Chapter 2: Umwelt
Will Storr, award-winning journalist and author of The Science of Storytelling and A Story is a Deal, has spent decades researching the links between storytelling, the human condition and our identities. In our new interview series, we speak to him to uncover how we can harness the power of our storytelling brains and unlock the full power of the story – in changing beliefs, driving action and achieving extraordinary results. Here, he discusses umwelt.
Never Miss A Story
Read the transcript of the film:
“You think that we see and hear everything in an untrammeled way. But the human eye can only pick up one ten-trillionth of the available light spectrum, compared to bees and birds who can see the electromagnetic structure of the sky.
Our brains can only pick up that which is essential to our human experience of consciousness. We can only see a narrow band of reality – and that’s referred to as our particular umwelt.
“The human umwelt is story. We are the only species on Earth who process reality in the form of narrative.”
Will Storr
If you’re an insect like a katydid, your umwelt is musical. If you’re a turtle, your umwelt is the magnetic field that you detect in the ocean. If you’re an electric fish, you live in this world of electricity. A dog lives in an umwelt of smell which gives it galaxies of information which we can’t pick up.
The human umwelt is story. We are the only species on Earth who process reality in the form of narrative. We experience ourselves as characters at the centre of an unfolding narrative. We have a sense of future; we have a sense of past.
We coat reality in this moral sense – so it’s not just other humans that we encounter, it’s heroes, villains, teachers and betrayers.
So this is why story is not a fad; it’s not a passing kind of trend. Story is the human umwelt; it’s sense making for humans.”
Get Will Storr’s new book A Story is a Deal here.
