Inside Cover Blurbs
- Enter a new dimension - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
- 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.
- 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 need to see through other eyes.
- Ed Yong’s first book, I Contain Multitudes, about the amazing partnerships between microbes and animals, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Wellcome Book Prize. It was a New York Times bestseller. He is a science writer on the staff of the Atlantic, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honours. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, the New York Times, Scientific American, and more. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Contents
The Only True Voyage – 3
- Leaking Sacks of Chemicals: Smells and Tastes – 17
- Endless Ways of Seeing: Light – 53
- Rurple, Grurple, Yurple: Color – 84
- The Unwanted Sense: Pain – 117
- So Cool: Heat – 135
- A Rough Sense: Contact and Flow – 156
- The Rippling Ground: Surface Vibrations – 188
- All Ears: Sound – 210
- A Silent World Shouts Back: Echoes – 243
- Living Batteries: Electric Fields – 276
- They Know the Way: Magnetic Fields – 300
- Every Window at Once Uniting the Senses – 320
- Save the Quiet, Preserve the Dark: Threatened Sensescapes – 335
Acknowledgments – 357
Notes – 361
Bibliography – 385
Insert Photo Credits – 431
Index – 433
Book Comment
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)