If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Did you know that you are currently walking through a hidden world of electric fields, magnetic maps, and ultrasonic songs that your human senses are completely missing?
- Have you ever wondered what it would be like to experience reality through the 'heat-vision' of a snake or the sophisticated sonar of a dolphin?
- What’s the secret behind the unique 'sensory bubbles' that allow animals to perceive a version of our world that is invisible, silent, and untouchable to us?
Listen to An Immense World — Free Audiobook
Key Takeaways from An Immense World
- Explore the concept of 'Umwelt' to understand how every living creature exists within its own unique and limited sensory bubble.
- Discover how animals process smells in extraordinary ways, from dogs using specialized nostrils to track continuous scent trails to snakes smelling in stereo with their forked tongues.
- Learn how animal vision is perfectly tailored to specific survival needs, explaining why starfish have eyes on their arms and horses struggle to see orange jump markers.
- Understand the crucial distinction between nociception and actual pain, revealing how studying animal discomfort highlights fascinating evolutionary adaptations that demand our compassion.
- Find out how incredible tactile systems replace vision in the dark, such as the star-nosed mole's 3D-mapping snout and the hidden touch receptors in a mallard duck's beak.
Learning Tools
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An Immense World — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Viewing the world: Color and echoes
Chapter 3: Smelly yet tasty
Chapter 4: A sense of vibration
Chapter 5: Uncommon (and unusually sensitive) senses
An Immense World Summary & Overview
An Immense World (2022) explores the sensory worlds of animals, highlighting how they differ from the human experience. Tracing sight, sound, touch, and more, it shares the various ways animals sense our world – and the extra information they glean with the help of their specialized senses.
Who Should Listen to An Immense World?
- People interested in how animals make sense of their environment
- Animal lovers
- Anyone curious about the natural world
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