Episode Details

Humans see just 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear only 0.14% of existing sound frequencies. This episode explores the shocking narrowness of our sensory window—from pigeons navigating by infrasound they can hear from hundreds of miles away, to mantis shrimp perceiving colors we literally cannot imagine. We trace how the history of science is really a history of building tools to detect what our senses evolved to ignore, and what the concept of "umwelt" teaches us about the limits of our reality.