The Invisible World Beyond Our Senses

Written By Michele Gargiulo

Maybe I’m feeling a little mysterious because the weather is changing and I’ve got Halloween on my mind, but this morning I was sitting there thinking about all the things we don’t “see” or feel, or notice that goes on all around us all the time.

I feel like sometimes we walk around with our cute little five senses like they are showing us everything in existence (in case you need a refresher, I mean our eyes, our ears, our skin, our tongue, our nose), but in reality, what our senses let in is only the thinnest sliver of what is really happening around us.

Think about it for a second, the visible spectrum of light, which is the rainbow we’ve been told is everything from violet to red, is just a narrow band between 430–770 terahertz. That’s it, just a little slice, barely there.
But…bees see ultraviolet, snakes sense infrared, and whales sing to one another in frequencies too deep for our ears to even register. The world is roaring with signals all around us, and we’re deaf to most of them.

Our hearing really is not much better than our eyes.
From 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz, that’s our little range. But the universe hums and crackles well beyond those puny numbers.
There are sounds so low they can physically shake the earth beneath us, vibrations we only feel as dread or awe in our brains, and tones so high they slip through our perception like they were meant for someone else.

It makes me wonder if we are missing more than 99% of what is happening, then what is reality, really?
Is reality the bit we can see, hear, and touch, or is it more that vast unseen ocean we’re floating in, oblivious?
How can we ever have the arrogance to believe we know something for certain with the kind of passion that influences violence or hate if we never know the full story of life?

The Prison of Our Perception

What humbles me most is that we’ve mistaken our sad little limits for complete and utter truth.
Our eyes cannot detect radio waves, yet we live inside them daily.
Wi-Fi signals pass through walls and bodies, carrying entire worlds of information that might as well be complete magic to our great-grandparents.

If you close your eyes right now and listen and tune your imagination outward, you might realize you’re submerged in layers upon layers of activity you don’t see. Gamma rays born from exploding stars, the steady drone of Earth’s magnetic field, the chorus of insects communicating in pitches we can’t hear, the earth spinning rapidly under our feet we don’t feel, the list goes on and on.

Reality isn’t absent when our senses fall short, it’s just hidden, waiting in plain sight.

We cling to the idea of “five senses,” but that’s really a story for children in grade schools, the truth is much messier and harder to count.

We don’t just see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.
We sense temperature changes and our our skin prickles when we’re caught in the rain, or relaxes in the sun.
We sense pain, that is always there to remind us of our vulnerability in this world full of sharp corners.
We sense balance and orientation, thanks to that delicate inner ear filled with fluid and hair-like cells that know when we tilt or fall. And when we have vertigo (this runs in my family and is a huge pain in the ass when it flares), our whole orientation is thrown out the window.
We also sense where our body is in space even with our eyes closed; that’s proprioception.
And then there’s interoception, the quiet awareness of our inner state: heartbeat, hunger, thirst, the flutter in the chest when anxiety grips, or the warm ease of oxytocin when we lay on someone we love’s chest. Thankfully, my husband is giant enough to be able to handle my head on his arm without it going numb.

And yet, even with all these tools that are much more than the classic five we were taught when we were younger, we are still fumbling in the dark.
Dogs smell storms coming, sharks detect electric pulses, birds navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field by some hidden compass we cannot see. Some insects can even view the sky in polarized light, a map completely invisible to us, and don’t ask me how Google knew that, because I have no clue.

Our senses are not a full map of reality, and they were never meant to be, they’re survival gear.
Enough to keep us fed, balanced, and alive, but far from the whole story.

I remember in college one of my professors over a decade ago told me “if it wasn’t dangerous to us, we never developed the ability to see/hear/smell it,” and that really suck with me.
Maybe because I love a good mystery, but also because it made me feel a little smaller in the world and a little less sure of everything I was positive of. Humility, I’ve got plenty of.

Ancient Ideas

Honestly, this gap in what we see and what we don’t might be why mystics and shamans spoke of unseen realms.
They really didn’t need the vocabulary of physics to know that there is more to the world than meets the eye.
Some people might even be able to feel the edges of the spectrum in ways science is only now beginning to measure.

Every so often, there are people who can even slip past the boundaries of ordinary perception.

Women with an extra cone cell can see millions of shades of color the rest of us can’t.
People who’ve had cataract surgery sometimes glimpse into the ultraviolet light spectrum.

Around the world, small groups report hearing strange low-frequency hums (the Taos Hum in New Mexico, the Bristol Hum in England, the Kokomo Hum in Indiana) that most ears dismiss completely. I’ve written about some of them in the past.

Some of these cases have roots in infrasound or industrial noise, others remain unsolved to this day. There are those who hear phantom booms in the night, a neurological quirk known as Exploding Head Syndrome (this one makes my stomach churn a bit, even four years post trauma), and still there are others who describe sound in color or taste, a world refracted through synesthesia.

What is “normal” hearing or vision is really just the average; the edges of human experience stretch wider than we usually even care to admit.

These rare outliers remind us that reality does not look or sound the same to everyone, and that our senses are not a single, fixed truth but shifting doors into a larger world. It makes me wonder if the shamans of the past were just people born outside of the norm.

Science tells us about dark matter, an invisible something or another that makes up most of the universe but can’t be seen or touched. It tells us about neutrinos streaming through our bodies by the trillions every second, little silent travelers we never even notice.

It seems completely laughable, then, that we ever trusted our senses as reliable sources of “truth”.

A World in Translation

This is where science and technology like to step in. They translate the unseen into the visible for us and remind us that some whales can make noises we can’t hear and bees can see things we can’t.
Radio telescopes give us pretty images of galaxies in wavelengths our eyes could never know.
Ultrasound lets us hear the hidden stirrings of life in the womb before the babies grace us with their first cries.
Instruments become extensions of our bodies, prosthetics for our senses meant to enhance everything.

The takeaway of all of this musing, for me, is humility.

If we can’t see or hear 99% of what’s happening, if even our “extra senses” are still just tiny keys in an infinite lock, then judgment about what is “real” or “possible” should really be a lot more flexible than it is today.

We don’t know everything.

Stop letting your mind and heart be so set on this decision or that that it invites hate into your heart. Be openminded to the musings of others and graceful enough to understand that you don’t understand everything, and that’s okay, because none of us do.

Reads You Might Enjoy:

Michele Gargiulo http://michelegargiulo.com
Next

Chartreuse: The Secret Elixir of Monks, Mystics, and Modern Drinkers