Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals’ Inner Lives

＂Amazing, moving and enlightening. Bats Sing, Mice Giggle presents the latest findings on the intimate lives of animals with great elegance. I recommend it wholeheartedly.＂--Larry King

＂Did you know that spiders taste with their feet, that a decapitated cockroach can live for two weeks, that a certain type of parrotfish wraps itself in a sort of foul-smelling snot before taking a nap, and that ants play? I didn’t until I read Bats Sing, Mice Giggle.＂ --New Scientist

＂Full of interesting facts . . . presented in a friendly, readable way that will appeal to most young adult and adult readers with an interest in the world around them. The authors discuss a remarkably wide range of topics [in] an easy general-reading text that introduces readers to interesting avenues of scientific research and observation.＂--SB&F

＂In the delightful process of discovering the secret skills of our living cousins, so crisply and clearly described in this book, each filled with their quirky spectacular capacities (which we can envy but not duplicate) that sense of our place in the scheme of things has been infused with . . . joyful awe.＂--Stuart L. Brown MD, Founder and President, The National Institute for Play

Bats Sing, Mice Giggle is the culmination of many years of cutting-edge scientific research that reveals how animals have secret, inner lives of which until recently--although animal lovers will have instinctively believed it--we have had little proof.

The authors show how animals communicate; how they warn and help each other in times of danger; how some problem-solve even more effectively than humans; and how they build, create, and entertain themselves and others.

Karen Shanor, Ph.D is a neuropsychologist, a former White House consultant and an advisory member of Discovery Channel Global Education. At Stanford University she researched how rats learn, and how cats dream. Her work at NASA’s Life Sciences department included animal research on memory and information theory, and she has taught with Karl Prilbram at Georgetown university since 1998. As a Peace Corps science teacher in Somalia, she was a consultant for a wildlife conservatory. A frequent lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution, Karen also hosted an NBC radio program for five years and appears frequently on Larry King Live, CBS Nightly News, Dateline, The Today Show and Oprah, and is a regular contributor to CNN.

Jagmeet Kanwal, Ph.D is an associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is also an external professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Fairfax, Virginia. Dr Kanwal is an internationally recognized neurothologist who was the first to perform magnetic resonance imaging in awake animals. He is an exert on cortical mechanisms for the perception of complex sounds. Dr Kanwal discovered a left-brain dominance for species-specific calls in bats, as is present for speech in humans, and together with co-workers is engaged in cracking the code for the neural representation of social calls. Dr Kanwal’s early contributions on the comparative organization of chemosensory systems include the discovery of taste centres in the forebrain of fish. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to understand the functional organization of the brain from the viewpoint of behaviour. He is also an ardent birdwatcher and keen nature photographer.