If an Elephant stomps does anyone hear it? 3.0

Part 3

Aug 27, 2024

This is Part 3. We ended part 2.0 talking about how some of us have sensory sensitivities that are hard for many to understand. Catch up with earlier posts part 1.

If an Elephant stomps does anyone hear it? 2.0

James McCall

Jun 9

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Pachydermistic Conclusion

This will be the end of this series. “Thank God!”, someone exclaims from the back. There will be more posts on sensory challenges and accommodations that would greatly benefit many of us in this world, especially in schools. It is nearly impossible to really imagine how other humans and other organisms have different sensory experiences with our individual array of senses. How can we learn to see through someone or something else’s eyes, ears, snout, skin? Why do we accept that our perception is somehow the only way to perceive similar sensory inputs. This post will wind (perhaps meander) through a thought experiment on pachyderms, and how they use their sensory superpowers to reach deterministic results.

Fahrvergnügen but Different

Germans make up the funnest words. The German term umwelt1 refers to the subjective reality that an organism's sensory systems and cognitive processes create. It is often used to describe non-human organisms, but it can (and should) also be applied to humans. The term is usually translated as the "self-centered world" or "environment" perceived through a prism of our own human exceptionalism using our limited sensors. What does the world look like to other species? How does each organism “make” its own world by bending its environment to its own needs?

An oft-used example of an umwelt is that of a tick, which are the politicians of the natural world2.

“...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood.”3

Umwelt can perhaps be best interpreted as the sum of meaningful correspondences between a species’ subjective sensory experience, ecosystem, physiology, and behavior. Organisms react to their environmental conditions. These environmental conditions are a compass that drives sensory adaptations. The arms race between the preternatural sight of an owl versus a furry mammal developing guard hairs that can detect thermal signatures. Then the owls counter adaptions to mask their thermal profile4. Pretty amazing that rodents have developed thermal googles, but with hair. I wonder how many adaptations that humans have developed are actually maladaptive in our digitizing world. I reckon the adaptations that kept us safe as prairie monkeys might often misfire in the modern era when weaponized by marketers, food science, and Facebook and Google A/B testing5. These digital stimuli invoking flight, fight or fawn responses and are flooding us with cortisol and dopamine hits.

Elephant Ears to Find the Fare/Fair

Imagine a hypothetical world where elephants roam Southern Idaho and they must find elephant ears at the carnival as part of their survival. How would they locate it? What senses might they use? Vision, hearing, smell, memory? Look at you God’s creation, with a huge nose/trunk, giant ears and eyes, long lifespan, great memory! Can they visualize pictures in their minds? or do they have elephantasia

This is generated by machine learning algorithms. Schools should probably teach how to use these tools to further human and elephant creativity.

They certainly have a myriad of sensory inputs to be able to locate the carnival in many different ways. They can hear at infrasonic (to humans) range, under 20 hertz that our ears just can’t detect. We can sometimes feel the vibrations from these ranges. As an aside, it was stylish and socially popular to turn an otherwise perfectly working car, into something with a suspension so low that the car would bottom out on the parking lot curb cut in the late 1900’s. A fancy car, modded out with bass that would make your kidneys feel like they were going to rattle out of one of your orifices was the equivalent of excess plumage I guess. But alas, I digress.

Each of the elephant’s sensory organs are wired into regions in the brain. The sum of this sensory wiring and networking makes up the elephant’s umwelt. How she perceives her environment, her safety, and experience.

It is logical that a baby elephant named Snuffleupagus is going to perceive its environment differently than her mother, Wobblebottom. This makes sense, as all lifeform seem to have a biomachine learning algorithms running in the background. The baby might smell elephant ears from the nearby fair a mile away, but has no idea what to relate it to. It is a novel, never before experienced, smell or taste. The smell has never been mapped to anything else in her neuronal-network (her “neuronet”). Snuffleupagus might hear through her comically large ears, the sounds from the fair. The sounds of sweet dough frying, the machinery emitting its mechanical yawp. These unknown sensory inputs are taken in by the olfactory system, the wavelengths penetrate the baby’s cute Dumbo ears. Are they frightening to Snuffleupagus, exciting, or of no concern? Does it overwhelm her neuronet? Would all calves share the same sensory experience?

How might these sensory inputs be experienced differently by Wobblebottom? The smell might immediately bring joy from past memories where she relates eating this delicious delicatessen delight to the scent molecules working their way up her trunk undergoing analysis with olfactory receptors that get coded to signals sent to her brain for processing. Perhaps, the sounds bring back joyful memories of riding the Tilt-a-Whirl as a wee calf. An elephant never forgets, after all. Which can be blessing or a curse when the elephant in the room is a traumatic experience.

Perhaps the memories, the neuro-mapping, isn’t of joy, but of trauma. Maybe she relates the smell to nausea, as Wobblebottom once ate whey to many elephant ears after riding the Tilt-a-Whirl7 and was publicly humiliated after vomiting on Fabio. Everyone remembers that Fabio is one of the prettiest and most popular elephants in Southern Idaho. What if the fare at the fair is triggering to Wobblebottom and induces trauma response as she (as is a right of passage for elephants) was forced to do hoop jumping, and balancing exercises on giant balls all while doing math. This anxiety was mapped to her brain and she relates it to the smell of elephant ears, the only food served at carny school. This hardwired relationship is unfortunate, as in this hypothetical, elephant ears are important to their survival and especially when the food is tied to internalized humiliation and shame.

