An Immense World

Pulitzer-winning Atlantic science writer Ed Yong walks through the sensory worlds animals occupy that humans cannot access, from the electric fields catfish read along a riverbed to the polarized light bees navigate by, the ultrasonic worlds bats hunt inside, and the magnetic compasses migrating birds carry in their skulls. Yong moves species by species, sense by sense, building toward an argument that human perception is one narrow channel inside an enormous library of animal experience. The book draws on hundreds of interviews with sensory biologists and reframes the dominant-species story Sapiens readers know.