RAVE: Ed Yong’s An Immense World

[jesse_the_k]

Find in library • DRM-free audiobook • BARD

As I hoped back in December, last month I found enough brain to tackle An Immense World by Ed Yong. I was convinced by pauraque’s extensive summary and review, and the 24 days I spent reading were a pure delight. Ed Yong is a great narrator: he fluently pronounces the Neo-Latinate species names as well as the international assortment of human researchers. He somehow manages not to giggle at his own (frequent) jokes.

He wildly succeeds at explaining the distinctive sensory worlds of many of our planet’s inhabitants. Along the way, he explores how scientists design experiments to pin down how, for example, a scallop sees or a leafhopper senses vibrations. He tells the truth that our current understanding is not necessarily the whole answer — that science means change. So much of the current state of the art began as theories mocked by the scientific establishment.

Yong is keenly aware of human as well as animal variety. When addressing the senses, he fluently acknowledges that not humans all have a standard complement—for example, his researchers are described as sighted when that’s relevant. He consciously seeks out women and non-binary researchers, as explained in his 2018 Atlantic article "I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories -- Here’s what I’ve learned, and why I did it.".

Most importantly, he’s such a good writer. He clearly loves his subject, and he plays with formal and informal registers. He provides enough detail to enthrall while lightly alternating between technical explanations and emotional delights. He organizes the books by sense, and each one almost stands alone. It helped that I gave myself permission to read for enjoyment, not trying to remember the details because there is no test. I'm looking forward to rereading it.

I do recall some stunning facts:

• Scallops have many eyes — from a dozen to more than 200.
• Owls have asymmetrical ears, enabling them to locate sounds both horizontally and vertically.
• Some creatures use the Earth’s very weak electromagnetic field to navigate—but we don’t know how. The signal is so subtle that it’s not contemporaneous: the whales, birds, and turtles must travel several miles before they can know if they’re headed in the right direction.

He starts with dogs, guaranteeing sympathy from half his readership. (I was charmed by references to his own Corgi pup, Typo.) In this 350-word excerpt, he introduces the canine olfaction expert, Alexandra Horowitz, and her dog Finnegan:

I’m so relentlessly visual that when Finn finishes nosing around and approaches me, I’m instantly drawn to his eyes, which are captivating and brown like the darkest chocolate. It takes concerted effort to refocus on what’s right in front of them—his nose, prominent and moist, with two apostrophe-shaped nostrils curving to the side. This is Finn’s main interface with the world. Here’s how it works.

Take a deep breath, both as demonstration and to gird yourself for some necessary terminology. When you inhale, you create a single airstream that allows you to both smell and breathe. But when a dog sniffs, structures within its nose split that airstream in two. Most of the air heads down into the lungs, but a smaller tributary, which is for smell and smell alone, zooms to the back of the snout. There it enters a labyrinth of thin, bony walls that are plastered with a sticky sheet called the olfactory epithelium. This is where smells are first detected. The epithelium is full of long neurons. One end of each neuron is exposed to the incoming airstream and snags passing odorants using specially shaped proteins called odorant receptors. The other end is plugged directly into a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. When the odorant receptors successfully grab their targets, the neurons notify the brain, and the dog perceives a smell. You can breathe out now.

Humans share the same basic machinery, but dogs just have more of everything: a more extensive olfactory epithelium, dozens of times more neurons in that epithelium, almost twice as many kinds of olfactory receptors, and a relatively larger olfactory bulb. And their hardware is packed off into a separate compartment, while ours is exposed to the main flow of air through our noses. This difference is crucial. It means that whenever we exhale, we purge the odorants from our noses, causing our experience of smell to strobe and flicker. Dogs, by contrast, get a smoother experience, because odorants that enter their noses tend to stay there, and are merely replenished by every sniff.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/616914/an-immense-world-by-ed-yong/9781039003927/excerpt ––– archive