Immense read on An Immense World

Book title- An Immense World

Book author- Ed Yong

When I met Seymour in Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, I found a soulmate in him. Seymour is quiet, he senses silence. Noise can be a hindrance to his sensing power. He has a friend- a great grey owl. In this quick-paced urbanizing world, a friendship like that is becoming rare and for Seymour it’s a heartbreak to discontinue the friendship. My heart breaks as well and I discovered that I saw myself in Seymour. Like Seymour, I have a deep emotion to connect to the quieter world, to the darker space, and to the diverse lives far away from me.

Back to Ed Yong’s An Immense World, I added it to my reading list to make my reading diverse. I had the pleasure to read Mama’s Last Hug and I was looking for more books on animals. This one has been a great pick!

The writing style caught my attention. Ed Yong would start a paragraph with an in-the-middle-of-a-conversation quote. For example, he is in a lab talking with a scientist and he brings you there by presenting the conversation so directly, without adding any introduction. This made the book very engaging.

Over the twelve chapters of the book the author talks about different senses an animal perceives. How diverse these senses are among billions of species on our planet. Our home, our planet projects different realms to different organisms. Parallel universe is not fiction, it’s existing right on our planet Earth! I can’t see ultraviolet or infrared, can’t hear the infrasonic songs of whales, the ultrasonic clicks of bats, without Google Maps I have no sense of location and so on. And right beside me, a mosquito is a state-of-the-art sensor of carbon dioxide and body heat. A sea turtle knows its way to the ocean right after birth, it swims, traverses continents before returning back to its homeland. A flower’s marking evolves to fall in the ultraviolet perception of birds who would pollinate them. Sea otters are little mischievous animals who can feel everything with their paws and they use this sense all the time like a kid who jumbles its surroundings. And in the far ocean, dolphins are trained to detonate explosives in the deep sea with an accuracy that no technology has developed yet. 

In the thirteenth chapter, the author mentions how these senses, some of which took billions of years to be evolved are threatened today. We might not feel all these senses. But we are the only species who have the knowledge of the diversity of senses. We know our limitations and we know other animals' sensescapes. This makes us responsible to cultivate an environment that lets all the organisms thrive, make use of their senses. And I hope we come to our senses!