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The convoluted history of the electric sense also hints at something special about electroreceptors. The language of the brain is electricity, and as we’ve seen, animals have had to evolve weird ways of converting light, sound, odorants, and other stimuli into electrical signals. But electroreceptors are just translating electricity into electricity. They’re the only sense organs that detect the very entity that powers our thoughts. Perhaps it’s not that difficult to evolve an electroreceptor, and that’s why they repeatedly blink in and out of the vertebrate evolutionary tree.

— An Immense World by Ed Yong

To date, “the only sonar that the Navy has that can detect buried mines in harbors is a dolphin,”

— An Immense World by Ed Yong

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star.

— An Immense World by Ed Yong

Beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder. It arises because of that eye.

— An Immense World by Ed Yong

The act of giving something up does not merely clear time and mental space to focus you. It’s a ritual, too, an offering where you sacrifice a portion of your life to the metaphoric gods of creation. Instead of goats or cattle, we’re sacrificing television or music or numbers—and what is a sacrifice but a ritual?

— The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

We don’t create a tactile scene of the world, even though we can feel with every part of our skin. Indeed, we largely ignore those sensations until something pokes us (or vice versa). And when we feel something unexpected, our most common reaction is to turn and look at it. Perhaps for a scallop, smell (not vision) is the fine-grained exploration sense and vision (not touch) is the crude, whole-body detection sense.

— An Immense World by Ed Yong