Michael Pollan

The Instant New York Times Bestseller "Pollan’s real genius—the word is not too strong—remains intact. That is his uncanny ability to scent the direction in which the culture is headed. He did it with food and psychedelics, and now, though A World Appears focuses on AI only intermittently, he has done it again." —Charles Finch, The Atlantic From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life. When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness. In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.

A Journey into Consciousness

A World Appears

Bastien Vaucher

We talked about the reanimation of the world that users of psychedelics often report perceiving, and about the uncanny fact that this perception harmonizes with the worldview of so many traditional cultures. Our own culture is, of course, the great ex-ception, and for good reason: It's been shaped by a conception of science framed in such a way as to render sentience in nature more or less invisible. As a result, it has given us license to treat nature as an exploitable resource.

His [Antonio Damasio’s] research demonstrated that, in fact, the presence of feelings improved decision-making. Fur-ther, people who had brain lesions that rendered them incapable of feeling or emotion generally made poorer decisions (as measured by psychological tests) and made them more slowly. Feelings allow us to internally try out possible courses of action before committing to them, providing a kind of gut check that speeds up and improves the decision-making process.

To their surprise, the leap in hippocampal activity preceded the arrival of the thought in the meditator's consciousness by nearly four seconds—an epoch in brain time, and far longer than it takes for a sensory impression to cross the threshold of our awareness. "Some-thing is going on prior to awareness," Christoff Hadjilieva said, but she's not sure exactly what it is or why it takes so long. This finding indicates that a spontaneous thought must undergo some sort of complicated unconscious processing before finding (or forcing) its way into the stream of consciousness.

This is why, when Gopnik tried LSD for the first time, she felt it had given her access to the world as it appears to a young child: numinous. "I realized that children are tripping all the time," she told me.

We don't actually have access to the past, only to our memories of it, and these are remarkably unreliable and subject to permuta-tion. This is usually regarded as a bug, a defect of our mental machinery, but what if the fungibility of memory is really a feature?

For this is precisely the role that Proust assigns to the artist—to translate, or decode, other people's inner books of unknown signs in order to reveal what he calls "the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual."

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