What if instead of being in close proximity to the fair, the parade of elephants is 100 miles away and the fair, in typical roving carny style, moves around every year to a different place. How might they find it? Surely even with their oversized ears and trunk, they can’t smell the cooking fare, or hear the machinery at a 100 miles. Their skills of never forgetting, and good memory aren’t useful either to find the roving nomadic carnival. What does Wobblebottom do?

Elephants Reign Supreme

The emaciated parade of elephants has been wandering through the sage brush sea over the hot summer months looking for the fare at the fair, but their luck hasn’t been there. The whole parade has been subsisting on cheat grass and dirt sandwiches and many are in dire need of their favorite fare food. Luckily Wobblebottom has learned a trick. She has particularly fat feet. And before you tell us not to fat shame an elephant, elephants love their fat feet.

Wobblebottom, waddles her bottom to the lead of the parade and stomps her right front foot, forcing as much contact with the ground as possible. She sits pensively for a minute, seemingly annoyed by the ruckus being made by Snuffleupagus and her pal Morton. Why? Is she foot signing to the parade? Is she tired? Is it a sign of itchy fungal pachydermatitis? On the approximate 777th repetition of this behavior, she lets out a deep trombone sound, the bellow has the immediate impact of focusing and stilling the entire parade. Wobblebottom sets a new course to their course, of course. What happened?

In fact, their fat feet have some exceptional adaptions. They are both very sensitive to touch, and have special foot bones. The ultrasensitive touch in her feet can detect/feel the ultralow frequency made from the trumpet of other mamma elephants at the carnival. The foot is pressed deep into the ground expanding the area of contact to detect the ultralow vibrations through the soil. Additionally the foot bones are fascinatingly a form of bone conduction8. Probably not totally unlike the bones in our ears, the hammer, anvil and stirrup. Do elephants hear with their feet? I guess that depends on our perception as we try to literally shoehorn a human sensory experience onto elephant’s feet like Cinderella’s slipper. Our human sensory experience, our umwelt, is entirely different from another species9. It's almost unimaginable for us to grasp how an elephant might perceive its sensory environment, given that we lack the ability to feel, hear, or smell with the same acuity.

What sorta idiot would put something like this on their feet on purpose

Ruminating Animals

Another fun fact, is that neither humans nor elephants are ruminating animals. I mean they aren’t ruminants like cows, sheep, or deer that have multiple stomachs and colonized microbes to basically subsist on grass. Humans are ruminating animals, in that they tend to ruminate over thoughts. A brain difference, part of neurodiversity, is that some humans ruminate more than others. It is almost trademark for some to have repetitive thought patterns and behaviors, rigidity of thought, justice sensitivity, and difficulty with emotional regulation. Similarly these brain differences come with a wide array of hypo and hypersensitivities.

Each individual has their own umwelt. Their perception is shaped by their particular sensory, emotional and physiology characteristics. Their perception might be shaped by their trauma, by sexual, mental and physical abuse. Perception might be shaped by being shunned, outcast or outed. Perception is truly a state of mind, a state of mind that we find comes with differences. The ticking of a clock might not register to the majority of humans, though for some it might be a maddening distraction that destroys their executive functioning. Ambient background noises might paralyze a child, as the inputs overwhelm the senses. A school bell might cause physical pain.

We understand that animals have wide diversity, and have entirely different methods for navigating their world with their senses. We easily accept that we can’t hear like a dog, see like a hawk, smell like an elephant, or detect electrical impulses like a shark. Why can’t we do this for each other? Why do we scream and implore at each other (and ourselves) to just be normal?

Why can’t we accept that these differences are part of a normal distribution, they are all normal, just some have exceptionalities? They are sensory outliers. These sensory outliers need, and I will argue we owe them accommodations. They shouldn’t have to white knuckle it through their day, just because the lights, noises and smells don’t overwhelm most of us inhabiting the mean of sensory experience.

We must ask more WHY questions, make MORE observations and FOLLOW our natural curiosity and intuition. Why is click bait so terrible? Why is the internet seemingly broken and yet impossible to avoid its siren song? Why are formerly reputable news organizations, now almost impossible to parse from what used to be only the domain of the National Inquirer and parody magazines. Why is our mental health so poor? Perhaps, an observation is that our biochemical responses that enabled us to find and remember food, assess danger, and enter tribal social structures are no match for the painful environment of middle school and Tiktok. Maybe if we allow space for natural diversity/neurotypes, where people can operate in their own emotional, social, sensory umwelt our young people would feel a real perceived sense of belongingness. Maybe this space can allow for the nurturing of curiosity and intuition, rather than shutting it down with pejorative statements, such as; this is the way we have always done it, that is school policy, and this is settled science.

Maisa Space

If an Elephant stomps does anyone hear it? 2.0

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