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Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses
Top of the pile
81
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
74/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Jackie Higgins
Publisher:
Atria Books
Date:
February 22, 2022
Higgins explores how we process the world around us through the lens of the incredible sensory capabilities of thirteen animals, revealing that we are not limited to merely five senses.
What The Reviewers Say
By examining the diverse perceptual capacities of our fellow creatures, Sentient leads us to perceive ourselves in a new, organic context.
Higgins keeps the lay reader engaged with her lyrical and lucid style, despite describing complex science (often at the molecular level), and skilfully incorporates individual human stories.
Higgins skilfully connects these tales from the natural world to the experiences of people with an exceptional sensory repertoire. Through their experiences we grasp how much can be learned from other animals, and how your sensory reality may be quite distinct from mine.
For all that it’s stuffed with entertaining oddities, Sentient is not a book about oddities, and Higgins’s argument, though colourful, is rigorous and focused. She leads us to adopt an entirely unfamiliar way of thinking about the senses..
