Two years ago I started co-hosting a podcast called "50 Words For Snow" devoted to words that do not quite exist in English. Words that name experiences we feel constantly but rarely examine. Some of these words are charming. Others are unsettling. A few of them quietly rearrange the furniture in your mind.

One of those words is umwelt.

My cohost Emily John Garcés and I recently discussed the concept of umwelt on our New Year’s episode with Jared Byas.

The word umwelt comes from biology, coined by ethologists studying animals in their natural habitats. It refers to the world as an organism can perceive it, based entirely on its sensory equipment.

A bat’s umwelt is built from echo. A dog’s from scent. A tick’s world is dominated by a single chemical cue that tells it when to drop from a branch onto a passing mammal. Each creature inhabits a complete reality, but not a complete world.

The crucial point is this. An organism cannot perceive what its senses do not allow it to perceive. Not because it is lazy or stubborn, but because it is biologically incapable of doing so.

Once you hear this, it is hard not to apply it to humans.

Biologically, humans have an umwelt too. Our senses are limited. We cannot see ultraviolet patterns on flowers like bees. We do not feel magnetic fields like migratory birds. There is an enormous amount of reality happening right now that we are simply not........

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