How the Brain Knits Together All These Signals

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The brain knitting together all these signals is very, very an part of this whole story. In a suit of one example, i like to to bats eco locate. Bats send out high frequency calls, and they hear the rebounding echoes,. They can navigate o obstacles, capture insects, yariara am. Because of the nature of that sense, a ecolocation should be stroboscopic. Every set of call in echo creates a snapshot of the world around it. So it sou be like the equivalent of watching a movie, right? Where you have different frames, each depicting something static. Now, when we watch a movie, we ofvously knit together those frames into something

All of us construct models of the world, and update them on the basis of evidence brought to us by our senses. Scientists try to be more rigorous about it, but we all do it. It’s natural that this process will depend on what form that sensory input takes. We know that animals, for example, are typically better or worse than humans at sight, hearing, and so on. And as Ed Yong points out in his new book, it goes far beyond that, as many animals use completely different sensory modalities, from echolocation to direct sensing of electric fields. We talk about what those different capabilities might mean for the animal’s-eye (and -ear, etc.) view of the world.

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Ed Yong received Masters and Bachelors degrees in zoology from Cambridge University, and an M.Phil. in biochemistry from University College London. He is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. His work has appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among his other awards are the George Polk award for science reporting and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. His new book is An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

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