An Immense World
New York Times), “dazzling” (The Wall Street Journal) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong “One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
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- Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand.
"It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."
- Light pollution affects behavior of most animals we bother to study, it's only one topic of many in the book but Ed Yong's 2022 book An Immense World covers this for insects in particular. Some of it can be mitigated mostly by simply changing the color of the light or frequency of flashing.
- If you're interested in how different creatures perceive the world, the book "An Immense World" by Ed Yong covers a very wide range of sensory experiences including echolocation.
- This book gets recommended a lot here but in case you missed it, An Immense World (2022) by Ed Yong contains a ton of examples of animals sensing the world differently than we do - including electrical sensors and different frame rates of acquisition. He doesn't address it but it calls into question in my mind many of the studies about consciousness in other animals that deny its existence, like the mirror test.
- This is a really short blog post about a book that apparently concentrates on sound for underwater life but for a broader sampling, as recommended by others, An Immense World by Ed Yong among other lifeforms goes into research on ocean and river dwelling creatures and it's alot more than just sound, just the sensors for detecting current/movement and electrical signals and the wider visual spectrum just off the top of my head.
- If you're a layperson interested in these sensory questions, I highly recommend the book An Immense World by Ed Yong. It's a 400-something page tour through the many senses animals have and we (mostly) don't. It might have the highest density of truly cool animal facts per page of anything I've ever read, despite being written for adults who maybe haven't considered themselves the audience for fun animal facts in decades.
