A fun, engaging, look at how our senses function, and how our brain interprets the data from those senses. Others may take a different approach, but for me I was able to glean (and retain) more information by reading the book in sections over time, instead of binging the whole thing in a day or two.

This book was super interesting and also written for the leeman who does not comprehend all the depth of neurological research. I found the approach very interesting and the book a very fascinating read. The language made it sometimes a bit hard to understand even for native speakers so I would not recommend it to just everybody but for the scientific inclined reader who loves to learn something new this book is a must read.

I found this to be a tough read as the writing was rather technical at times. That said, I did enjoy learning about senses and reading about the experiments conducted with other species.

One of my roles at Wellcome is to write and deliver tours of the Collection and a number of recent exhibitions have touched on themes relating to the senses and consciousness. How I wish I had read this book years ago.

Rob DeSalle, a curator at The American Museum of Natural History, draws on recent research to examine how the senses - the familiar five & some less familiar - shape our world. He discusses genomics, evolutionary development, shared perceptual experiences (as far as we can ascertain that they are shared!) and less commonplace experiences - the extraordinary - to illuminate what it means to be human.
It is intense, magical, un-put-downable: a tremendous achievement.

Our Senses: An Immersive Experience is, perhaps appropriately given its topic, a dense and at times perhaps overwhelming exploration of how our minds take in information and make sense of it. While I found much of it utterly fascinating, and would recommend it, I have to confess there were times I was tempted to skim and felt the book became either a bit unfocused or, on the flip side, hyperfocused. It didn't help - and this is clearly no fault of author Rob DeSalle - that the formatting on the Kindle got confused by insets, so that it took a moment to track just where a sentence was going. Here's hoping that gets fixed soon.

You might have expected DeSalle to have organized the book by the six basic senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, sound, and balance (this last one was new to me as a "basic" sense), but you'd be wrong. First, he notes there are a lot more than those six; numbers vary depending on who you ask, but some he notes argue for as many as thirty-three, though he admits that's too unwieldy a number for his purposes. As far as organization, he eschews separate chapters for each sense (the usual route) and instead moves amongst them as he explores "six important phenomena researchers have recognized in explaining the senses":

" How our neural systems evolved from the earlier microorganisms
" The "super senses" of other organisms that can help shed light on our own
" Human variability-those with superior and diminished sensing capabilities
" The effect of trauma on specific senses
" "The interaction of our senses with one another (synesthesia being the extreme example)
" "Crossmodality": how our senses communicate with each other, particularly in higher-order perception of external stimuli like art, music, literature, and drugs and how cross-modality creates a total consciousness

DeSalle is writing for the layperson here, but some scientific literacy and a sense of basic anatomy will come in handy as he tosses around terms like photons, molecules, lock-and key proteins, etc. Most times he'll offer up a brief definition or explanation, but having a firm grasp of basic scientific terminology will go a long way toward making Our Senses flow more smoothly. Mostly it goes down easily with just a modicum of attention, but some sections get quite dense and will require I'd guess rereading for most of his audience. And every now and then, I'd say his asides or metaphors can be more distracting than enlightening, though those cases are rare.

Along with the scientific detail, DeSalle offers up a wide variety of fascinating facts, experiments, and comparisons with other species. The evolutionary aspects are thorough and detailed, the cross-modality section even more so and therefore that segment is perhaps the most dense and difficult to get through. As noted, sometimes I could have used a bit less detail or maybe some better spacing between heavy detail and the occasional pop references (Spinal Tap makes an appearance for instance) or more basic explanations. And personally I would have liked to hear more toward the end about the hallucinations (what is here is fascinating), effects of arts and music, and how our senses will be continue to be augmented by technology (something he does touch upon but only slightly, though in fairness that could probably have been its own book).

