Experience Planner

Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle — A Natural History of the Senses AND A Feast in Every Sense: The Mystery, Marvel, and New Science of Our Senses

Originally published in 1991, A Natural History of the Senses is a vibrant celebration of our ability to smell, taste, hear, touch, and see. Poet, pilot, naturalist, journalist, essayist, explorer, Diane Ackerman weaves together scientific fact with lore, history, and voluptuous description. The resulting work is a startling and enchanting account of how human beings experience and savor the world.

It asks and answers such questions as: How do perfumers know which scents allure? Why does music move us? How did kissing on the mouth begin? What is our craving for chocolate? It illuminates the phenomenon of pheromones and looks into the question of whether they control us. Incorporated in its superb reporting and splendid prose are fascinating facts: Humans have about 10,000 taste buds, cows 25,000. What are they tasting, and what are we missing? It probes such everyday mysteries as why leaves turn color in the fall and why we see them in color; and what it is that causes lovers to feel delight when they touch. A Natural History of the Senses is at once an ingenious exploration of the physical processes underlying our perceptions and an eloquent ode to life.

A companion work to A Natural History of the Senses and forthcoming in January 2027, A Feast in Every Sense is Diane Ackerman’s luscious and tender journey into the mystery of our modern sensory lives, a grand tour that captures the heady feelings of being alive. She introduces us to receptors that create the creamy sensation of a perfectly ripe avocado, sound waves that allow us to identify hot versus cold water by sound alone, skin sensors that lower pain and change brain chemistry at a lover’s touch.

The sensory universe colors every morsel of human existence. Why does sitting in a hard chair make you a harder bargainer? Why does Tylenol decrease empathy? Why does sipping a bitter drink invite harsher moral judgments? How does the time of day you receive a flu vaccine or an organ transplant affect its success? Is airplane food really that dull, or do our cravings and sense of taste warp at altitude? What sensory rebels have lived at the frontiers of perception? So many mysteries, good and bad, can only be understood through our senses.

Ackerman also uses new scientific discoveries, like our host of Secret Senses—ever-vigilant scouts—to explain life’s intricacies and understand how the world’s endless stimuli combine with our inner lives to form our deepest thoughts, feelings, hardships and joys.

Blending history, science, personal experience, and a poet’s eye, A Feast in Every Sense is both an ambrosial display of how we process the beauty around us and a call to rediscover what it means to be fully embodied and alive in a world brimming with wonders.

Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of over two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including The New York Times bestsellers The Zookeeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Age. Ms. Ackerman has received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Communicating Science, P.E.N. Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing, Orion Book Award, John O’Donohue Poetry Award, John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, Guggenheim Fellowship, Lavan Poetry Prize, an honorary doctorate from Kenyon College, among many others, as well as being celebrated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Several of her books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Circle Critics Award finalists. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She also has the distinction of having a molecule named after her —dianeackerone— a sex pheromone in pygmy crocodiles. Ms. Ackerman has an M.F.A. and PhD from Cornell, and has taught at a number of universities, including Columbia and Cornell. Her essays about nature and human nature have been appearing for decades in the New York Times, New Yorker, American Scholar, Smithsonian, Nautilus, National Geographic and many other journals. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by A Natural History of the Senses. In 2017, The Zookeeper’s Wife was made into a feature film starring Jessica Chastain.