Cover Image: Where We Meet the World

Where We Meet the World

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WHERE WE MEET THE WORLD is an exploration of the senses - not just the "five senses", author Ashley Ward writes, but all of the means by which our bodies are able to detect the world around us, including subtle senses such as our ability to detect our position in space to coordinate our movements. In this manner, this book is really about the ways in which we have human (or animal) experience in the world.

The chapters in the book are organized around the five conventional senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste, and sensation - as well as a sixth chapter for all of the other senses that we don't conventionally recognize - like proprioception. Ward draws on insights from a diverse range of fields including evolutionary biology, human psychology, linguistics, and sociology to paint a rich portrait of the numerous ways in which sensation and perception - the interpretation of the physical stimuli that are detected by sensation - work and interact to generate the richness of experience. This range is a real treat for the reader, though sometimes it veers close to feeling scattered. More than once I wondered whether the studies being cited in the book were truly replicable or just hype (and more than once she acknowledges that some of the studies included were not replicated, for which I appreciated the honesty and disclaimer). Nonetheless, the pace of the book was well done and I frequently found myself sharing anecdotes as I read the book. An engaging and entertaining introduction to the topic and one that will provoke questions about what it means to be human.

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Happy to highlight this new release in “Nurture Your Nature,” a round-up of new and notable books on birds, in the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

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Accessible and informative, this is a fascinating read on some vital aspects of ourselves that have often gotten lost in the shuffle. One of my top nonfiction reads of the year thus far.

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10/10 stars

My full review on my blog (link attached).

Ward’s newest book, Where We Meet the World, is a beautiful ode to the miracle of the natural world. It’s funny, engrossing, and educating, but the main highlight for me is the way it radiates awe and amazement directed at things we usually take for granted: the incredible, complex way our senses work to deliver our sense of self within the wider world.

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In some ways, maybe because I’ve read less about this topic than about social characteristics of animals, I felt that Where We Meet the World was more educational than The Social Lives of Animals. It’s still popular science, easy to read and easy to digest, light, humorous, relatable and sometimes even personal, but filled with a plethora of curated, fascinating biological facts many of which were quite eye- (or other sensor-) opening for me. The cultural bias with which we perceive our senses, for example – it’s fascinating that different societies value the senses differently, and that the precedence afforded to vision is not entirely universal. I would dearly love to know how environmental factors come into play here, or how history/evolutionary adaptations could have moulded our responses to different stimuli.

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What I particularly loved, however, was the tantalisingly short consideration on how all of our senses collaborate and compile the external stimuli into a coherent vision of the world, and the internal stimuli into a vision of us – and how our own uniqueness, our sense of self, is born from that interaction. I am still not convinced that the term Umwelt was coined by the Estonian/German biologist Jakob von Uexküll (the earliest mention of his use of the term that I have found comes from his book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, published in 1934, while Martin Heidegger used the term as one of the main building blocks of his philosophy in his key work Being and Time published seven years earlier, in 1927), but the mention of this term in a biology book was rewarding enough. This is a topic that’s getting hotter by the minute, considering the evolution of AI – how do we exist in the world? What makes us us? Can you achieve sentience without a body which interacts with the wider world? Philosophy was long intrigued by these concepts, from the inherent unknowability of the reality of the world to the intrinsic subjectivity and fundamentally physical nature of our perception – but it’s great to see biology, and informational sciences, taking interest in these topics as well. I would wish to read more about it, particularly in Ward’s accessible, narrative style, but I guess that could well be the topic of his next book :).

Where We Meet the World is a truly fascinating work, opening large vistas of knowledge just waiting to be discovered. It’s also fun, and poignant, and written with love and awe for the subject that is truly contagious. It perfectly fills a niche between the dry academic books and the easy pop science offerings, skilfully delivering a wealth of knowledge with a storyteller’s panache. I’ll be looking forward to whatever Ward decides to write about next.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks.

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Loved it! Sensory biology made fun.

When I read popular science books, I look not just for information (hey, had I wanted to read a dry boring textbook I would have read a dry boring textbook) but for how accessible it is, how interesting and how fun. Well, Ashley Ward got it right again. He hit all the points with his previous book, The Social Lives of Animals, and with this book he proved that he’s not a one-hit wonder.

“The hákarl is delivered to me in chunks, sealed in a Kilner jar lest its terrible smell frighten the horses. My friends, who stubbornly refuse to participate, watch on as I timidly unfasten the container and retrieve a gobbet with the toothpick supplied. There’s no going back now. I pop the heinous morsel in my mouth. I don’t gag, though many first-timers do, apparently. A wave of flavour breaks over my tongue, a gustatory collage of particularly disreputable public toilets. There’s a note of elderly fish, swimming valiantly against the lavatorial flow. The texture is troubling, too, a kind of rubbery malevolence. To sum up the experience, I’d probably go with ‘vulcanised litter tray’.”


