Where We Meet the World
The Story of the Senses
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The thrilling story of how our senses evolved and how they shape our encounters with the world
Our senses are what make life worth living. They allow us to appreciate a sip of an ice-cold drink, the sound of laughter, the touch of a lover. But only recently have incredible advances in sensory biology given us the ability to understand how and why our senses evolved as they have.
In Where We Meet the World, biologist Ashley Ward takes readers on a breathtaking tour of how our senses function. Ward looks at not only the five major senses—vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—but also a host of other senses, such as balance and interoception, the sense of the body’s internal state. Drawing on new research, he explores how our senses interact with and regulate each other, and he uncovers what we can learn from how other animals—and even bacteria—encounter the world.
Full of warmth and humor, Where We Meet the World shows how new insights in biology transform our understanding of the relationship between ourselves and our environment, revealing the vibrancy—and strangeness—of both.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This eye-opening pop-science treatise by University of Sydney biologist Ward (The Social Lives of Animals) rhapsodizes about the power of the senses. He draws on evolutionary theory, neurology, and psychology to explain the development and functioning of senses in humans, animals, and plants (peas, for instance, can "hear" water flowing underground). In humans, according to Ward, each sense serves as an "information highway" that transmits "terabytes of information every second," which the brain assembles into a "narrative" as it prunes, anticipates, fills in gaps with educated guesses, and sometimes overthinks. (Carsickness, he notes, happens because the brain interprets the disorienting sensations of motion as the product of intoxicating poison that it tries to make the body vomit up.) He packs in innumerable fascinating details: stars look white because we see them in dim light that only allows the eye's black-and-white rod cells to function, a Scottish nurse was able to detect undiagnosed Parkinson's disease by smell, and goats can sense impending volcanic eruptions hours ahead of time. The science illuminates the complex processes through which creatures make sense of their surroundings, and the delivery benefits greatly from the author's stylish, evocative prose: "There's a note of elderly fish, swimming valiantly against the lavatorial flow," he writes of tasting Icelandic fermented shark. This will change how readers see the world.
