From Michael Pollan, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND, a dazzling and panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the limits and bounds of our very humanity
When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point scientists, philosophers, and researchers can all agree on with a level of certainty: that it feels like something to be ourselves. And yet, the fact that each and every one of us has a subjective experience of the world continues to be one of the greatest mysteries in nature. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would studying the idea of an inner life even look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? What began for Michael Pollan as a startling awareness of his own consciousness soon evolved into a greater fascination with this strange and elusive phenomenon. In A WORLD APPEARS, Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness via several radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, spiritual, historical, and psychedelic—to see what each has to teach us about this central kernel of our lives.
When scientists began to study consciousness in earnest, in the early 1990s, they questioned how and why it came to be that three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view – if indeed the brain is the locus of our felt reality. But Pollan ventures to the latest cutting-edge advances in the field, beyond the brain labs attempting to track down the neural correlates of this enigmatic experience and offering us a seat at the table with plant neurobiologists studying nature’s surprisingly complex intelligence and ability to problem solve, neuroscientists and psychoanalysts attempting to engineer feeling into AI, and psychologists interpreting the thoughts that enter our slippery stream of consciousness.
In Pollan’s singular narrative inquiry and deft handling of complicated subjects, he ungirds a world that reaches far deeper than the reality we wade through, day in and day out. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A WORLD APPEARS deconstructs and rebuilds the laboratories of our minds one theory at a time, amplifying how we might make better use of our awareness and more meaningfully connect with our own souls.
