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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor for the

Spectator and this week we will be opening the doors of perception. My guest is Ashley Ward,

whose new book is sensational, a new story of our senses. Ashley, welcome. Now, most of us have a,

to excuse the part, a kind of common sense idea about what our senses are and how they work,

and we know there's five of them, and that's that.

Can you tell me what you set out to do in this book in terms of problematising or complicating

that picture? Yeah. Well, thank you very much, first of all, for inviting me. So I guess the

senses are so central to our existence that we almost sometimes forget that they're even there in a sense.

You know, we see things and we don't think about how we see them.

We hear things and don't think about the process by which we register sound and so on.

But the picture is so much more interesting and so much more complex than that once you take a deep dive into it.

And I think really what started me off on this particular path was really thinking about, in my case, I have worked extensively with examining animals, for instance, in the context of science, and wondering how they perceive the world.

And it was really looping that back around to think about how we perceive the world

that really started me thinking about this book and about this project.

I mean, that question of how people perceive the world, how animals perceive the world.

I mean, I don't think you mention it in the book, but there is that famous essay,

you know, what would it be like to be a bat,

Thomas Nagel's philosophical thing. I mean, it's, you know, as someone who works in the field

who works on animal senses, can we, could we ever know what it's like to be a bat? Can we

understand or transfer in some way our individual qualia

into other animals? I don't think really we can. All we can do is try and be open-minded enough

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