RaveThe Wall Street JournalBy examining the diverse perceptual capacities of our fellow creatures, Sentient leads us to perceive ourselves in a new, organic context ... To her credit, Ms. Higgins doesn’t waste her time or ours trying to suggest what it is like to be a spookfish, an octopus, or a bar-tailed godwit. Rather, she digs deeply into the sensory capacities of some of the world’s most intriguing animals to better understand not only them, but the biological miracle of our own perceptions, many of which turn out to be surprisingly acute ... After reading Sentience, you’d have to be uncommonly insensible not to appreciate your own sensory powers even if, like most of us, you’ve been experiencing a Covid-generated, sensorily-deprived life for the last two years ... Nearly every chapter of Sentience is enlivened with the author’s conversations with scientists who did the groundbreaking work she explores ... Ms. Higgins’s most extraordinary achievement in an extraordinary book may be that in the course of her investigations she seems to have discovered a new sense: the sense of how to write compelling popular science.
