Thank you Random House ​and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book.
I must say, this science book stands out as one of the finest I have ever read. If you have even the slightest curiosity about how animals perceive the world, I wholeheartedly recommend delving into its pages. Prepare to be astonished, as you probably never knew that humans could echo-locate. However, this book goes beyond that, revealing the remarkable capabilities of other animals, far surpassing our own.

The author's explanations of various concepts and experiments are presented with utmost clarity, making it easy to grasp the fascinating insights into the animal kingdom. To enhance the experience, I opted for the audiobook version, which was expertly narrated by the author themselves, adding an extra layer of immersion and authenticity. This book is a true gem for anyone interested in exploring the intricacies of how creatures adapt and thrive in their unique environments.

Umwelt is a way to describe what we can perceive around us. Humans can see rays of light, trees swaying in the breeze, and a rabbit running under a brush, but how does each animal or insect sense? Ed Yong explores these concepts in his new book An Immense World.

Yong starts his book with a human observing a chain reaction of events. But so much that happens cannot be viewed by a human. Mammals and ants can see more colors and spectrums, giving them extra abilities to survive or stalk their prey. A scientist accidentally discovers ultraviolet rays when ants avoid an invisible spectrum of color from a prism. The color, a sort of Yerple, cannot be seen by humans but by almost every other mammal. There are countless examples of these amazing natural occurrences in this book.

I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

A beautiful and engaging book about how animals interact with the world through the senses. Ed Yong is an amazing writer and just pulls you into the subject with his enthusiasm and perspective on everything he writes about. He is always reminding us that we are all connected and demonstrates why that is so important. I love how inclusive and compassionate he is in his writing. Definitely read everything he writes for the Atlantic as well.

I read part of this as an e-arc and the rest as an audiobook. The physical copy is full of interesting footnotes that don't get included in the audiobook, but the audiobook is beautifully narrated by Ed Yong.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the e-arc.

My family is probably glad that I'm finished with this book because I have not been shy about sharing all of the interesting tidbits that I learned about animals and the ways that they perceive the world that are so very different from our own senses. Every time I take my dogs for walks now, I consider their umwelt or sensory bubble, and how much more important smells are to them than they are to me. The book deepened my understanding and curiosity about animals and served as a good reminder that human perception is hugely limited. Highly recommend!

Beautiful, enlightening and brilliant! This is a must read in nature discovery. Well written and immensely valuable.

I can't decide if I enjoyed this one or his previous book "I Contain Multitudes", This is one of the best science books I've read. It kept me engaged the whole time-especially reading about how we humans are changing the environment so much and the effects it has on wildlife. It is a fascinating read- to learn more about animals' senses, their way around the world, and how they live each day. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys science, and wildlife or has a general curiosity about animals. I also loved that each chapter is a stand-alone, so if one isn't up your alley, you can always go to the next and won't be lost.

Thank you to the author and publishers via NetGalley for this book in return for my honest thoughts and review.

The cover is alluring, and Ed Yong is so impressive. But the book is too general for both scientists and serious biology students. The book presents as a survey with a reach that is wide, but not deep. Some very interesting information is hidden within, and it's information that would normally not be accessible to the general public who do not have access to scientific journals. But then, information in the journals is not ready for general consumption, but meant to be inter-lab communication about current hyppotheses that are still undergoing research.

A book that's full of interesting & engaging information about the senses, more than the five we normally think of, found in animals. Happily, it's free of the excessive preaching with the subtext of "two legs bad, four legs good" that mars most nature writing these days. That is until the last chapter which is non-stop preaching. Skipping that chapter makes the book worth it.

In An Immense World, Ed Yong explores the many ways our fellow living things receive and react to information from their environment. It is a fascinating read that opens the mind to the wonders of this world and how similar and strange we all are.

Another great entry in the genre of science for the layman. This gets rather involved and the sections on each sense may be a little too long for the casual reader, but those that endure will be delighted. I do believe I exclaimed, "Oh! How cool!" a few times, which does get you weird looks if you're listening to the audiobook with headphones.

Excellent addition to your science and nature collection.