Our five senses may seem pretty clear and simple on initial glance (and hey, like many I seem to default to visual metaphors all the time, prioritizing the visual like most of us seem to do), but once you delve deeper into it they are anything but. Sensation is one thing, perception is another. There’s endless integration and collaboration going on constantly, with fascinating interplay.

“We also have taste receptors sprinkled around the body in places such as the liver, the brain and even the testes. This latter revelation, from a paper published in 2013, gave rise to a fad among young men to dangle their balls in such things as soy sauce, with some even claiming to have registered a savoury hit. The thing is, though taste receptors may be found in such extraordinary places, they’re not organised into taste buds and nor are they wired to the brain in quite the same way as the receptors in our mouths, so they don’t deliver the experience of flavour. The net result is that the participants exposed themselves not only to condiment-covered gonads but to accusations of wishful thinking.”


While I quite enjoyed the sections on vision, hearing and touch, the chapters on smell and taste were by far my favorite. I’ve never really appreciated the richness of experience coming from these, and when I lost both of these for a few weeks due to Covid I didn’t miss them at all — but Ward made me care a bit more about them, as well as give me many moments of hilarity and horror:

“For example, one of those chemicals that makes up the smell of coffee, indole, can cause problems for coffee-loving mums-to-be. To most people, indole has the odour of bad breath or faeces. In the melee of hundreds of different aromas in coffee, hardly anyone notices it. When some women become pregnant, indole’s shitty odour comes to the fore and ruins the whole experience.”


Humans can be quite disgusting and I’m never touching a perfume bottle ever again:

“As well as things like musk and castoreum from these animals, perfumes often contain a hint of urinary fragrance. Horrible as it may sound, our noses seem to like it.”


Even supposed wine connoisseurs can get fooled by a trick of adding food coloring to wine and involving preconceived expectations to replace supposed objectivity with subjectivity. When blindfolded, quite a few of us cannot identify coffee smell.

“There are many answers to the question of how many senses we have. It’s more than five, perhaps more than fifty. I’d argue that we learn little from the dry arithmetic process of accounting the senses. The important thing is to understand that the end result, perception – our overall sensory experience – is an alloy, an extraordinary conjoining and melding of the separate senses.”


Ward keeps it compulsively readable, sticking with an easy-to-follow humorous conversational tone while delivering quite a bit of information which never gets overwhelming or dry. Easy 5 stars.

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Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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Thank you Netgalley and Basic Books for access to this arc.

Our brain doesn’t actually sense anything, it just collects and integrates what is sent to it. If needed, it smooths little bits into a whole, and fills in missing stuff with its best guess. Senses can be “fooled” (vision is likely the most vulnerable to this) and probably no one’s are alike. Genetic differences can make eating coriander a nightmare for some, age and gender changes how bitter other foods taste to us (pregnant women and young children have heightened responses which are thought to be a protection against eating toxic plants). When your kiddo refuses to eat broccoli, it isn’t just to try your patience.

Our vision is the result of life having started in water and (for some) then migrated to land. Mammals’ relatively poor color vision was further shaped by mostly hunting in the dark – what kept them alive when, as the size of shrews, they ducked and dodged through the pre-Chicxulub night world when it paid to stay beneath a non-avian dinosaur’s notice. Our senses have been further honed by genetics as well as culture. Various cultures list different senses as being the most important to them though a large number, when asked which one they’d stand to lose, pick smell.

Humans live in a more colorful world than say dogs or cats as we have 3 types of cone cells to their 2 types and more cone cells overall. But just for a day or two, I’d love to see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp. They can see wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared as well as polarized light and have 12 cone cells. Imagine having one of them do your interior decorating! But humans really should avoid cell phones before bed as our melanopsin (which shuts off production of melatonin) is activated by blue. Our languages and culture also shape our perception of colors. Most languages have terms for black and white with red usually being added next. These are mostly followed by yellow or green and then by blue or brown. English didn’t have the word orange until relatively recently making due with red or red/brown to describe “redheads.”

Human responses to various sounds seem to be hardwired protection devices to avoid diseases. The sound of vomiting is the most loathed sound, followed by sniffling, and listening to someone chewing with their mouth open – bodily functions, especially ones connected to a risk of disease transmission put us on alert. Language appears to have propelled us as a species and despite the multitude of them spoken, most people can accurately intuit basic emotions when listening to others even if they don’t understand the words being said.

Our sense of smell, while nowhere near as good as a bloodhound’s, is actually not that bad. Once again though, pregnant women appear to have an increased sense of it, probably to help protect against eating something that might hurt their baby. Our noses can help us with kin recognition as well as potential disease detection. Sadly, smell has been historically used to denigrate certain groups including Jews and Black people.

The need for touch was horribly demonstrated in the Rumanian orphanages before the fall of communism when there were too many babies for providers to touch much at all, much less cuddle. The act of being held causes stress levels to drop and babies cry less. Tactile therapy helps preemies to gain weight more quickly as well as helping development of their brains.

