[Yong's] new book aims to open our eyes to another unseen world...From ultraviolet vision to echolocation, by way of those singing mice, it examines the world of animal senses that extend beyond the limits of our own...It is a delight...Some nonhuman senses are outlandish — a little scary, even...Catfish have taste buds all over their body; if you licked one, Yong observes, 'you’d taste each other'...Rattlesnakes 'see' thermal radiation given off by animals...Seals can hunt down a fish 200 yards away, following its wake through the water with their whiskers...Dolphins use clicks for echolocation, like bats, and can perform an ultrasound examination of their prey so fine-grained that they can differentiate between otherwise identical canisters of water and alcohol...Yong makes heroic efforts to try to understand how any of this might feel...Yong calls his book a 'call for humility,' and it did fill me with a certain awe...But it goes further...Subtly — Yong is never heavy-handed — it prompts a radical rethink about the limits of what we know — what the world is, even...It is quite a book...And, I felt, putting it down, quite a world..

That I found myself surprised at so many moments while reading An Immense World, Ed Yong’s new book about animal senses, speaks to his exceptional gifts as a storyteller — though perhaps it also says something regrettable about me. I was marveling at those details because I found them weird; but it turns out, if I try to expand my perspective just a bit, they aren’t so weird after all.

... a dense and dazzling ride through the sensory world of astoundingly sophisticated creatures. Who wouldn’t want to tag along on a field research trip or peek into the lab of a sensory biologist?.

... sumptuous.

... a journey to alternative realities as extraordinary as any you’ll find in science fiction.

Yong explains how these senses work — sometimes down to the biochemical level — and takes us on field trips to meet the scientists behind the findings, all while masterfully weaving these disparate threads into a single narrative rope. But, as I finished chapter after chapter, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we kept falling short of our promised destination: understanding what it’s like to be another animal...This may be impossible .... Again and again, Yong tiptoes up to the precipice of another animal’s experience but never quite takes that final imaginative leap.

Yong writes in a perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world.

Yong tackles the realm of animal senses, taking readers on a fascinating journey backed up by impressive research.

... magnificent.

... [Yong] has done it again, and then some. His sumptuous new work, An Immense World, is a sweeping survey of animal senses, and how and why they mold us even as they remain elusive. One doesn’t pick up this book so much as fall into it.

The menagerie of critters and their unique perceptual abilities Yong examines here include the platypus with a bill that detects electric fields, sand scorpions that rely on surface vibrations to hunt prey, the echolocation prowess of bats and dolphins, the ultrafast vision of killer flies, and the outstanding olfaction of elephants...The facts are frequently astonishing...Yong worries about humanity’s 'ecological sins,' as sensory pollution—noise, night lighting, chemicals—is ubiquitous...Yong’s scientific curiosity and concern for the natural world are contagious...This is 'sense'-ational reading..

Like a lot of great science writing, An Immense World is a catalog of such wonders.

... immaculately researched, elegantly written, iconoclastic and compulsively readable.

In his 1974 essay, 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?' philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that other animals experience a world utterly foreign to us, one nearly impossible to describe...In this follow-up to I Contain Multitudes, Yong, a staff reporter for the Atlantic who won a Pulitzer in 2021 for his reporting on Covid-19, mostly follows the traditional popular science format (travel the world, interview experts), but he takes a different, realistic, and utterly fascinating approach, emphasizing that every organism perceives only a tiny slice of the world accessible to its senses...In a dozen chapters, Yong delivers entertaining accounts of how animals both common and exotic sense the world as well as the often bizarre organs that enable them to do so...Building on Aristotle’s traditional five senses, Yong adds expert accounts of 20th-century discoveries of senses for echoes, electricity, and magnetism as well as perceptions we take for granted, including color, pain, and temperature...One of the year’s best popular natural histories..

Pulitzer-winning journalist Yong 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')...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..