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An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.  Ed Yong.  Random House.  NY. 2022.

Hard Cover.  Sewn and Glued.  451 pages.  1.72 lbs.  Color Photo Plates.  Notes.  Bibliography.  Index.

Gifted by a long-time friend.

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The five senses.

I never gave that phrase much thought.  Took it on its face value…of course, the five senses: Sight, Sound, Touch, Taste, and Smell.  Easy.

Leonardo da Vinci explored how the sense of sight can be influenced by whether one pays attention to borders or gradations.  Katy Bowman explores how one touches the earth through their feet can influence their spinal and muscular health.  Charles Spence explores how the sense of taste can be influenced by stimuli for the other senses, such as the color or heft of a plate.

These are just some of the examples of how humans thoroughly examine our five senses to help us understand the larger world around us.

THE five senses. 

How anthropomorphic of us.  As though they were THE only ways in which all creatures understand the world.

Lucky for us, we have Ed Yong and An Immense World to show us a much wider and more diverse array of sensations through which to perceive reality.

At first I was feeling unimpressed.  While the Introduction was captivating, by the end of Chapter 2 I was getting disappointed in the book.  By then, we had already explored Smell and Taste in one chapter, and Vision in the next.  Was this just to be an encyclopedia of trivia factoids with a scant trail connecting each chapter?  I  much prefer a book that puts its topic into a broader context.  Give me the big picture, please.

Fortunately, my judgement was too quick and—ironically—blind.  The next chapter continues exploring Vision, and the following two chapters investigate the sensations of Pain and Heat.  The thread connecting all the chapters becomes larger and brighter.  Yong slowly reveals his skill at writing about a complex topic; a skill he had already shown us in I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life.

By the book’s end I was more than satisfied; I started reading An Immense World again from the beginning; when I do that, I know I’m hooked. 

Yong notes in the introduction that some scientists study other animal senses in order to better understand humans, and some scientists do so to reverse-engineer other animal senses for new technologies.  He claims that An Immense World is written to simply better understand the lives of other animals, not humans. 

But his subtitle betrays him: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.  He is indeed interested in how the study of other animal senses can help broaden our own human knowledge, and I am all the happier for his interest.

The book’s chapters are divided by the various sensations.  While there are chapters on Smells, Tastes, Sights, Touches, and Sounds, there are also chapters on Pain, Heat, Echoes, Electric Fields, and Magnetic Fields.  In fact, his chapter structure follows a broad division of the senses into two categories: chemical and mechanical, with Magnetic Fields possibly belonging to either category or both.

Reading each chapter and learning the details for how smell, taste, or vision are chemical senses while touch, hearing, and electrical senses are mechanical, is where all the fun resides. 

Just how the stimuli of photons are converted into electrical signals, or of how vibrations in the earth are likewise converted into electrical signals, and so on with all stimuli, is both fascinating and dramatic.  I often wanted to learn more details than he could convey in this wide-ranging book.

The thread that ties it all together is the concept of Umwelt. 

Umwelt—a German word, singular here, and plural as Umwelten—is the part of a creature’s surroundings that they can sense and experience.  “…a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten.”  We each have our own bubble of experience.

You could be standing next to a blade of grass with a tick on it.  The tick has no conception of how the sky is a beautiful summer blue, but it sure knows there is a warm body next to it; in the meantime, while marveling at that sky you are completely oblivious to the tick climbing aboard your body.  We each have our own umwelt.

Ultimately, An Immense World is for the betterment of humans.  As Yong notes in the end, “This ability to dip into other Umwelten is our greatest sensory skill.”  We are the only creature on earth capable of knowing what other beings sense and quite possibly “the only one who might care.”

We humans have our five senses to help us experience the world, but while those five senses give us a lush rainbow of wide experiences, our Umwelt is nevertheless limited. 

Dogs smell far better than we do; bees see a different spectrum of light; there are beetles who use the sensation of heat to guide their flight from miles away; some sharks use electrical fields to help them catch prey; and most birds use magnetic fields to help guide their migrations.  We humans pale in comparison to each of these animals’ specific abilities.

How we humans know what we know is so much more informed simply by paying attention to how other creatures sense the world of reality.  Our human bubble of experience, our Umwelt, our conscious experience of the world, is not the whole truth to what the world entails.

An Immense World could be fodder for any newly-aspiring scientist looking for a field to study, especially one who likes working with animals.  Just place the book in front of a fan so the pages are continually flitting back and forth and then throw a dart at it.  Whatever page the dart lands upon, one could find a lifetime’s worth of material to study in-depth.

Likewise for any science fiction/fantasy writer.  There’s enough material in here to imagine any matter of alien creature in any sort of world.

The book is simple enough, and well-written enough, that one could read a portion at night before drifting off to dream about it; then pick it up the next night and continue reading.  Yet the book is also challenging enough that by the end, one has absorbed the overriding importance of Umwelt.

Once again I am confronted with the concept of perception and just how challenging it can be to ascertain: what is real and how humans know what we know.

If I were to ask Yong a question, it would be about sensory systems, which are collectively the sense organs, the neurons that transmit their signals, and the parts of the brain that process the signals; in short, the mechanical physical constructs that allow creatures to sense the world.

Throughout An Immense World, Yong conveys how the abilities of our five senses are vastly expanded upon by studying other creatures’ sensory systems, including stimuli we don’t normally associate with a sense, such as electric and magnetic fields.  I just finished reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book, Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, in which he marvels at one point about how science has expanded human sensory experience.

To Yong I would ask: Could there also be sensory systems—physical constructs—for the stimuli in the universe that Tyson mentions: radiation, microwaves, gravity, gamma rays, radio waves, or barometric pressure?  Perhaps that is food for thought, research, and/or science fiction.

Other posts that mention this review: The Consciousness Instinct