An Immense World
by Ed Yong · first published 2022
24mentions
13recommended by
16HN commenters
2022–2026first – last mentioned
81% recommend13% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
Accessible, non-technical tour of how animals sense the world, from echolocation to ocean and river creatures, with surprising facts. Suits curious laypeople and anyone wondering how other creatures perceive reality.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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If you're interested in stuff like this, I highly, highly recommend Ed Yong's new book, An Immense World. There are huge parts of animals' sensory landscapes that we don't perceive, and he does a good job of letting you see the world through their eyes/smell it through their noses/etc. He also writes about…
on “How do other animals see the world?” ↗If you're interested in how animals use their senses, how about a whole book about it: https://bookshop.org/books/an-immense-world-how-animal-sense... _An Immense World_ by Ed Yong, who wrote a lot of the great early Covid articles for The Atlantic.
on “Scientists discover how mosquitoes can ‘sniff out’ humans” ↗Ed Yong just put out a book, “An Immense World,” all about animal senses and how they experience the world. It’s magical. https://bookshop.org/p/books/an-immense-world-how-animal-sen...
on “Researchers Taught Parrots to Video Call Other Parrots” ↗ML researchers would get a lot of interesting ideas from Ed Yong's book: "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us" It goes through the extraordinarily diverse sensory systems of all animals. In the push for at-the-edge, exteme-low-latency, low-resource "intelligent"…
on “Squawk bots: Can generative AI lead us to understanding animals?” ↗> exist in the wild that we are somehow missing An Immense World by Ed Yong about sense and sense processing of living things convinces me there is a lot we human's misapprehend or uncomprehend about the world. https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp...…
on “She Steals Surfboards by the Seashore. She’s a Sea Otter” ↗A brief list, without the links to library aggregator worldcat.org in the interest of time: An Immense World, by Ed Yong; grabbed my attention right away Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, by Frans de Waal; got here from dog training and Temple Grandin and animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell…
on “Ask HN: Looking for an Engaging Science Book” ↗…theoretically sufficient for what we perceive and so our brain is effectively running an ongoing simulation of the future a few miliseconds ahead of now and correcting based on sensory input. The book "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us" by Ed Yong [0] is really great for understanding how sensory input informs but isn't the same as a mental model of the world built into the operations…
on “Camera Crushes Lidar, Claims Startup” ↗I recommend you check out An Immense world by Ed Yong - many senses are arguably 'touch tuned for something'. Though taste and smell and vision are not.
on “Plants don’t have ears. But they can still detect sound” ↗This post definitely needs a link to the wonderful book by Ed Yong, An Immense World. Given all that even simple animals can sense and affect, it is not surprising that plants will hold further sensory surprises. https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp...
on “Plants don’t have ears. But they can still detect sound” ↗I just finished a wonderful book that readers of this comment thread may find interesting: "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us" by Ed Yong. The book is a relatively non-technical deep dive into the many ways different organisms sense their environments. The chapters are…
on “How the Ear Works: Nature's solutions for listening (1997)” ↗There’s a fantastic book called “An Immense World” by Ed Yong that covers the incredible range of sensory modalities found in nature. One of the chapters goes into depth on bats and sonar.
on “Tiger moth jams bat sonar (2009)” ↗Ed Yong's book An Immense World is an incredible exploration of one of the questions raised in this review, which is what animals talk about. He explains the incredible array of senses animals have and how those shape their worlds…
on “Review of Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication” ↗It is interesting to think about how much could be done to mitigate human impact on various ecosystems if we humans had an improved grasp on animal senses. Recommendable: “An Immense World” by Ed Yong https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp...
on “Seeding steel frames brings destroyed coral reefs back to life” ↗This is a really short blog post about a book that apparently concentrates on sound for underwater life but for a broader sampling, as recommended by others, An Immense World by Ed Yong among other lifeforms goes into research on ocean and river dwelling creatures and it's alot more than just sound, just the sensors for detecting current/movement and electrical signals and…
on “Sound rules life underwater” ↗If you're a layperson interested in these sensory questions, I highly recommend the book An Immense World by Ed Yong. It's a 400-something page tour through the many senses animals have and we (mostly) don't. It might have the highest density of truly cool animal facts per page of anything I've ever read,…
on “Quieting the Global Growl” ↗