Overview
Yong surveys the sensory worlds of non-human animals — how dogs smell time, how bats hear shapes, how electric fish perceive their surroundings through pulses of current — and argues that each species inhabits its own perceptual bubble, what the German biologist Jakob von Uexkull called an Umwelt.
Yong is a science journalist at The Atlantic who won the Pulitzer Prize for his COVID-19 reporting in 2021. An Immense World, published in 2022, was his first book after that Pulitzer and draws on roughly 150 interviews with sensory biologists. It was a New York Times bestseller and won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Key Ideas
Umwelt
Each species lives inside a distinct perceptual world shaped by the senses it evolved, most of which are invisible to us.
Senses beyond ours
Magnetoreception, electroreception, infrared vision, ultrasound — our five-sense model is wildly provincial.
Attention as selection
Every animal's brain is a filter that ignores most of what its senses register in favour of what matters for survival.
Light pollution and sensory collapse
Human infrastructure is increasingly polluting the sensory environments of other species in ways we're only starting to measure.
Wonder as a scientific practice
Yong argues that close attention to non-human perception is itself a moral practice, not just a scientific one.
Who should read this
Readers who want natural history that expands the definition of experience. Particularly useful for anyone who has ever wondered what a dog is thinking when it stops at a lamppost, or how a bat imagines its world. The chapter on electric fish is one of the most mind-bending pieces of science writing I've encountered.
Who might skip it
Skip if you want a book primarily about human perception — Yong is careful to keep the focus on non-human sensory experience, and uses humans mostly as a baseline for comparison. Skip also if you prefer tight single-animal case studies; the book is deliberately comparative.
The verdict
The best new science book I've read this decade. Yong's reporting is meticulous, his prose is gorgeous, and the cumulative effect of the book is a kind of epistemic humility — a sense that what you perceive is a small slice of what is there. A book that changes the texture of a walk outside afterwards.
There is a fundamental pluralism to the living world: no single way of being is right, or best.
— Ed Yong, An Immense World
If you liked this
I Contain Multitudes, Yong's earlier book on microbes. King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz for the founding work in ethology.