DeSalle's writing is solid and informative, but I wouldn't call it particularly engaging or compelling. This isn't the Oliver Sacks' (who also makes an appearance or two) style of personal engagement and I wouldn't put it alongside recent non-fiction like Radium Girls or Caesar's Last Breath in terms of emotional impact or stylistic aplomb, but if it's a bit dry, it does its job of informing and leaving the reader wanting to explore further. Recommended.

Interesting book designed for the layman exploring the senses and our perceptions.

We were taught in school that there are five senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste. But that’s an oversimplification. We also have a sense of where our body is oriented in space, which is called propriroception. We can also sense pain, heat and moisture. Some animals can sense stimuli far beyond our ability: ultrasound, infrared radiation and even magnetic fields.
Why we have the senses we do, how they evolved and how our senses work is the subject of the new book by Rob DeSalle, Our Senses: An Immersive Experience . DeSalle is the curator of the American Museum of Natural History, and his book is based on a popular exhibition of the same name which opened in 2017.
One of the basic questions the author tackles is why humans have evolved such a gigantic brain. Brains are not needed for perception, since even single-celled organisms can sense and respond to their surroundings. Plants, fungi and many animals get along just fine with no brains or rudimentary ones. Our large brains, perched precariously atop a narrow neck puts us at risk for fatal injuries from falls.
Our head position made sense when our ancestors walked about on four legs. Rising upright and moving on two legs changed the equation, but our body design could not be radically reconfigured after the change.
One of the overarching themes of Our Senses is that the process of evolution is not particularly efficient. It finds a solution that improves survival chances and then builds upon it, much like a 19th Century farmer constructing a homestead, a room at a time as he can afford them. The result is a jerry-rigged brain and senses that work fairly well but not as well as they could.
The placement of our eyes give us stereoscopic vision, but restricts our field of view. The processing of light at the back of the brain instead of close to the eyes means that damage along the nerve route can result in blindness or distorted vision.
DeSalle burrows down to the genetic and biomolecular level to show how mutations, natural selection and genetic drift have crafted our senses, allowing our species to dominate the planet.
The long process by which we discovered how our senses operate and what causes them to sometimes fail, makes up the bulk of the book. Paul Broca’s autopsy of the brain of a man who lost the ability to speak led to the discovery of the part of the brain that processes speech. Experiments with patents who had the hemispheres of their brains separated to stop seizures, resulted in the realization of the now familiar right vs left brain asymmetry in processing sensations.
But the great breakthrough came with genetic sequencing and functional MRI scans. We are now able to identify at least some of the genes involved in sensation and see which parts of the brain are activated by the senses.
I found the most interesting chapter to be the one on synesthesia, the rare condition in which two or more senses are linked. For example, a sound may produce a sensation of taste or color. It turns out that identifying such people is more difficult than it appears. Some people can trick themselves into thinking that they are synesthetes when they are not.
Our Senses is a dense book, parked with information and a specialized vocabulary that will have the general reader reaching for a dictionary from time to time. But those who stick with it will be rewarded with deeper insights into how we experience the world around us and, indeed, what makes us human.

What was the first ever sensory experience, way, way back in evolutionary history? One of the most fascinating and plausible theories is that it was simple osmotic pressure caused by different salt concentrations inside and outside the cell in ancient, simple single-celled organisms. Not the most exciting experience, perhaps, but in the current human landscape of information and sensory overload such a simple little beginning in the primordial murk, it is quite a meditative thought.

The vast majority of life on the planet is made up of brainless bacteria, DeSalle tells us, that can nonetheless have sense-experiences and interpret their environment. More recently – by almost four billion years – we human youngsters in the evolutionary stakes are using our brains to develop technology that will restore sight and hearing to people who have lost – or have never had – those senses.

We have learned, and continue to learn, about our sense of hearing by comparison to bats’ echolocation, and we are exploring our sense of smell by studying the olfactory differences in as widely diverse creatures as bacteria and elephants.

