I think of going for a walk with Typo as him checking his social media. It’s very much like when I’m scrolling through Instagram or Twitter and seeing what my friends are up to. He does this on a walk. He checks out what all the neighborhood dogs are like, what they’re doing, where they’ve been. It’s a deeply social activity for him.

The senses as a topic really leans into that because of how important imagination is for understanding them. Light is electromagnetic radiation. Smells are just small molecules drifting through air and water. Sound is just pressure waves. It’s not actually obvious that we should be able to sense any of these things, let alone then transform them in... See more

There’s always going to be this chasm where it can only be leapt over through imagination rather than through empiricism. Empiricism can guide our imagination, but we still have to make that final leap on our own. To really get at this, you need to fuse the sciences and the arts. You need to think more broadly than just the products of research pap... See more

Comparing and contrasting that tendency to make generalizations can very easily devalue the experiences of humans who sense the world in very different ways.

We think of the senses as passive intake valves: Light enters my eyes; my ears are vessels for absorbing sound. But actually the senses have this almost active role in shaping the world around us. In viewing nature’s palettes, eyes also act like paint brushes.

An Immense World argues that the world around us is deep and richer than we know because we are confined by the constraints of our own sensors. Other animals operate under different constraints and so perceive a very different world than what we are familiar with. And even everyday things, a street or a plant or a featureless body of water, are ric... See more

Many people knew this before, but the last three years have hammered home the fact that we cannot protect things that we don’t empathize with. If we don’t care about the value of other lives, whether human or animal, then we won’t be motivated to protect those lives.

One of my favorite reviews for I Contain Multitudes was a one-star review on Amazon, someone saying that this is a book about feelings, which makes it not a science book. There are no figures and tables or charts and numbers, and it’s not serious enough. That science should be opaque and serious. I think it should be exactly the opposite.

It’s a slightly limiting concept. It means all of us are kind of constrained and trapped by the confines of our own senses. But it also is wonderfully expansive because it means that nothing can do everything.