Ed Yong’s An Immense World is about how other animals perceive the world — how a bat hears, how a snake senses heat, how a dog navigates a smell landscape that we cannot even conceive of. It reads like the best kind of science journalism: specific, warm, based on interviews with researchers who love their animals.
The chapter that stayed with me was the one on echolocation. There is a passage where he describes hearing a recording of a bat cry slowed down to human speed, and how the researcher described it — the bat is not just detecting an obstacle, it is building a real-time 3D model of a moving world made of returning sound. That is a mode of being alive I had never imagined. It rearranged, briefly, my sense of what “seeing” even is.
Since finishing it I look at my dog differently. When she stops to sniff a specific patch of grass for 30 seconds, she is doing something I cannot do — she is reading a chronological log of who and what has been there recently. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact of her sensory life. Yong’s book is 350 pages of that kind of respect.