After reading several glowing reviews in publications I trust, I was eager to read An Immense World for myself. I am a great fan of books and programs that see Man as a part of the natural world, not a superior life form. The focus of this book is to educate the reader to all the senses and abilities that birds, insects, reptiles, and other mammals use to survive, many of which are not part of the human toolkit. We have always acknowledged that other creatures may see better, run faster and use other senses we share with greater finesse. But until recently even scientists took for granted that our senses were of a higher order than the rest of the animal kingdom. It was hard to comprehend that,, for instance, senses like echolocation and the response to electricity enable other life forms to experience their world in ways that we can’t.
Shifting the focus from Man encourages the reader to see the miracle of each creature and it’s place in the world. The author presents this concept early and reinforces it throughout the book.. Each chapter deals with a different sense and is heavily footnoted. In addition an extensive bibliography is included. I could easily see this book as the text for a university course. There were so many research studies included that my inadequate human brain was on overload. As it was, it took about a month for me to plow through to the end.
If you love reading the findings of scientists in the field, this book will satisfy you. For me, I found it top heavy with research detail and I was just glad I wasn’t expected to take an exam at the end.

An immense book!

Top line: Highly recommend! This is a very well-researched and well-written work in the several ways that animals sense their material surroundings. It genuinely makes you look at the world and the creatures in it differently. I have looked differently at our cat and fish in aquaria since reading this.

The amount of detail, both in terms of the diversity of animals and the technical explanations of their senses is massive, and yet highly engaging and you are not bored for a second! In particular, I really appreciate that the science has been explained with great analogies that will help non-scientific readers appreciate the technical beauty of various sensory systems.

If there is one major quibble, it is in the precise notion of Umwelt - the term coined by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll to describe the internal, perceptual world of animals (including us). Is this supposed to be the conscious experience of the sensory stimulus as apparently Uexküll envisioned? Or it is just a sensory stream without invoking consciousness? When Yong talks about how we interact with dogs, he seems to assume the consciousness aspect, but in taking about for example scallops, it appears that the sensory umwelt is more “robotic.” And while we can agree that we are harming the planet not just chemically but also along sensory dimensions, I find this itself a very anthropocentric view – after all, some billion years ago a whole group of organisms completely altered the chemical composition of our atmosphere, “polluting” it with oxygen.

Nevertheless, this is a minor quibble, and does not detract from the rest of the wonderful book.!

NB: A copy of the book was provided by netgalley/Random House for review

An amazing journey into the world of animal senses, revealing how they experience the world differently from each other and from humans, Yong's deadpan humor makes this a fun read as well.

Included as a top pick in bimonthly June New Releases post, which highlights and promotes upcoming releases of the month (link attached)

Recommended to folks who binge nature documentaries for self-care (I am a person who has watched Planet Earth twenty times just to reduce general anxiety). The audiobook (narrated by the author Ed Yong) has intense David Attenborough vibes: British accent, measured, and soothing. The science is accessible/understandable for readers who struggle with scientific jargon.

I kinda regret not reading a deadtree version because apparently there are interesting footnotes (which are omitted in audiobook). Ah well. That’s what rereads are for. Read via audio.

A decade ago, Frans De Waal questioned Man’s misguided evaluations of animals, because they were always measured against Man’s own performance. Now, Ed Yong has put together just an overwhelming collection of stories and studies to describe the many senses animals employ that Man cannot even begin to experience. In An Immense World, Yong looks at how animals operate without the baselines of Man, for a trip to another planet, Earth, filled with strange beings people think they know, as well as endless ones they clearly don’t know at all. It promotes awe, wonder, and huge respect for even the simplest forms of life people take for granted or ignore.

What he found was that virtually everything in living beings is a tool. Everything has a purpose and an effect. Nothing is wasted. Navigating and communicating are the major uses, but far from the only things senses do.

Yong groups the stories by senses, 13 chapters of them, where tools/senses like echolocation, sonar, and magnetic and electric fields hold their own among sight, hearing, touch and taste. He finds experts – passionate scientists - who have devoted their lives to understanding a single kind of spider or owl, electric eel or parasitic wasp, in an absolutely endless variety of skills they employ to be as effective and competent as Man is in his world. All these animals are intensely sophisticated beings, and the more scientists study them, the more astounded they become. Man takes everything about animals at face value, when the exact opposite is needed – and merited. We haven’t even scratched the surface of how the world works.

