Where We Meet the World

The Story of the Senses

By: Ashley Ward

Narrated by: David Morley Hale

Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

The thrilling story of how our senses evolved and how they shape our encounters with the world

Our senses are what make life worth living. They allow us to appreciate a sip of an ice-cold drink, the sound of laughter, the touch of a lover. But only recently have incredible advances in sensory biology given us the ability to understand how and why our senses evolved as they have.

In Where We Meet the World, biologist Ashley Ward takes listeners on a breathtaking tour of how our senses function. Ward looks at not only the five major senses—vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—but also a host of other senses, such as balance and interoception, the sense of the body’s internal state. Drawing on new research, he explores how our senses interact with and regulate each other, and he uncovers what we can learn from how other animals—and even bacteria—encounter the world.

Full of warmth and humor, Where We Meet the World shows how new insights in biology transform our understanding of the relationship between ourselves and our environment, revealing the vibrancy—and strangeness—of both.

©2023 Ashley Ward (P)2023 Basic Books

You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles!

*There is no such thing as color.

*Our pupils dilate when we’re moved, so we find big pupils warm and compelling, which is why Renaissance women used nightshade (belladonna!) to dilate their pupils.

*The key part of our hearing apparatus between the inner and outer ears evolved from the gills of fish.

*We lift our hands to our faces once every two minutes of the day, partly to smell them and what they’ve touched.

*Coffee has eight hundred different odor releasing molecules, but the brain turns them into one thing, coffee.

*Garlic improves our body odor.

*We tend to prefer the smell of t-shirts worn a few days by people from our own university to that of people worn by other universities.

*Catfish taste with their bodies, flies with their feet.

*Our fingers have two hundred nerve fibers per centimeter, our back nine.

*When dogs defecate and cattle graze, they tend to line up north to south.

*A tick has a limited sensory experience of the world compared to us, but it’s rich to the tick!

Those are some of the many savory items in Ashley Ward’s Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses (2023), an engaging and stimulating book about how we perceive the world via our five (or fifty-three!?) senses (faculties that detect specific stimuli by means of receptors dedicated to those stimuli). Ward explains how we sense and why and how our senses have shaped us individually and as a species.

His first five chapters cover the five main senses, the sixth introduces unappreciated senses, and the last explores how perception works. Throughout, Ward uses easy vocabulary, defines the occasional scientific jargon, provides plenty of compelling examples (from human and animal and plant life), cites plenty of interesting scientific studies, and generally entertainingly illuminates perception and the senses.

Here are some of the things that I should remember from the book:

*Our senses are all interconnected with each other.

*There is no universal human hierarchy of the senses (European cultures prioritize sight, other cultures taste or smell, etc.).

*We have more than the five basic senses.

*Everything about our perception of the world is influenced by our biology, experiences, personality, mood, health, and cultural biases.

*Each of us perceives the world uniquely (no one’s “red, bread, or Beethoven” are the same as anyone else’s).

*The brain is miraculous in the vast amount of data it processes and interprets and uses to predict and fill in gaps and coordinate based on our different sense receptors and our interior and exterior conditions.

*To study perception and the senses effectively, multiple fields are needed, including biology, psychology, economics, and medicine.

*We still can’t figure out the relationship between the objective reality of the world and our subjective experience of it.

Audiobook reader David Morley Hale is deliberate and clear and has an appealing, vivid north England accent, pronouncing the u sound in words like some, up, us, come, study, just, much, etc. like the oa in soap.