The Modern Human Umwelt

These days I do most of my work in co-working spaces or cafes. I haven’t been in the office in a long time.

When I was in the office though, I had my own private space that I could close the door. But I never loved it. I actually don’t like working in pure silence. That’s because I don’t mind working in public. I like working around ambient noise. It’s easier for me to concentrate with a little bit of resistance. Pure silence makes every half-formed idea feel profound, but a little background noise sharpens my focus and filters the good thoughts from the bad.

However, there’s one type of noise that I actually don’t like and it really does cut through me and interrupt my thought process. It’s when someone in the cafe is on a zoom meeting and I’m sitting near them. And I’m not alone in universally hating it. A lot of people complain about this. You’ll many tik-tok videos made about this.

People don’t really know why it bothers them so much. Why it cuts through everyone in the general vicinity. They’ll mention something zoom call kills the vibe of the cafe.

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or blame it on the person being really loud

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but even a considerate caller speaking at library level still slices through the room in a way ordinary chatter doesn’t. The reason isn’t loudness or vibes, it’s deeper, it bothers us so much because you’re hearing only one side of the conversation. What’s interesting is how this dynamic is not at all like two people having a face-to-face conversation.

When two people sit together, they share the same acoustic bubble. Their voices bounce off the same walls and drift into a single spatial spot your brain can file under background noise. That symmetry is fine for our auditory system’s filtration circuits. A half-digital call breaks the loop. Your cortex flags that one sided voice, it is saying this is not part of this space, pay attention to it. There’s studies done on this and has been replicated over and over in research.

Just overhearing the one-sided conversation lowers the performance of people in the same room who have to hear it. That’s why it is annoying.

Our brains evolved to treat any human voice as a high-priority signal. When half a conversation is missing, the prediction circuits can’t lock onto a pattern, so they keep grinding—draining attention and registering as irritation. That asymmetry hijacks bystanders: we’re suddenly hosting a foreign sensory bubble, an Umwelt.

What is the Umwelt?

Every creature lives inside its own Umwelt, a sensory bubble each species inhabits. German biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term in 1909, and it’s enjoying a revival thanks to Ed Yong’s bestseller An Immense World. He proposed that every creature exists within its own "surround-world", the specific slice of reality its senses can detect. Even when sharing space with our pets, we're experiencing fundamentally different worlds.

Take your dog for a walk. While you admire flowers and storefronts, your dog is engaged in an invisible world of scent. A dog’s split nostrils pull in fresh air with one side while exhaling through the other, it is investigating clues, which neighborhood dogs passed the hydrant, what they ate, whether they were anxious. That’s their Umwelt. Unfortunately, we tend to impose our visual bias on dogs, us humans have decent vision, and we tell them to “look,” dimming the very sense that defines their world.

Other animals inhabit stranger bubbles. Elephants follow relatives by smell across hundreds of miles of savannah. Sharks map electric currents. Birds read ultraviolet patterns. Sea turtles steer by Earth’s magnetic field.

Humans are weak with senses compared to animals. We can build tools and pass culture across generations. Animals are always engaging in trial and error and never learn from each other.

We traded specialized detectors for an outsized cortex that stitches patterns together and predicts what should come next. Most days that swap makes us formidable, But our prediction engine glitches when inputs break the pattern.

How Do We Know Someone is Staring at Us?

Ever notice when someone is staring at you? You’ll look to your right and see someone staring directly in your eyes. No mystical sixth sense at work, just your brain's remarkable integration system. It’s part of our Human Umwelt.

Your peripheral vision registers a subtle shift in posture, unconscious hearing detects a change in ambient sound, and suddenly the amygdala connects these whispers of data into a conviction.

Our brains process the world while they actively construct it. We perceive meaning, intentions, and stories where other species see only physical stimuli. This symbolic lens served us brilliantly in ancestral environments but leaves us vulnerable to the engineered realities of modern life. We're essentially running Stone Age prediction algorithms on information-age inputs, creating mismatches that manifest not just in that irritating half-heard call.

Three Modern Human Umwelt Disruptions

We’re the only animals who willingly flood our Umwelt with cognitive pollution. Let’s see some other examples of this.

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