There is a single word in An Immense World that jumps out at the reader, time and time again: unclear. lt is unclear how some unusual organs work, what data the animal receives, and how, or why they have this function when they also have that one. As much as we know, we will never get inside the head of another animal, because we would look at their lives with our minds and never theirs. And we will never appreciate how to employ their gifts as they do. We can never see what they see, smell what they smell, or sense what they sense, from a drop of water on a pond surface to an electron pushing away from another electron. It all remains unclear.

Yong gives the example of the octopus, with a total of nine large brains – one in each arm and a central brain that does not rule over the others. We cannot even conceive of what that is like. Yet the octopus is highly intelligent and lavishly talented. It can be curious, playful, determined, petulant and loving. It is a sentient being. It has also survived far longer than Man has or is likely to. In other words, scientists’ ignorance of how life works is not merely in its primitive stages today; we will never understand it completely. Let alone learn from it. In an endnote, Yong says of the octopus: (Philosopher Peter) “Godfrey-Smith marvelously compares the central brain to a conductor and the arms to jazz players, the latter ‘inclined to improvisation and accepting only so much direction.’” This animal deserves much appreciative study, and not ending up in a salad.

Man is all about vision, his favorite and most developed sense. So any being that doesn’t have the same vision as Man is looked down on. But Yong finds hundreds of different kinds of eyes, all with different abilities, pluses and minuses.

Ants see ultraviolet. This was discovered 150 years ago when a scientist held a prism over an ant colony. The light, now in its rainbow components, caused the ants to scramble away from the pure colors - even beyond the rainbow where the scientist saw nothing to cause them consternation. It was the ultraviolet range, that ants see and Man does not. It also transpires that sunflowers have “targets” of ultraviolet areas in their flowers, to attract birds that see UV. To Man, it is just a gray seed repository. There is a lot going on without our knowledge. Right in front of our eyes.

This visual prejudice is also harmful. Smooth surfaces and windows can be invisible to those using echolocation, for example, killing millions as they travel at night. Light pollution misdirects flying insects and newly hatched turtles. Manmade undersea noises prevent communication by all kinds of wildlife that turn out to be enormously chatty. Even just yanking the dog away from the telephone pole is cruel treatment for a being whose favorite thing in the world is strewn garbage. Yong’s achievement is to take animal senses for what they really are, and not how weak they might be in parking lot lighting of bluish white or fluorescent orange.

Meanwhile, vision itself comes in astonishing varieties. Some vision is restricted to just a few degrees – but is razor sharp there. Some vision only counts looming objects and does not paint the entire picture. Different parts of eyes provide different kinds of visual data. Some animals have innumerable eyes all over their bodies, all providing data. Others have no use for eyes at all. There are animals with flicker rates so high that Man’s vision would be like looking at slides to them. For Man, the rate is 60 Hz (cycles per second), but many dragonflies, bees and flies see at 350. Some nocturnal toads see at less than .025. They all survey the same scene much differently than people do.

As for color, it depends on the cones in the eye. Two will provides tens of thousands of colors, mostly grays, yellows and blues. Dogs are in this category. Three, like Man’s, add greens and reds, multiplying that to several million shades. Four – tens of millions of colors. Trichromatic mammals see more kinds of colorful fruits, that dichromats miss completely in tests. The dichromats however, are far better at finding insects among leaves and branches because of their intense exploitation of the grayscale.

Birds are mostly tetrachromatic, able to pinpoint shades of color that humans miss entirely. Yong says to think of Man’s color chart as a flat triangle, and birds’ color range as a pyramid. Birds see other birds very differently as a result. White would not simply be white. Ultraviolets could change the appearance of many feathers. Their identification of another bird is completely different from ours. Man is so lackadaisical he named a redbreasted ground scavenger a robin, when its namesake back in Europe is a flycatcher. A moth would notice the difference instantly.

