「日本では国土の約7割を森林が占めている。悠久の時を刻んできた各地の森林に、研究者たちと共にカメラが分け入り、北海道の雄阿寒岳山麓、宮城県の鳴子のほか、大分県の日田、熊本県水上村、沖縄県の西表島などを訪ねながら、多種共存の森の謎を解き明かす。」
映画「森に聴く Listen to the Forest」公式サイト https://t.co/wigzG1VgMl #森に聴く Listen to the Forest
A Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist spent years interviewing researchers across a dozen countries, and the book he wrote accidentally proved that everything you think you know about reality is a lie your nervous system constructed for you.
His name is Ed Yong. The book is called An Immense World.
I read it over two nights and it genuinely scared me. Not in a horror movie way. But In the way that happens when you realize something true that you cannot unfeel.
Here is the idea that broke my brain.
There is a German word called Umwelt. It was coined in 1909 by an Estonian-German zoologist named Jakob von Uexküll. It means the perceptual world of a specific animal. The slice of reality that animal can sense, experience, and respond to.
Every animal has one. Including you.
Your Umwelt is shaped by your eyes, ears, nose, skin, and tongue. Those organs evolved over millions of years to detect the specific information your ancestors needed to survive. Not reality as it is. Reality as it was useful to perceive.
That is the part nobody tells you.
You did not evolve to see the world accurately. You evolved to see enough of it to not die.
The rest of reality is just out there. Running constantly. Invisible to you.
Here is what that actually looks like.
A dog lives in a world of smell the way you live in a world of sight. When your dog walks into a room, it does not just detect that food is present. It reads who cooked it, when it was touched, who has been in the room, what emotional state they were in, and whether any of them are sick. A dog's nose has 300 million olfactory receptors. You have 6 million. Your dog is not smelling the world. It is reading it.
Birds are even more disorienting.
Most birds are tetrachromats. They have four types of color receptors where you have three. This does not mean they see slightly more color. It means they perceive an entire dimension of color that you have no sensory apparatus to access. There is no human experience that captures what they see. The feathers of a bird that look brown to you are likely a riot of ultraviolet patterns visible only to other birds. Flowers that look plain to you have ultraviolet landing strips pointing insects directly to the pollen. You walk through a world covered in signals you cannot read.
The mantis shrimp is the one that finished me.
It has 16 types of photoreceptors. You have 3. Scientists initially assumed this meant mantis shrimp saw an almost incomprehensible number of colors. Then they tested it. The mantis shrimp does not compare colors the way we do. Its visual system processes color more like a barcode scanner, running a quick yes or no against each receptor rather than mixing them into rich experience. It has 16 channels, but it likely perceives the world in a completely alien way that we have no framework to describe or imagine.
There is no human word for what the mantis shrimp sees. Our vocabulary for visual experience was built by creatures with three receptors. It does not reach.
But here is the part of the book that stayed with me longest.
Yong writes about a tick. A tiny bloodsucking parasite that can live for up to 18 years without eating. Its entire Umwelt consists of three signals. Temperature. The smell of butyric acid from mammal skin. The touch of hair. That is the entire perceptual universe of a tick. Warmth, one smell, one texture. It waits for those three signals. When they arrive, it falls and feeds. Then it waits again.
For 18 years sometimes.
Inside an Umwelt that contains almost nothing.
The tick is not suffering. The tick has no concept of what it is missing. It has exactly the sensory equipment it needs to survive, and nothing else. It perceives the world it evolved to survive in, and it cannot imagine a larger one.
And this is where Yong does the thing that made me put the book down at 2am and stare at the ceiling.
He points out, quietly, that the same logic applies to you.
You have exactly the sensory equipment your ancestors needed to survive on the African savanna. You see the wavelengths of light that bounced off fruit and predators. You hear the frequencies of human voices and snapping branches. You smell and taste at ranges that kept you fed and kept you away from rot and poison.
Everything outside those ranges is simply not there for you.
Electric fields. Magnetic fields. Ultraviolet light. Infrared signatures. Vibrations moving through the ground. The low-frequency calls of elephants traveling 10 kilometers through soil. The echolocation pulses of bats painting a sonic picture of the world in real time.
All of it happening. Constantly. In the exact room you are sitting in right now. And you perceive none of it.
The world is not what you see. The world is what exists. Your brain built a model of the relevant parts and handed it to you and called it reality.
Yong's most important line is not a dramatic one. It comes near the end, almost as a quiet admission.
He says we are the only animal that can try to understand the Umwelten of others. We cannot experience them. But we can study them, build instruments to detect what we cannot sense, and use our imagination to extend our perception beyond what evolution gave us.
That is not just a line about biology.
It is the best argument for curiosity I have ever read.
Every field of science is, at its core, a tool for extending the human Umwelt. The telescope. The microscope. The spectrometer. The fMRI. Every instrument humans have ever built is an attempt to perceive a slice of reality that our biology locked us out of.
We have been building prosthetic senses since the first person held a lens to their eye.
The book scared me more than anything I have read this year, because it is true. The world is immense. You are perceiving a very thin slice of it, assembled by evolution to keep you alive, not to show you everything.
The tick survives on three signals. You survive on five senses. The difference is enormous and also, when you look out at the full spectrum of what exists, not as large as you thought.
What is one sense or ability from the animal world that you would want to experience for just one day, and what do you think it would change about how you see your own life?
15년차 한의사로서 말씀드립니다. 귀에서 삐— 하는 이명이나 원인 모를 불안·불면 같은 자율신경 증상으로 힘들다면 ‘후두하근’을 한 번 의심해보셔야 합니다.
뒤통수 아래에 있는 작은 근육인데, 스트레스와 거북목 자세가 반복되면 긴장이 쉽게 쌓이는 부위입니다. 문제는 이 긴장이 단순 근육통으로 끝나지 않는다는 점입니다.
① 자율신경 불균형
후두하근은 상부경추·경막과 연결돼 있어, 과하게 긴장하면 몸이 계속 긴장 모드에 머물 수 있습니다. 두근거림, 두통, 만성 피로와도 관련이 있다고 봅니다.
② 이명·귀 먹먹함
이 부위 주변에는 뇌로 가는 추골동맥이 지나갑니다. 후두하근 긴장이 심하면 머리·귀 주변 긴장과 순환에도 영향을 줄 수 있어 이명을 호소하는 분들에게서 자주 굳어 있는 경우가 많습니다.
③ 몸이 기억한 긴장
후두하근은 균형 감각을 담당하는 중요한 근육입니다. 거북목 자세가 지속되면 이 부위가 계속 수축하면서 목 전체 긴장으로 이어지기도 합니다.
그래서 후두하근은 단순히 “목 근육”이 아니라, 몸이 쌓아둔 긴장의 시작점으로 보는 경우가 많습니다.