An Immense World
Discover how animals perceive the world and see nature as you never have before.
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- 129,00 kr
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The Sunday Times Bestseller on how animal senses reveal the world around us
Award-winning science writer Ed Yong takes readers on an astonishing journey through the hidden senses of Earth’s creatures. From the magnetic compass of migratory birds to the ultraviolet vision of bees and the echolocation of bats, Yong welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
Drawing on the latest research in neurobiology and animal behaviour, An Immense World explores how each species lives within its unique environment, uncovering the sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields that form its sensory bubble of experience.
This is science writing at its most transporting: showing us that in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.
Winner of the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
A New York Times, Guardian, Economist, Spectator, TLS and New Statesman Book of the Year
‘Immersive and mind-blowing’ Peter Wohlleben
‘Suffused with magic’ Siddhartha Mukherjee
‘A book that prompts awe at the world around us’ Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winning journalist Yong (I Contain Multitudes) reveals in this eye-opening survey animals' world through their own perceptions. Every animal is "enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble," he writes, or its own "perceptual world." Yong's tour covers vision (mantis shrimp have "12 photoreceptor classes"), sound (birds, researchers suggest, hear in a similar range as humans but they hear faster), and nociception, the tactile sense that sends danger signals (which is so widespread that it exists among "creatures separated by around 800 million years of evolution"). There are a wealth of other senses outside the standard five: sea turtles have two magnetic senses, electric fish generate currents to "sense their surroundings" as well as to communicate with each other, and the platypus's sensitive bill gives it what scientists think may be "electrotouch." Yong ends with a warning against light and sound pollution, which can confuse and disturb animals' lives, and advocation that "natural sensescapes" ought to be preserved and restored. He's a strong writer and makes a convincing case against seeing the world as only humans do: "By giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be right in front of us. And sometimes what we miss is breathtaking." This is science writing at its best.