Our Senses is fascinating stuff, crammed with a very accessible – though nonetheless scientific – story of our senses: how it came to be that we, and every other life-form, even have senses in the first place; how we use our senses to interpret our environment; how our senses may be filtered and changed by our memories and emotions – or maybe, vice versa, how our senses filter and change our memories and emotions – or maybe both, working as a feedback loop that in some way, in essence, creates our world, or at least the world we perceive.

Arguably, the most fascinating chapters of Our Senses look in-depth at what’s happening when our senses go wrong. When things are trundling along just fine, most people on a day-to-day basis take eyesight, hearing, and the senses of touch, taste, and balance as a given – they’re great, but they are stuff we just innately have – but when one or more – or indeed all of them – are damaged by disease, injury, stroke, or even, in the case of hearing, simply by day-to-day noise pollution, that’s when things get interesting in the laboratory, and most especially in the area of fixing sensory problems – fixes that range from the counter-intuitive and, as at the time of the book’s writing still at experimental stage, specialised noise therapy for tinnitus, to using colour as a means of marking margins to help stroke victims who suffer from peripheral dyslexia. There are also more drastic interventions detailed by DeSalle, as in cases where children with epilepsy have a hemispherectomy performed upon them, which surgically removes, either completely or partially, one half of the brain – a fearsome procedure, but DeSalle assures that because of the brain plasticity of young children, those children go on to ‘lead very normal if not exceptional lives’. In this slightly gruesome but riveting section of Our Senses, DeSalle also looks at brain study, and brain surgery work from the late nineteenth century up to the present day, especially in relation to epilepsy and the split-brain surgery that sets out to cure the sometimes debilitating condition.

DeSalle’s language and explanations tread a difficult path with elegance. He remains light and simple without skimping on the science or sacrificing deep interest, and explains the science without lecturing or dumbing-down – the explanations of, for instance, the properties of light and sound waves, and the interaction of our senses with these is simple enough for those of us without heavy-duty scientific training, but does not sacrifice accuracy for simplicity. He explores the consequences of disease, structural flaws, and trauma on the senses, and how these problems can be righted in some cases – and how in others they have become the fount of artistic and musical expression that is extraordinarily beautiful and sometimes exquisitely strange.

Some of the illustrative examples of experiments of how our brain detects and interprets sensations have potentially far-reaching consequences once further research has explored them more fully: the brains of women and men, for instance, are wired slightly differently (though DeSalle cautions against drawing any conclusions from these subtle differences); and, surprisingly, left-handed and right-handed people interpret a certain hearing experiment in different ways. In fact, Our Senses is full of examples and evidence that give us clues about how our brains work in conjunction with our senses in unexpected ways, and experiments showing that although they are the primary, in fact the only way we experience our environment, they can by no means always be trusted to give us a true picture of our reality.

Like the ever increasing number of sexes we suddenly recognize, there are more senses than we traditionally credit. Balance, for example, is definitely a sense. And it is part and parcel of our hearing mechanism. Pain is another. And there are combinations of traditional senses – how smell affects taste, for one. Our Senses is an attempt to cover them all in a survey of research. The result is not totally satisfying.

Rob DeSalle has pulled together a lot of great stories, examples and theories. (Nature has evolved 25 completely different kinds of sight mechanisms, original designs adapted to the needs of different species.) But he has also focused (too much) on DNA and specific genes, whose letter/number codes are instantly forgettable and of little use to the average child reader. This book is the accompaniment to the exhibit of the same name and design at The American Natural History Museum in New York. As such, it is really a museum gift shop book. It is not a catalog of the exhibit, but an expansion of greater depth.

The problem is like that of all-season tires – wrong for summer and also wrong for winter. There is both not enough detail and also too much. Intriguing paths end suddenly. Highly technical knowledge is displayed without insight. It’s a problem of the pairing of museum and book, not of the author Rob DeSalle, who is not merely expert, but clearheaded, thoughtful and most enthusiastic. If you see the exhibit, this is a great reminder.

David Wineberg