A Feast in Every Sense

Aristotle said we have five senses. Neuroscientists now think the real number may be closer to thirty - from chronoception, our mysterious internal clock, to interoception, the conversation our organs are constantly having with our brains. Three decades on from her cult bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman returns to find that science has been quietly dismantling everything we thought we knew about perception.


In A Feast in Every Sense, Ackerman takes us swimming with manatees who see with their skin, inside research labs where scientists are regrowing the microscopic hairs that give us hearing, and into a bedroom where a Scottish nurse smelt her husband's Parkinson's disease a decade before his diagnosis. She explores the sensory signatures of outer space, the hidden scent receptors in our hearts and sperm cells, and a blind man who navigates city streets by echolocation. At a time when screens are steadily starving our natural senses, this is a book that will make you feel startlingly, exuberantly alive.