Six-part series that goes around the globe in search of the biological roots of our senses of smell, vision, taste, touch and balance. Live action combined with special effects creates imagery to convey the "feeling" of how our senses work.

"Professor Francis Colavita offers a biopsychological perspective on the way we humans navigate and react to the world around us in a process that is ever-changing. Our experiences are vastly different today than they were when we were children and our senses and brains were still developing; and those experiences are becoming ever more different as we age, when natural changes alert us to the need to compensate, often in ways that are quite positive"--Publisher's...

Discusses the sense of touch and how it works to tell us more about the world around us.

Invites readers to use their senses to find a friend who is calling out to them from inside the book.

Can you describe how the flavor of halibut differs from red snapper? How Brie differs from cheddar? For most of us, unfortunately, the answer is: badly. Flavor remains a vague, undeveloped concept we don't know enough about to describe-or to appreciate-fully. In Flavor, Bob Holmes shows us just how much we're missing. He tackles questions like why cake tastes sweetest on white plates, how wine experts' eyes fool their noses, and how language affects...

"Perception is the foundation of human experience, but few of us understand why we see what we do, much less how. By revealing the startling truths about the brain and its perceptions, [neuroscientist] Beau Lotto shows that the next big innovation is not a new technology: it is a new way of seeing. In his first major book, Lotto draws on over two decades of pioneering research to explain that our brain didn't evolve to see the world accurately. It...

Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing "flea"-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way...

Describes the anatomy of the eye and ear, how those organs function and some ways in which they may malfunction, and how the brain is also involved in our seeing and hearing.