An Immense World argues that the world around us is deep and richer than we know because we are confined by the constraints of our own sensors. Other animals operate under different constraints and so perceive a very different world than what we are familiar with. And even everyday things, a street or a plant or a featureless body of water, are... See more

On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.

We think of the senses as passive intake valves: Light enters my eyes; my ears are vessels for absorbing sound. But actually the senses have this almost active role in shaping the world around us. In viewing nature’s palettes, eyes also act like paint brushes.

Science is not a neutral force. A scientist’s conclusions are profoundly effect-influenced by the methods that she used, which are influenced by the questions that she thought to ask, which are influenced by her own beliefs and values, which are influenced by her senses, by her culture, by her background.

there’s a part in the book where I talk about what kind of eye would be best at discriminating the fine differences between flowers. What you get is an eye that has receptors for blue, green, and ultraviolet: specifically, the wavelengths of an insect eye. You might think that eye evolved to see those colors, but actually it’s the other way around.... See more

He says if he was a catfish, he would jump into a vat of chocolate because you could taste chocolate with your butt.

EY: That’s right. Yeah, absolutely.

AW: Imagine if humans could taste throughout their entire body! What a great image, right? Tasting chocolate—

EY: With your butt.

AW: With your butt.

I don’t care about the value of animals as model organisms or as inspirations for new technology. I think that there is a strong argument to be made that they are worthy in their own right and that they’re worth protecting and saving in their own right.

I think of going for a walk with Typo as him checking his social media. It’s very much like when I’m scrolling through Instagram or Twitter and seeing what my friends are up to. He does this on a walk. He checks out what all the neighborhood dogs are like, what they’re doing, where they’ve been. It’s a deeply social activity for him.

There’s always going to be this chasm where it can only be leapt over through imagination rather than through empiricism. Empiricism can guide our imagination, but we still have to make that final leap on our own. To really get at this, you need to fuse the sciences and the arts. You need to think more broadly than just the products of research... See more