Umwelt

QUOTE

Anaïs Nin once said…

“We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”

(French-American essayist)

CONCEPT

Umwelt

Umwelt describes the unique sensory world that each organism inhabits.

Every creature—tick, bird, dolphin, human—lives inside its own slice of reality, shaped by what its senses can detect and what its brain can interpret.

There is no single, shared world—only overlapping realities. Your Umwelt is your perceptual home, and it influences what you notice, what you ignore, what you value, and what you believe to be true.

STORY

Tick, Tick … Bloom?

In 1910, the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll crouched in a patch of forest with a glass vial in his hand, studying a creature so simple it barely seemed to possess a world at all.

The subject was an ordinary tick—blind, earless, almost motionless—but it navigated life with an uncanny precision that fascinated him. Uexküll wanted to understand how animals perceive their surroundings from the inside, not in human terms but in their own.

What he discovered would reshape biology.

Through careful observation, he learned that the tick’s existence revolves around just three sensory cues: it climbs upward toward light; it releases its grip when it detects the scent of butyric acid—a chemical found in mammalian skin; and it seeks warmth, which signals that it has landed on a blood source.

Those three signals form the entirety of the tick’s perceptual world. It cannot see predators, hear wind, or smell flowers. It waits, sometimes for months, suspended on a branch for the brief moment when these cues align. Only then does its world come alive, and only then does it act.

Uexküll realized that the tick was not living in the same world humans see. It inhabited a radically reduced environment built exclusively from the sensations relevant to its survival. In his terms, this was the tick’s Umwelt—its subjective sensory universe.

The revelation was profound: if a tick’s Umwelt is so small compared to ours, then our own might be just as limited compared to the sensory worlds of other animals. That idea challenged the assumption that all creatures share a single objective reality. Instead, Uexküll argued, every organism creates meaning by carving out its own perceptual home from the vastness of what exists.

Beyond science, this idea offers a quiet, humbling lesson for human life: what we perceive feels like the whole world, yet it is only the slice our senses and experiences allow us to see.