An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

"I was marveling at those details because I found them weird; but it turns out, if I try to expand my perspective just a bit, they aren't so weird after all ..."

"My admiration for the book is, well, immense ..."

"[Yong's] new book aims to open our eyes to another unseen world...From ultraviolet vision to echolocation, by way of those singing mice, it examines the world of animal senses that extend beyond the limits of our own...It is a delight...Some nonhuman senses are outlandish — a little scary, even...Catfish have taste buds all over their body; if you licked one, Yong observes, 'you'd taste each other'...Rattlesnakes 'see' thermal radiation given off by animals...Seals can hunt down a fish 200 yards away, following its wake through the water with their whiskers...Dolphins use clicks for echolocation, like bats, and can perform an ultrasound examination of their prey so fine-grained that they can differentiate between otherwise identical canisters of water and alcohol...Yong makes heroic efforts to try to understand how any of this might feel...Yong calls his book a 'call for humility,' and it did fill me with a certain awe...But it goes further...Subtly — Yong is never heavy-handed — it prompts a radical rethink about the limits of what we know — what the world is, even...It is quite a book...And, I felt, putting it down, quite a world."

"From bat sonar to dog noses to piscine electric fields, Yong's reporting is layered, seasoned with vivid scenes from laboratories and in the field, interviews with researchers across a spectrum of disciplines ..."

"And sometimes what we miss is breathtaking'...This is science writing at its best."

"In his 1974 essay, 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?' philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that other animals experience a world utterly foreign to us, one nearly impossible to describe...In this follow-up to I Contain Multitudes, Yong, a staff reporter for the Atlantic who won a Pulitzer in 2021 for his reporting on Covid-19, mostly follows the traditional popular science format (travel the world, interview experts), but he takes a different, realistic, and utterly fascinating approach, emphasizing that every organism perceives only a tiny slice of the world accessible to its senses...In a dozen chapters, Yong delivers entertaining accounts of how animals both common and exotic sense the world as well as the often bizarre organs that enable them to do so...Building on Aristotle's traditional five senses, Yong adds expert accounts of 20th-century discoveries of senses for echoes, electricity, and magnetism as well as perceptions we take for granted, including color, pain, and temperature...One of the year's best popular natural histories."

"Ed Yong lays bare the thrilling inadequacy of our own epistemologies and makes plain the central truth that the more we know, the deeper the mystery."

"What Yong never really gets to, however, are animals' inner lives ..."

"Yong tackles the realm of animal senses, taking readers on a fascinating journey backed up by impressive research ..."

"The menagerie of critters and their unique perceptual abilities Yong examines here include the platypus with a bill that detects electric fields, sand scorpions that rely on surface vibrations to hunt prey, the echolocation prowess of bats and dolphins, the ultrafast vision of killer flies, and the outstanding olfaction of elephants...The facts are frequently astonishing...Yong worries about humanity's 'ecological sins,' as sensory pollution—noise, night lighting, chemicals—is ubiquitous...Yong's scientific curiosity and concern for the natural world are contagious...This is 'sense'-ational reading."