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Ed Yong: The Incredible World of Animal Senses
Ed Yong, science journalist and author in conversation with Michael John Gorman (BIOTOPIA) about the incredible world of animal senses. They discuss how animals perceive the world, what humans can learn from animals, how we change our behavior in consequence and how we can better protect the animals by understanding their senses. Join us and explore the power of animal perception!
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Jackie Higgins: Exploring the Animal Kingdom Reveals Our Secret Senses
Jackie Higgins, wildlife documentary director and author in conversation with Samara Rubinstein (BIOTOPIA), exploring numerous marvels and extraordinary stories of the sentient world in zoology. They are holding up a mirror to better understand what we can learn from animals and how we humans relate to them.
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Jonathon Keats: Recipes for Climate Adaptation
Tasting Tomorrow: Jonathon Keats, experimental philosopher and artist, about the challenges we are facing in the future, regarding climate change and food - especially creating traditional recipes in a changing environment in future generations. Which substitutes will we be growing in different climatic regions in the future, in order to maintain our heritage foods?
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Ophelia Deroy & Charles Spence: Surprising Sensory Connections
Ophelia Deroy (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and Charles Spence (University of Oxford) talk about surprising sensory connections, fascinating associations many people experience and explore extraordinary questions like: Can you taste shapes or feel colors?
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Alex Jordan: The Seismic World of Spiders
Alex Jordan, scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, shows us the fascinating sensory world of spiders, including their dangerous liaisons, surprising team-work and elaborate building techniques. Highlights of his research include the delicate interaction between spiders and their webs, as well as their sophisticated form of seismic sensing. And did you know, that spiders also have REM-sleep?
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Harald Luksch: Where do I look if I don't know what I'm seeing?
Harald Luksch, neurobiologist at the Technical University of Munich, gives us new insights into the world of vision in this exciting lecture. Under the title "Seeing as a complex performance of the brain" he shows us amazing and funny phenomena of the sense of sight, both in humans and in animals. What to do if we don't know exactly what we're looking at?
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Conny Kopp-Scheinpflug: Tuning out - Hearing at older age
How does our sense of hearing change over the course of our lives? How is hearing loss in old age related to dementia? Conny Schopp-Kleinpflug from the Biocenter at the LMU in Munich explains why we have to learn how to locate sound sources as children and how we find it increasingly difficult to perceive high frequencies as we get older. She also has some very useful tips to help us keep our hearing fit for as long as possible!
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Stefan Leutenegger: How do mobile robots perceive their environment?
Robotics expert Stefan Leutenegger shows how robots find their way around their environment, how they react to changes and how they can learn to interact with their surroundings and people. He also explains that machines follow similar principles in such complex tasks as, for example, we humans do when we move through the world.
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Anna Vogeler: Dancers of the night: How bats orient themselves
Bats are fascinating creatures! Also in terms of their sensory perception. Anna Vogeler from the Coordination Office for Bat Protection Southern Bavaria takes us into a world of the night, where seeing with your ears is quite normal, smelling of fish and pee is sexy and where vampires donate blood to each other.
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Étienne Serbe-Kamp: The flytrap asks the mimosa: "Do we have senses?"
Do flytraps and mimosas have brains? Étienne Serbe-Kamp from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence shows us here how much our senses are similar to those of plants and that plants also have the same action potentials as we do. Mimosa and flytrap react a bit slower than we do, but that is also due to the different demands we have. And can Venus flytraps really count?
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Daniela Sammler: Concert of Neurons: Biological Origins of Musical Senses
Musicality is more deeply rooted in our biology than previously thought. Daniela Sammler from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics explains to us that our sense of tact is already predictable in our genes and that this anchoring in biology may be the reason why everyone in this world has and makes music. But how are we more like cockatoos than monkeys? -
Martin Heß: A fish sees something you don't see
Does the anchovy see better than us? In this interesting lecture, Martin Heß, zoologist at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, shows us how anchovies are able to recognize their food better and what advantages it has to be able to perceive polarized light. Observe the exciting effect that a polarizing filter can have on our perception! -
Thomas Wachtler: Can we trust our senses? What optical illusions reveal about our brain
How do optical illusions come about and why do they make so much biological sense? In this interesting lecture, Thomas Wachtler from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich takes us on an exciting journey into the world of the phenomena of our sense of sight and our optical perceptions. Is it so easy to trick our brain, or are these important perceptual abilities under natural conditions? -
Juan Ruiz: Seeing with your ears! Theory and practice of echolocation
Seeing with your ears? Yes it's possible, as Perceptual Mobility trainer Juan Ruiz proves in this presentation. He is blind and relies on echolocation instead of his eyes, like a bat! Thanks to years of practice, he can easily orient himself using his clicking sounds, move through rooms without bumping into objects, and even recognize the texture of different materials!
On the stage in the Hubertus Hall of Schloss Nymphenburg, scientists from the Max Planck Society, TUM and LMU Munich, among others, gave insights into their current research on the sensory perception of different species. Biologist Anna Vogeler, for example, showed how bats orient themselves.
Nature filmmaker and author Jackie Higgins took the audience on a journey through little-known corners of the animal kingdom - including the star-nosed mole with its amazing sense of smell - and gave them a glimpse of the potential that unconsciously resides in us humans as well. And the Malaysian-British science journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong also took the audience on a journey into the incredible world of animal senses, the subject of his book "An Immense World," and raised awareness of the importance of good science education.
The sound spectrum of Mother Nature - from birdsongs to stridulation sounds of grasshoppers to bioelectrical recordings of fungal webs and plant root systems - was heard during the musical evening program with biologist and musician Dominik Eulberg on Saturday and multi-instrumentalist and composer Cosmo Sheldrake on Sunday.
The fully booked themed tours for the senses in the Botanical Garden on flowers and their pollinators as well as exotic aromatic and spice plants were also very popular. The numerous hands-on stations in the BIOTOPIA Lab, in the Museum Mensch und Natur and in the castle courtyards were particularly popular: See the world through the eyes of "dichromats" - in yellow and blue. The color design and poster for the festival were also yellow and blue. All in all, an eye-catcher.
Get lost in the multisensory labyrinth and find yourself again. Create your own scent compositions from aroma molecules and oils. Explore the "scent alphabet" of Helmholtz Zentrum München. Play feel-memory and make a kaleidoscope. See the sensory organs of ticks under the microscope.
With more than 60 program points at the four locations, young and old alike got their money's worth. And the living chameleon, which provided the motto "Seeing the world through different eyes", was very popular.
Download SENSE - Program (in German)
Download SENSE - Poster (in German)
Download SENSE - Social Media Toolkit
Download Sense - location map (in German)
