A German neologism coined by theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the 1920s, umwelt refers to how any one creature or species experiences its environment—a personal phenomenology, or what it is like to be a particular organism. An octopus, which, as I learned in Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, has neurons not only in its large brain but also in the suckers on its tentacles, has a completely different umwelt than the diver who encounters it.
While the concept arose as a heuristic for speculating on the experiences different animals might have of their environment, it lends itself well to the recognition that we each construct our own realities out of perceptions as they chime with thought patterns and “priors”—as neuroscientists refer to constituents of beliefs.
Another, related, concept I came across recently is affective niche, a concept that describes the set of things that influences our affect: what we care about, what we react to emotionally. An example from Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made is the different ways a human child and a young chimp relate to a toy car: the kid is interested and curious; the chimp doesn’t care. The toy car is within the affective niche of the child but not of the chimp. Extend this outward metaphorically to one’s entire umwelt and it becomes apparent how our perceptions—the ways our visual systems and hearing and so on—weave with patterned cognitions, predictions (for the brain is a prediction machine constantly pushing out simulations), and emotions to create the reality we think we are in. Some things we don’t notice at all; others seem to ensnare our attention.
Part of this plays out in the phenomenon of heightened salience: when we learn a new thing, want a particular thing like that style of boot or type of car, it suddenly appears everywhere. This happened to me with the word umwelt! I read it in Annaka Harris’s book Conscious, and then I read Other Minds, and then a friend—in a completely different context and without knowing anything about my reading interests of the moment—said he was reading von Uexkull’s book itself, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, where the word first entered language.
Umwelt translates as world or experience-environment, and even though it is the whole world of one’s experience, implicit in its definition is finitude and limitation. Think of the very limited portion of the light spectrum we can perceive, as just one example of the bounds of a human umwelt.
Then consider conceptual and emotional limitations caused by confirmation bias and affective niche. Etymologically, niche has two possible origins, but both are cozy concepts: one root derives from Latin nidus, for nest, and the other is from Italian nicchio, seashell. Since around 1600, niche became associated with recesses in walls, nooks; later, it became a term of ecology describing the “place” in an ecological network where any one organism fits.
The trick of course is to learn these concepts, explore them in imagination, and be humbled as well as committed to understanding that concepts indeed are a veil, as are emotions, and that we see ourselves as little beings in bubbles, bound by space and time. But it’s not easy.
Meditation can help… as poetic insight did for Rainer Maria Rilke, who lamented our umwelt-niche-bound sense of existence:
Never, not for a single day, do we have
before us that pure space into which flowers
endlessly open. Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No…
But the intensity of his longing reflects the intensity of his experience of “the Open,” which he has felt in
… an hour, or perhaps
not even an hour, a barely measurable time
between two moments—, when you were granted a sense
of being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.
Between two moments… it is possible to be Nowhere without the No…
Quotes from the Eighth and Seventh Elegies, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation