A quirky, intimate, and eye-opening look into the ways of thinking like a fish.

An extract from the much-loved modern classic on the subject of fish consciousness, What a Fish Knows.

Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? Jonathan Balcombe dives in among our marine cousins to explore the essential questions of how fish perceive and process the world.

With his ethologists gift for showing us the hidden depths of questions weve routinely preferred to think of as simple, and his raconteurs flair for the surprising and the curious, Balcombe takes us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Balcombe upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellianin other words, much like us.

Using humor and a repertoire of some of the most surprising fish facts youve ever heard, Balcombe shakes up what you think you know about whats going on inside the mind of these denizens of the deep.

Fish Sense is part of the Picador Shorts series Oceans, Rivers, and Streams in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.

Paperback | 144 pages | 5.00″ x 7.45″