Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses

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."

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.

My husband loved this book and couldn’t stop quoting from it as he was reading it. A fascinating take on the human senses-more widespread and powerful than we knew before reading this interesting gem!