Hairs turn out to be the most versatile tool in the box. Hairs are the key to hearing in humans (and most others). They also detect the presence of other animals, the gentlest ripples of water, or the breeze created by a moving spider. Fish leave an underwater stream by swimming along that all kinds of underwater animals can detect. Such as seals – who hunt them. Meanwhile, the flowing stream itself provides all kinds of data to the fish in it, all through those hairs.

But it doesn’t stop there. Hairs pick up data from the magnetic field around the Earth, from the north-south orientation in the midsection to the doughnut holes at the poles. They measure electrical charges to identify individual kinds of insects within range, acting as a replacement for touch itself. Just because an animal has no fingers does not mean it has any less a sense of touch. Same goes for dolphins under water.

Sounds differ according to the listener. Scientists divided up the song of the zebra finch according to constantly repeated segments. When they mixed up the segments, it made no difference to the birds. Zebra finches listen for nuances in the individual notes. Any variance will be noticed and cause concern, but the song itself is immaterial. Humans can tell the difference in the segments, but not the notes.

This makes the point – one of many times throughout the book – that humans simply don’t know what is going on in the world around them.

An Immense World is another of those great books where you night as well leave the Hiliter in the drawer, because every page would be totally soaked in yellow, and you’d never find anything standing out. Plus, the range is nothing short of phenomenal. Here’s a sampling of what I mean:


-Some 200,000 kinds of insect communicate through surface vibration. They cause plant shoots and branches to vibrate with their messages. By staying still and not actually moving to meet other insects, they avoid predators. Insect songs can be melodic, well beyond chirping or buzzing.
-Elephants feel ground vibrations in their ultra-sensitive toenails, and can tell the difference between family and strangers as well as other species, even miles away.
-Spiders do not wait around for a gust of wind; they levitate using the laws of physics, ie. same charges repel each other. “Spider silk picks up a negative charge as it leaves the spider’s body, and is repelled by the negative charge of the plants on which they sit.” So even on a windless day, spiders can travel for miles. It’s called ballooning.
-We calculate distance by merging the sight from two eyes. The mantis shrimp does the same with three zones in one eye, giving it depth perception in each independent eye.
-An owl’s whole face is an ear. Facial feathers focus sounds, and as one earhole is higher on the head than the other, precise location, to the millimeter, even in total darkness, is not a problem for them.
-Fish have a lateral line of sensors along their bodies that tell them the direction and speed of the current, and the presence of other animals. The catfish’s entire body is covered not with scales but with touch sensors. They have a “feel” for their entire surroundings.
-Thanks to their heightened sense of touch, even blind fish can school.
-Mosquitos do not target perfumes or body heat, they are totally focused on carbon dioxide emissions from warmbodied mammals – a total giveaway that a free meal is available.
-350 kinds of fish produce electricity. They use it as their sense of touch, with special hairs on their bodies to read the data and build up a map or picture of their surroundings. They retain this picture and can return precisely to the spot, even years later. And some can kill with this electricity – up to 860 volts.
-A peacock’s magnificent tail disturbs the air at a specific frequency when he fans it, causing nearby peahens to feel it resonate in their feathered crowns. Then females acknowledge by displaying back to the male. It’s a two-way conversation.
-Hibernation is not sleep. Squirrels have to rouse themselves from hibernation, raise their body temperatures and pulse so they can get some real sleep – or be exhausted from the lack of it.
-Alligators can feel a single drop of water on a pond surface, locate it precisely, and whip around to snag whatever made it, all in a fraction of a second. That’s why they lounge near the shore all day.
-Snakes do the same, using their constantly flicking tongues as noses. Same microsecond response. Not being warmblooded and needing to eat daily, rattlesnakes can sit coiled and immobile for days, waiting.
-All living beings create electricity in water. Which is why animals like many sharks have electroreceptors right by their mouths, so they can dig for buried living treasure that fairly screams at them.
-Vision can have high resolution or high sensitivity – but not both at the same time. They tend to be mutually exclusive.
-Sound can have high temporal resolution or high pitch sensitivity – but not both at the same time. Some birds can switch between at will.
-Hummingbirds will open their beaks for no apparent reason, but actually, they are singing at pitches above 30,000 Hz – well above the 20K maximum humans can hear. Man has never heard a hummingbird song. Just the occasional squeak.

