennett. It's called How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, and it was written in 1908. And so it's always a gem to kind of return to these texts and see that we've been grappling with these things. quandaries for many decades and centuries even.
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Chapter 6: How do bees influence the colors of flowers?
As I'm sure you know, movie theaters don't want you to bring in your own snacks. Many theaters forbid it. They all frown upon it. You probably could get away with it, but according to David Callahan, who's the author of a book called The Cheating Culture, doing so is really wrong.
As a guest, you should obey the rules of the establishment, just like you would at any other business that serves food. Movie theaters make about 40% of their revenue from the sale of food and drinks. There's no doubt that the markups are sky high, but keep in mind that theaters have to share ticket sale revenue with film distributors and studios.
In the old days, snacks and drinks were not allowed in most carpeted, plush theaters. Then once TV came along, the theater industry had to pull out all the stops and allow people to have snacks. But you really should buy the ones they offer. And that is something you should know.
Your rating and review would really help us if you could find the time to just take a moment, write a few words about this podcast, and post it wherever you listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. For a long time now, I've been recommending The Jordan Harbinger Show as another podcast you might want to listen to.
The Jordan Harbinger Show is different than something you should know, but as you'll see, it aligns well with this audience. Meaning, if you like this podcast, you're probably going to like that one. The Jordan Harbinger Show. Each episode is a conversation with a different, fascinating guest. Recently, he had on Amanda Ripley talking about how to survive an unthinkable disaster.
which strikes close to home for me, having just been through the fires and mudslides in California and evacuated twice. He also spoke with Jay Dobbins, who's a former ATF agent who went undercover with the Hells Angels. Now that's a conversation worth hearing. And listening to his conversations will make you a more critical thinker about the world around you.
Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show, and there's a good chance it finds its way into your regular rotation of podcasts. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Have you ever heard about the 19th century French actress with so many lovers that they formed a lover's union? Or what about the Aboriginal Australian bandit who faked going into labor just to escape the police, which she did escape from them. It was a great plan. How about the French queen who murdered her rival with poison gloves?
I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History. Every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know, and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we re-examine well-known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas, sharing the truth behind their legends.
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