Sentient

Author Jackie Higgins
Narrator Joan Walker
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Run Time 10 hours and 43 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Evolution, Human biology, Popular science, Zoology and animal sciences.

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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
How would the First Encounter with an extraterrestrial alien change our view of ourselves? Great science fiction explores the question. But we don’t need science fiction. The aliens are all around us – the octopus with its mysterious body-image, the electric scanner of the platypus’s bill, the magnetic compass of a migrating bird, the moth antenna that can detect the scent of a female in quadrillion-fold dilution. Jackie Higgins’s lyrical, literate style will charm you while her book stuns your imagination with strange, other-worldly truths.
Richard Dawkins
Jackie Higgins puts a mirror up to the natural world so we can sense ourselves through our animal relatives. I love this book because it reminds me of our wildness, it reminds me how powerful our senses are, and it celebrates animals and humans in a way that binds us together. The stories are so interesting and well researched, and the language speaks of an author with a deep sense of biological wisdom and wonder
Craig Foster, filmmaker and subject of the Oscar-winning documentary, My Octopus Teacher
Sentient is a tour de force of popular science, leading the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the natural world, to show the fascinating parallels between animal and human senses.
Stephen Moss, naturalist and author
If we are sentient, how do we know the world? Why presume other species might know it less? In her fantastic new book, Jackie Higgins digs deep to show us star-nosed moles that see what they touch, discovers how great grey owls fly silently in search of their prey, and how sightless humans can see with their faces. You will never see in the same way again. With potentially endless reverberations for our creative and perceptive states, Higgins delivers a series of delicious lessons in what it is to be sensate, and shows how our own brains can emulate the miraculous feat of the animals with whom we share this fragile planet.
Philip Hoare, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Leviathan and Albert and the Whale
In Sentient, Jackie Higgins deftly explores the sensory world of animals — the exquisite touch-sense of a mole’s bizarre nose, the magnetic sense of migratory birds, the electric sense of the platypus — as a window onto our human senses, which echo and some cases even exceed their wild counterparts. Extraordinarily rich in detail; there is a miracle on every page.
Scott Weidensaul, author of A World on the Wing
I loved Sentient, it’s filled with the wonder of knowing and the infinite surprises of nature.
Stephen Rutt, author of The Seafarers and Wintering
Educational, ground-breaking and meticulously well-researched.
Reaction Life Book Digest
Brimming with fascinating, frequently delightful and occasionally freaky trivia this is an entertaining, gentle and easily digestible read with some important and intriguing ideas at its core.
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