There is some degree of redemption for humans in the book. Yong visits Daniel Kish, who lost both his eyes to cancer as a baby. He soon started making loud clicks – his own sonar – and 50 years later gets by fine with them and a long cane. He can tell when a car is parked on grass. That’s how sensitive his personal sonar is. He can recognize homes by the porches and shrubbery out front. And even when a branch is going to block his way. He will duck out of the way without missing a beat. It is human echolocation, like a bat’s.

Meanwhile, scientists have the chore of naming all their test animals, and sometimes they get creative about it. The hands-down winner in this book is a manatee named Hugh. Second prize goes to Turtelini.

There is something for everyone to be amazed at in this book. It is as entertaining as it is world-shaking. The stories come at the reader fast and furiously and continuously. And readers will come to appreciate that this is only a beginning.

David Wineberg

I love Ed Yong's writing and this is such a good book. Clear and descriptive without being overly dry or technical or textbook-y. The framing of the senses as not better/worse compared to humans but simply how they function for the animals themselves in their own lives instead of treating everything in a human context was so interesting and important!! I love this book I've bought two copies already.

This book has 13 main chapters, and a total of about 356 pages, not including the Acknowledgments/Notes/Index. The chapters are organized by specific senses: so Chapter 1 focuses on smells and tastes, Chapter 2 on light, etc. There are also great notes a the end of each chapter, that go into further detail on some ideas.

The Introduction starts with a clever and illustrative thought experiment, where Yong asks the reader to imagine a gymnasium that contains several different animals and one human. Yong describes some of the ways each creature would interact with the sights, sounds, and smells generated by the other creatures. He explains some interesting differences in perception between these species; as some animals would be able to hear or see or feel things that other species couldn't detect at all. This is an excellent way to introduce the concept of an “Umwelt”: an individual's sensory bubble, based on what their limited senses enable them to perceive about the outside world.

Throughout each chapter Yong uses entertaining stories and creative examples to translate the science and anatomy into layman's terms. He describes his discussions with scientists that specialize in certain fields: for example in Chapter 1 he spends time with an expert in dog olfaction while he watches her dog Finn sniff around and explore a new environment. He goes into exquisite detail as he describes exactly what a spider sees in Chapter 2. In Chapter 6 he recalls his time with a sensory biologist watching “fidgety” otters attempt to disassemble everything around them.

I was very impressed with Yong's ability to explain complex biological concepts; not only in terms that the average reader can understand, but also in expressive and frankly beautiful language that shows off his skills as a writer. Yong captures thoughts and ideas that I have contemplated myself before, but his eloquent explanations really get to the root of these ideas so perfectly. This is my favorite kind of book: where the author is both an expert science communicator, and an entertaining, talented writer. I loved this book right from the Introduction, and I would highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in thinking about how all creatures perceive their environment.

This book opened my eyes to the different ways that we animals living on this planet perceive the world. It turns out that there are many more senses other than the five that we were taught about in school. Some of the ones the author discussed I knew about, but many I had never heard of. I knew about sonar and echolocation, for example, but animals that can sense magnetic fields? I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the natural world.

My thanks to Random House and NetGalley for an advance reader copy of this book. It was my pleasure to read and review it.

In a word: “eye-opening.” This work is full of mind-blowing facts about how animals (yes, including us) perceive the world. Now, you may be familiar with the usual five and maybe even heard of others, like echolocation but, how about electrolocation? I read as many books about animals as I can get my hooves on, but this one includes many facts that I’d never heard before. It also expounds on others that I was familiar with, but in much more detail. This is not an easy or slow read. It took me much longer than any other book I like, but that’s because it’s bursting with fascinating information. It is clearly well researched and Yong backs everything up with hard science, but in a way that is easy to understand. He writes in a simple style that makes the science shine, and he even has a sense of humor (alas, not one of the senses included here). If you, like me, have ever laid on the floor trying to understand how your cats see the world, this is the book for you. Even if you’ll be surprised as how alien some of these perceptions are compared with ours. Wonderful!
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#Random House!