The Earth teams with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. Here, author and Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to receive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter Beatles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the earths magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discovered that a crocodiles scaly face is as sensitive as a lovers fingertip and the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learned that bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes and what dogs smell on the street. We hear stories of discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many sensory mysteries that remain unresolved. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, an ImmenseWorld takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage… Not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.“

ISBN: 9780593133231