8 Of the Best Nonfiction Books About The Senses

If you are looking for a tour of all the major senses in one book, this is the one to pick up. Diane Ackerman takes her readers on a journey, across time and to far corners of the world, to explore how we perceive and interact with the world around us. The writing is lush and evocative, as is expected from a book about sensory experiences, and the book is a treat even when read in small snippets.

In this book, pioneering neurologist and author Oliver Sacks delves deep into the ways in which we perceive, and interpret, the visual world. He weaves the science of seeing with his own experience of cancer, and that of other people coping with loss of vision, into a compelling and intimate narrative.

This book is an exploration of the sense of touch — a vital means of our communication with the world around us, but one that has been sidelined as humanity assigned more importance to the cerebral world than the corporeal one. It combines discourse on the physiology of touch with personal experiences and interviews, and it examines the significance of the sense of touch in an increasingly digitized world.

This book is a fascinating deep dive into the science of taste. Stuckey tells her readers how the different senses work together to create our perception of taste, and how variations in biology and genetics make this perception unique. If you have ever wondered how we have such varied responses to the same type of food, this book is for you.

From drumbeats in a prehistoric cave to the cacophony of modern life — historian David Hendy looks at 100,000 years of history to explore the role that sound and listening had to play in the evolution of our civilization. With its engaging prose and interesting insights, this book will give you a true taste (sound?) of what it would have felt like to live in the past.

In this book, Harold McGee will take you on an olfactory world tour, where you will meet smells mesmerizing, malodorous, and mundane. It also provides an accessible introduction to the chemistry and biology of odors and the way we process olfactory stimuli.

This memoir by Bangladeshi American author Tanaïs is structured like a perfume, with base, head, and heart notes. The book is an exploration of the author’s personal history, and the cultural history of fragrances in the South Asian context, interwoven with an examination of social hierarchies like race, caste and gender. Sensorial and beautifully written, it is a must read.

This book is essential reading to truly grasp the narrowness of our anthropocentric worldview. Through a wide exploration of the unique ways in which animal senses decode the world, Ed Yong shows his readers how much of the world still remains beyond our grasp. I thoroughly enjoyed the author’s earlier work I Contain Multitudes, and this one was equally engrossing and fascinating. For a more specific look into the sensory world of dogs, the animals that probably live in closest contact with us, I also recommend Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog.