An Immense Worldby Ed Yong
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: June 30, 2022
Pages: 449
Genre: Non-fiction, Science
Publisher: Penguin Books
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
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 humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, 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 which lie unsolved.
Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the threads of scent, waves of electromagnetism and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.
I’d been looking forward to this book since I heard it was coming out, and I started it soon after I received it, but Halloween Bingo came up and the book got set aside for the duration of the game. I had to go back and re-read a few bits to refresh my memory before picking it back up. I mention this because the fact that it took me over 100 days to read this book isn’t a reflection on the book itself.
An Immense World is a very readable exploration of how non-human animals perceive the world, with Yong trying very hard to connect the reader to perceptions that he’s the first to admit are almost impossible for us to imagine. Starting with the 5 senses we ourselves use, and how they differ wildly, and sometime dramatically, from animal to animal (peacock shrimp have 16 different visual receptors – we have 4) and why that’s not always the good or bad we imagine it to be, Yong than expands into the senses we can only imagine, like the use of electric and magnetic fields.
He’s right, of course, that it’s impossible to experience the world as another animal does, but occasionally Yong comes close to bringing the reader at least a hint of what that other perception might be like. He does this with a modicum of charts and as little rock-hard science as he can get away with, allowing any reader to expand their thinking without intimidating them. On the other hand, as someone who enjoys rock-hard science, I wasn’t disappointed or left wanting either. I think he found a decent balance between both audiences, and I really appreciated the color photo inserts in my hardcover edition, especially for those animals discussed that I’d never heard of before (knifefish, for example, which generate their own electricity).
There’s a lot to take in here, but I found it all interesting. Enough so that I might re-read this via audiobook in the new year, in hopes that a bit more of what I read will sink in.