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Paper short abstract:

During COVID, I took to the woods for daily walks; my only certainty in uncertain times. Walking expanded my sensory frame (my umvelt) for reading the environment. This paper draws on a year of walking to trace links between sensory experiences, cognitive shifts, and walking as "slow" research.

Paper long abstract:

In "An Immense World," Ed Yong explores the concept of umwelt – the unique sensory world of an organism - noting that an organism’s senses filter through multiple stimuli to capture what is most relevant and to filter out what is not useful. Those filters create a sense of certainty about food, shelter, threats/allies, or mates. When COVID sent most people indoors, I took to the woods for daily walks. As a heightened sensory experience, walking was my only certainty in uncertain times. Each day I became more aware of my umwelt and how I read the environment.

Yet, our umwelt is biased. We overlay our five senses onto the umwelt of other organisms, limiting what we might learn about other sensory experiences. While walking reduces the risk of cognitive impairment, it may also enhance cognitive processes. It may heighten awareness of our own umwelt and open our minds to the possibilities of others.

Alexandra Horowitz, in her exploration of a city block through the eyes of eleven “experts,” discovered that viewing our world through different perceptual frames strengthens our ability to take “an informed imaginative leap” toward deeper understanding. As I walked, I began to re-map my community through the experiences of the trails, the birds, the rivers, mushrooms and mushroom hunters, people's backyards, and my own sensory awareness of its history. The result is a “slow” ethnography. This paper draws on a year of walking to explore links between sensory experiences, cognitive shifts, and enhanced cultural understanding.