Watch: How Animals and People See the World Differently | National Geographic

[Music] What most people think of when they look at the world, they think other animals probably see the world pretty much the same way. Only with time do we realize that, of course, other animals don't see the same things we see. That takes us to a sort of a philosophical question: what is the animal actually seeing?

It's impossible to know because it goes into a brain that's very alien to ours. It goes through processes that we don't use when we process visual stimuli. The animal does things with that information that we don't do, so it's really hard to know. The most simple eyes just tell an animal when it's light and when it's dark.

Then you got eyes like ours that have color vision and very, very good spatial vision and can see very complex detail. The development of eyes can be categorized into four stages, from simple to complex. Stage one is the simplest form: light falling on just a few photo receptors allows an animal to sense light and dark.

At stage two, organisms can now tell which direction light is coming from. In stage three, two distinct eyes appear. The first is a cued eye with more photo receptors; the second is a compound eye that adds more cups. Both types in stage three can produce crude images of objects.

In stage four, the most advanced eyes perform complex visual tasks. Lenses, corneas, and irises focus light on photo receptors, creating sharp, clear vision. This entire evolution, from simple to complex, could theoretically happen in less than half a million years.

People have asked me, um, if I could be any animal at all, what animal would I like to be? In terms of their vision, it would only be right to say that since I work on them so much of my time, I would really like to know how mantis see the world. Their perception of the world is so different, both in terms of their sense of color, their sense of parts of the spectrum that we don't see at all, and also the way that their eyes are multiple, so that each eye sees the same thing multiple times from different points of view.

I think I’d probably, if I got myself into the mind of a mantis, I’d have no idea what was going on, and I would never be able to tell myself, "Oh, this is how they see." That's the thing that I'm afraid of, but I'd still like to spend at least a few minutes seeing how a mantis sees the [Music] world.