Book completed
Jun. 26th, 2023 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeAn Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong. This is an extraordinary book. It could very well be the most interesting book I've ever read, considering how often I found myself exclaiming "wow!" or "huh!" out loud while reading it.
Yong reviews research (and meets with the scientists who did it, whenever possible) on each of the many senses known to exist in the animal world. He starts with smell and taste, then moves on to two aspects of vision: light and color. Next comes pain - and the associated sense that happens first, nociception, which detects harm but doesn't necessarily lead to pain unless there's a point to it, as in, the organism might learn to avoid it in the future. Then he talks about touch and other ways of sensing movement physically, like whiskers. Then sensing vibrations, which can happen on its own or become processed as sound. Then comes echolocation, then sensing and using electric fields, and finally magnetic fields. Then there's a chapter on how they all work together, and the book ends with one on how humans are affecting other creatures' sensory worlds, e.g., with light and noise pollution.
Again and again, the examples amazed me. I'll have to read it again. Did you know that human eyesight (resolution) is better than pretty much all animals except birds of prey, but that almost all other animals can see ultraviolet and we don't get to? Did you know that many bats make incredibly loud sounds, so it's fortunate that they're too high for us to hear? We're talking in the range from chain saws to jet engines. There's a kind of sea scallop that has dozens of eyes, even though it doesn't have a brain to integrate the information together. Dolphin echolocation can help them distinguish steel and brass at a distance, and scientists have no idea how that works.
It's all fascinating.
Yong reviews research (and meets with the scientists who did it, whenever possible) on each of the many senses known to exist in the animal world. He starts with smell and taste, then moves on to two aspects of vision: light and color. Next comes pain - and the associated sense that happens first, nociception, which detects harm but doesn't necessarily lead to pain unless there's a point to it, as in, the organism might learn to avoid it in the future. Then he talks about touch and other ways of sensing movement physically, like whiskers. Then sensing vibrations, which can happen on its own or become processed as sound. Then comes echolocation, then sensing and using electric fields, and finally magnetic fields. Then there's a chapter on how they all work together, and the book ends with one on how humans are affecting other creatures' sensory worlds, e.g., with light and noise pollution.
Again and again, the examples amazed me. I'll have to read it again. Did you know that human eyesight (resolution) is better than pretty much all animals except birds of prey, but that almost all other animals can see ultraviolet and we don't get to? Did you know that many bats make incredibly loud sounds, so it's fortunate that they're too high for us to hear? We're talking in the range from chain saws to jet engines. There's a kind of sea scallop that has dozens of eyes, even though it doesn't have a brain to integrate the information together. Dolphin echolocation can help them distinguish steel and brass at a distance, and scientists have no idea how that works.
It's all fascinating.
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Date: 2023-06-28 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-06-28 03:04 pm (UTC)You find the best books! :-)
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