The whole book is filled with fascinating facts and information about how we experience the world around us, the importance of all our many and varied senses including the “new” ones such as proprioception. I found it interesting as well as accessible though my advice would be to read it slowly. There’s a lot to take in and most of it will spark scintillating dinner conversation. B

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Fascinating overview of sensory biology! Ward divides the book by each of the five senses, but then describes how all of the senses are intricately integrated during the complicated process of perception.

Naturally, there are some gender differences when it comes to perception, with men having the evolutionary advantage for visual acuity and motion sensitivity, while women have better color discrimination. Women also have 50% more neurons in olfactory processing brain regions, making them far more sensitive to scents. The theory is that this evolved as a way to protect fetuses; a strong sense of smell allows (aka, pretty much forces) a mother to avoid things that give off a strong odor that could hurt the developing fetus. The reproductive hormones involved also give women of reproductive age a better sensitivity for taste compared to age-matched males.

I also thought the cross-culture comparisons on sense perception to be really interesting as well. Due to changes of lifestyle per culture, Westerners have a disadvantage when it comes to scent ability. For example, only one in four US adults were able to correctly identify the smell of coffee on a blind scent test. The variety of diets cross-culturally also explains the differences for taste, with 1 out of 4 Caucasian subjects being classified as "non-tasters" while East Asian and Afro-Caribbean samples performed astronomically better.

I always thought that humans have weaker perception than many mammals, but it turns out cats are legally blind by human standards! Dogs perform better, but worse than humans, and birds' eyesight puts the rest of the animal kingdom to shame. When it comes to taste, humans actually have more than 10x the amount of taste buds compared to dogs, which could explain why dogs have no issue eating poop. And while humans can't exactly replace TSA dogs when it comes to sniffing, we have a better sense of smell than I ever imagined. Ward described how study subjects were able to differentiate between the smell of fear rather than from exercise just by sniffing sweaty t-shirts! Lastly, humans, similar to other animals, seem to have a subconscious magnetic-driven perception of cardinal directions. Some humans have a stronger, subconscious brain activation to the change in magnetic fields, which could explain why some people are just more navigationally-skilled then others. These sections of the book are not only little fun facts, but sparked many conversations!

Sometimes this integration leads to inaccurate perception, and Ward provides amusing and thought-provoking examples of these situations. For example, just by dying white wine red, even experienced wine connoisseurs ended up mistakenly (but confidently) mislabeling it. Further studies revealed that background lighting and music also have a strong effect on how we perceive the flavor notes in wine; all to suggest that our perception is a conglomeration of multiple inputs of information in the setting; a sensory crosstalk, as Ward put it.

The only drawback of the writing style was the extremely long paragraph formatting at times, some of them a full page long. I felt like this would have made reading a bit smoother if they were reorganized, but that's minor. The book overall was excellent and very intriguing, highly recommend! Thank you to NetGalley and Basic Books for allowing me to read an advanced copy before publication.

"The fact remains that we experience our surroundings in very different ways, and this shapes not only what we perceive, but how we relate to the world."

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I generally don’t read popular science for the laughs; I’m there for well-explained content, hopefully with a conversational tone. But this book delivers it all; the content, the style and the humor that makes for great science writing. Written in a conversational tone with minimal use of jargon, this book gave me an excellent, well-explained tour of the senses. The book is well-paced and there is never a dull moment, making it hard to put the book down. Thank you to Netgalley and Basic Books for the digital review copy.

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Interesting, Well Written, Readable- But Needs Well-Sourced Bibliography. This book was an utterly fascinating mid-range dive into each of the human senses (even including at least one chapter on senses *other* than the "Big 5"), their biology, evolution, and overall impact on the human body and mind. It was truly well written for most anyone who can read at all to be able to understand, without too many technical or highly precise and specific terms that would require specialized knowledge. It was humorous enough to increase its readability, while still being serious about its subjects and discussions. Really the only flaw, at least in this Advance Reader Copy form, was the lack of a bibliography at all (where 20-30% is more common in my experience), and I also want to call out the inclusion of a page listing a "selected further readings to come" or some such, indicating that the final version of the book would only have a limited bibliography. To my mind, this would be a mistake, and I hope the publisher sees this with enough lead time to hopefully correct that direction before publication. This dearth of a bibliography was the sole reason for the star deduction here. Still, if nothing else changes about this book at all from the time I read it nearly three months before publication and for decades following publication, this is truly a strong book giving the reader a complete overview of the human senses as we currently understand them. Very much recommended.

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This book is exactly what it says it is on the cover, it tells you some basic facts about your senses and offers theories about how and why they evolved the way they did blending a variety of scientific disciplines. That being said, it was a fun read with just the right blend of stats, anecdotes, and ideas to keep it engaging all the way through.
A lot of the information presented I was already familiar with, and the language used was pretty accessible (no unnecessary lingo here) so I would say this is a book that would be great for anyone who is discovering an interest in the topic or someone who is just drawn in by the pretty cover.
I particularly enjoyed the section about smell and how we tend to undervalue that particular sense even though is one that our bodies put a lot of resources in, while I'm not entirely surprised that we do when comparing it to our other senses we spend so much time and money on not smelling bad one would think we'd actually be pretty invested in that sense

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