A Feast in Every Sense

Aristotle said we have five senses. Neuroscientists now think the real number may be closer to thirty – from chronoception, our mysterious internal clock, to interoception, the conversation our organs are constantly having with our brains. Three decades on from her cult bestseller A Natural History of the Senses , Diane Ackerman returns to find that science has been quietly dismantling everything we thought we knew about perception. In A Feast in Every Sense , Ackerman takes us swimming with manatees who see with their skin, inside research labs where scientists are regrowing the microscopic hairs that give us hearing, and into a bedroom where a Scottish nurse smelt her husband’s Parkinson’s disease a decade before his diagnosis. She explores the sensory signatures of outer space, the hidden scent receptors in our hearts and sperm cells, and a blind man who navigates city streets by echolocation. At a time when screens are steadily starving our natural senses, this is a book that will make you feel startlingly, exuberantly alive.