51 pages • 1 hour read
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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Summary and Study Guide
Overview
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (2022) is written by Ed Yong, a British American science journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to An Immense World, Yong is also the author of I Contain Multitudes (2016), which explores the relation between animals and microbes. An Immense World won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. This study guide refers to the 2022 hardcover edition of the book.
Content Warning: The source material refers to a wide range of animal experiments in the sciences, many of which involve the nonconsensual captivity of animals, often causing them harm and sometimes death.
Summary
An Immense World attempts to approach animals’ sensory perceptions through the bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexkull’s 1909 theory of the umwelt (plural, umwelten). The umwelt refers to the species-specific sensory worlds in which animals live and out of which they make sense of the outside world. Yong asserts that he is interested in learning about animals in and of themselves to help people understand their lives, as opposed to trying to learn more about human lives through theirs.
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