The Brain of a Duck Is a Different Kind of Hardware

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In the book, i write about how throughout fantasy and ime scientific n literature, we have many examples of people who project their consciousness into the minds of other animals. I think that e, it's a bit of both and i think that the hardware piece of it becomes more obvious when you think about something that is much more different to us than even a dark so the example i give in the books is an octopus,. And an octopus has a large nervous system, but a most of that nervous system exists in its arms. Its arms have a large number of neurons, more collectively than it is actual the brain in its head does. Those neurons allow the arms to work em semi

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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