An Immense World
Scallops have nearly 200 eyes, dolphins can see your bones, and catfish are swimming tongues. This world is more immense than you could ever imagine---dive into it in this book.
If you have ever found yourself wondering what it is like to be a bat, as Thomas Nagel famously pondered, An Immense World is probably the closest account we have that allows us to truly consider what a bat experiences, along with many other animals Yong reports on. The way animals experience the world is both similar and vastly dissimilar to how we experience it, something that is easy to take for granted. Yong weaves a narrative journey through the world of different animal senses, showing us the wonders of how the world presents itself to the creatures of planet Earth. Although we cannot know for certain “what it is like” to be any other creature, Yong shows us that the way we experience it is far from the only way. Yong, a Pulitzer prize winning scientific journalist, has a way of writing that brings you right there with him as he speaks to different researchers and observes the animals he reports on, slowly uncovering the path to our understanding of what animals sense. Reading this book truly feels like being let in on a huge secret, one which sits unobservable to us on a daily basis. The secret being the marvelous complexity and depth of planet Earth through the many eyes, ears, and sense organs of its creatures.
This book is not only a beautiful painting of our immense, sensory-vibrant world, but a call for action to fight against the human activities that are destroying it. The noise and light pollution constantly being generated by humans has become so commonplace that we tend to not even notice it, or we can’t notice it, like the quick flashing of lights that is too fast for our eyes to perceive, but to many animals is incredibly disruptive to their natural behavior. We might not be able to completely eradicate this problem, because our technologies are so pervasive and useful to modern life, but there are ways we can minimize the impact, which Yong describes. Most of all, Yong asks us to step outside of our own sensory bubbles and consider that the sensory world we notice and care about is not the same one that a dog or a fish does. So buckle up, because this book is a wild and illusory adventure into the rich world of sensations, from sight and sound to magnetic and electrical.