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

"Pulitzer-winning journalist Yong reveals in this eye-opening survey animals' world through their own perceptions...Every animal is 'enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble,' he writes, or its own 'perceptual world'...Yong's tour covers vision (mantis shrimp have '12 photoreceptor classes'), sound (birds, researchers suggest, hear in a similar range as humans but they hear faster), and nociception, the tactile sense that sends danger signals (which is so widespread that it exists among 'creatures separated by around 800 million years of evolution')...Yong ends with a warning against light and sound pollution, which can confuse and disturb animals' lives, and advocation that 'natural sensescapes' ought to be preserved and restored...He's a strong writer and makes a convincing case against seeing the world as only humans do: 'By giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be right in front of us."

"We may feel like we are the masters of our planet, having mapped every inch of its landmass and stared into the guts of an atom, but when it comes to understanding what it's like to be a songbird using the earth's magnetic field to navigate across continents, we barely know where to start."

"makes otherness seem tantalizingly out of reach."

"Like a lot of great science writing, An Immense World is a catalog of such wonders ..."

"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."

"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 ..."

"While this title is perfect for adult nature lovers, the accessibility of Yong's approach also makes this a wonderful gift for high school or college students interested in science."

"This, in itself, is a major achievement."

"It helps that he has a fantastic cast of characters ..."

"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."