WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT?

At the Museum, we have built a space to cohabitate with the bats. “What is it Like to be a Bat?” is an exhibit that consists of a large bat roost, hoisted 20 feet in the air by a wooden post. Whirling through the night sky, hunting in echos, bats are often unseen. They spend their nights (our days) huddled closely together upside down. As the sun sets, they flock the sky! As a bat beats its wings, it sings out in ultrasonic pulses. This sound is unhearable to our human ears, but not to a bats. Not only do bats hear this song, they hear the echoes that bounce back from these pulses. These echoes build the experience of the bats world in a similar way that our eyes use reflections of light to build ours.

What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagle asked us this question in his 1974 paper on consciousness. He describes the difficulty in using reductive methods in science to probe “subjective experience” or consciousness. Explaining that we still do not have a way of defining, measuring, or really understanding consciousness other than that we all seem to agree that we are experiencing it. Experience is key. Towards the ground, where the people walk around, is a small box that looks very similarly to the bat roost that hovers high above it. Inside this box is an ultrasonic bat detecting device hooked to a telephone. This is a frequency mixer that supplements human hearing so that a we might be able to hear ultrasonic frequencies that are typically beyond our natural limits.