Forms of Experience

Experience lies at the heart of every living life.

Every animal continuously interacts with its environment—finding food, avoiding predators, caring for offspring, exploring unfamiliar places, or resting in safety. Yet behaviour is only part of the story. Behind many actions may lie internal experiences: pain, pleasure, fear, curiosity, or the motivation to play, explore, and form social bonds. Although these experiences cannot be observed directly, they shape how animals respond to the world around them.

Understanding subjective experience is one of the greatest challenges in biology, neuroscience, and animal welfare science. We can never fully know what another individual experiences—not even another human. Nevertheless, by combining evidence from behaviour, physiology, cognition, and neuroscience, researchers are gradually uncovering how different species may perceive and experience their worlds.

Some experiences appear to be widespread across the animal kingdom, while others may differ profoundly depending on the nervous system, ecology, and evolutionary history of each species. Exploring these similarities and differences not only deepens our understanding of animal minds but also helps us make more informed decisions about animal welfare, conservation, and our relationship with other living beings.

This section explores some of the most fundamental forms of subjective experience—from consciousness and pain to curiosity, play, social bonding, sleep, and dreaming—highlighting what science currently knows and where important questions remain unanswered.