Ed Yong, on his book, An Immense World:
There really are a lot of scientists who have sensory divergence, who have things like colorblindness or prosopagnosia, the kinds of things that some people might bill as disorders and that I’m choosing to bill as perceptual differences. These kinds of differences make people a little bit more attuned to the ways in which animals might be different. If you know that the way you perceive the world is atypical, you’re more likely to cue into atypicality in the creatures you are studying.
And a lot of them have arts backgrounds. There are a lot of painters and musicians among people who study vibrations and sounds. And I think that’s valuable too because the problem with thinking about the sensors— which folks like Thomas Nagel and others wrote about—is that it’s an inherently impossible task. We can get some way towards understanding how a bat or a whale or a dog experiences the world, but we’ll never get that entirely. There’s always going to be this chasm where it can only be leapt over through imagination rather than through empiricism. Empiricism can guide our imagination, but we still have to make that final leap on our own. To really get at this, you need to fuse the sciences and the arts. You need to think more broadly than just the products of research papers. And people who are artists have an edge in thinking in this way. They are people who are paid to let their imaginations run riot.