A World Beyond Human Experience by Howard Hughes MIT Press, 1999. Some animals live in sensory worlds that are unimaginable to us. Electric fish probe their surroundings with brief electrical pulses and sense nearby objects by the microsecond shifts in timing and microvolt changes in amplitude these objects cause in their self-generated electric fields. Some electric fish 'digitize' information at frequencies exceeding a kilohertz with submicrosecond jitter. These are feats that push the envelope of ion channel behavior and neural processing.
Bees forage on cloudy days by detecting complex patterns of polarized light in the sky.
This is done with a small dorsal patch of retina comprising a few hundred specialized ommatidia. The exact positioning of a single ultraviolet-sensitive photoreceptor within each ommatidium, and the variation of its position within the ommatidia across the dorsal patch, allows a bee to perceive the brightest signal when it is lined up with and flying towards the unobservable sun. This is a simple but elegant solution by strategic positioning of an array of detectors, a so-called 'computational anatomical' solution. A World Beyond Human Experience attempts to peer into these private worlds and inspire us in both ways. This book, which grew out of an undergraduate course taught by the author, is not a textbook but a popular science book.