Sentient What Animals Reveal About Our Senses

Sentient: What Animals Reveal About Our Senses explores the remarkable sensory abilities of animals to reveal how human beings perceive—and make sense of—the world. Rather than accepting the familiar idea that people have only five senses, Jackie Higgins examines a wider sensory landscape that includes colour, balance, touch, taste, smell, hearing, time, direction, pain, pleasure, body awareness, and desire. Each chapter pairs a human sensory capacity with an animal whose biology makes that sense especially vivid. Readers encounter the harlequin mantis shrimp’s extraordinary colour vision; vampire bats’ sophisticated touch; cheetahs’ exceptional balance and manoeuvrability; bloodhounds’ powerful smell; Goliath catfish that taste their environment through receptors across their bodies; four-eyed spookfish adapted to dark-water vision; and common octopuses, whose flexible arms offer clues to body awareness and movement. The book uses these examples to argue that human senses are neither ordinary nor isolated from the rest of animal life—they are part of a shared evolutionary toolkit. Originally published in Britain by Picador in 2021, with a U.S. edition released by Atria Books in 2022, the book is an accessible science narrative rather than a textbook. It combines field research, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, animal behaviour, and personal reflection to make readers more attentive to the sensory complexity of everyday life.