Sentient

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What to expect

'Jackie Higgins’s lyrical, literate style will charm you while her book stuns your imagination with strange, other-worldly truths' Richard Dawkins

Sentient assembles a menagerie of zoological creatures – from land, air, sea and all four corners of the globe – to understand what it means to be human. Through their eyes, ears, skins, tongues and noses, the furred, finned and feathered reveal how we sense and make sense of the world, as well as the untold scientific revolution stirring in the field of human perception.

The harlequin mantis shrimp can throw a punch that can fracture aquarium walls but, more importantly, it has the ability to see a vast range of colours. The ears of the great grey owl have such unparalleled range and sensitivity that they can hear twenty decibels lower than the human ear. The star-nosed mole barely fills a human hand, seldom ventures above ground and poses little threat unless you are an earthworm, but its miraculous nose allows it to catch those worms at astonishing speed – as little as one hundred and twenty milliseconds. Here, too, we meet the four-eyed spookfish and its dark vision; the vampire bat and its remarkable powers of touch; the bloodhound and its hundreds of millions of scent receptors, as well as the bar-tailed godwit, the common octopus, giant peacocks, cheetahs and golden orb-weaving spiders. Each of these extraordinary creatures illustrates the sensory powers that lie dormant within us.

In this captivating book, Jackie Higgins explores this evolutionary heritage and, in doing so, enables us to subconsciously engage with the world in ways we never knew possible.

Critics Review

  • The first rule of popular science is to reveal the wonder and mystery of the world. For that reason, Sentient, written by photographer and wildlife film-maker Jackie Higgins, is my personal pick of the year.

    New Scientist Best Books of the Year
  • Spellbinding . . . More than any other book, [Sentient] has made me think differently about the world this year.

    Financial Times Best Books of the Year
  • Higgins makes popular science accessible – Sentient is a dizzying display of the evolutionary ingenuity not only of lifeforms, but also of zoologists, neuroscientists and biologists who have mapped new frontiers of knowledge. You may finish reading it and wish that humans could use that intelligence to stop the destruction of the habitats all of us live in.

    Observer
  • Jackie Higgins’s eye-opening account of the often bizarre or superhuman sensory systems of other animals, from Hades-dwellers to Arctic owls.

    Telegraph Best New Science Books
  • Gripping . . . Thanks to Higgins’ flair for storytelling, Sentient successfully informs us about our own senses by exploring those of animals.

    TLS
  • [An] epic account of how the senses make sense . . . Higgins’s argument, although colourful, is rigorous and focused. She leads us to adopt an entirely unfamiliar way of thinking about the senses.

    The Times

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