An Immense World
Ed Yong's survey of animal senses — the argument that every species inhabits its own sensory world, that ours is one narrow slice, and that understanding this requires deliberately dismantling human assumptions.
- First published
- 2022
- Publisher
- Random House
- Pages
- 464
- Shelf
- Science
- Level
- Core
- ISBN-13
- 9780593133248
Record checked against
Catalogue note
- Reads as
- ReflectiveChanges how you see rather than what you do.
- Level
- Core / BuildingAssumes general familiarity with the subject.
- Approach
- Theoretical
- Written for
- Curious general readers, Readers with some grounding
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Read this if
- You are curious what is actually happening in the brain.
- You want to understand living things by how they came to be.
- You want to understand a place, or what we are doing to one.
- You want a book that changes how you see things rather than what you do tomorrow.
- You know roughly how the subject works and want the fuller account.
Umwelt
Yong's organising concept, borrowed from the biologist Jakob von Uexküll: the sensory world an animal actually inhabits, determined by what it can detect and what those detections mean to it.
The discipline the book imposes is constant. Every chapter requires setting aside what a scene looks like to a person and asking what is available to a creature with different equipment, and Yong returns to correcting his own lapses throughout.
The discipline is constant: asking not what a scene looks like, but what is available to different equipment.
Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book
Smell and taste
His opening chapters on chemical detection, which he argues is the most widespread and least appreciated sense.
His treatment of dogs is the standout — not simply more sensitive but sampling differently, with continuous airflow, separate channels for breathing and smelling, and the ability to detect direction from the difference between nostrils. His point that a dog's walk is an act of reading rather than exercise reframes an ordinary experience.
Light and colour
His chapters on vision, including the ranges other animals see that we do not: ultraviolet patterns on flowers and feathers, polarised light used for navigation, and the mantis shrimp's many photoreceptor types.
His treatment of the mantis shrimp is a useful correction to a widespread claim. More receptor types does not mean richer colour discrimination, and the experimental evidence suggests it discriminates worse than we do while processing faster.
Pain and the difficulty of knowing
His chapter on nociception and on the genuine difficulty of establishing whether an animal experiences pain rather than merely responding to damage.
His treatment of the fish pain debate is careful about what the evidence can and cannot settle, and it is the clearest example in the book of a question where our own experience is the only model available and is probably misleading.
Surface vibrations and sound
His chapters on hearing, on infrasound used by elephants over long distances, on ultrasound, and on the vibrational world of insects communicating through plant stems.
The vibrational material is the most surprising, because it describes a channel of communication that is abundant, well studied and completely unavailable to unaided human perception.
Echolocation
His extended treatment of bats and of what it is like to build a world from returning echoes — including the evidence that echolocating animals perceive shape, texture and motion rather than merely distance.
He engages directly with Nagel's question about what it is like to be a bat, and his answer is that we can establish a great deal about the information available while the experience remains inaccessible.
Electric and magnetic senses
His chapters on electroreception in fish, on the electric fields used for both sensing and communication, and on magnetoreception in birds and turtles.
His honesty about magnetoreception is notable: the behaviour is well established, the mechanism is still uncertain, and he presents the competing hypotheses without resolving them.
Sensory pollution
His closing argument and the book's practical turn: artificial light and human noise are not merely unpleasant but destroy the sensory worlds animals depend on.
His case that light pollution disrupts navigation, reproduction and predation across a very wide range of species, and that it is among the most easily reversible forms of environmental harm, is the most actionable material in the book.
Light and noise pollution destroy sensory worlds, and are among the most easily reversed harms we cause.
Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book
The method
Yong reports from laboratories and field sites, describing the specific experiments that established each finding rather than summarising conclusions.
The effect is that a reader learns how these things are known, which is unusual in natural history writing and is what makes the book's claims assessable rather than merely striking.
What it changes
Its cumulative effect is a permanent adjustment to how one regards ordinary animals: the dog, the bird at the window, the insect on a leaf, each occupying a world that overlaps ours only partially.
That reframing is the book's real content, and it survives forgetting the individual facts.
What to take away
- 01Umwelt: each species has its own worldOurs is one narrow slice, and reading the book requires constantly correcting for it.
- 02A dog's walk is readingContinuous airflow, separated channels and directional comparison make it a different act from ours.
- 03More photoreceptors is not better colourThe mantis shrimp discriminates worse than we do and processes faster, which corrects a popular claim.
- 04Vibration is an abundant hidden channelInsects communicating through plant stems occupy a well-studied world we cannot perceive unaided.
- 05Light pollution is reversible harmIt disrupts navigation, reproduction and predation broadly, and costs less to fix than almost anything else.
