A World Appears

Why does it feel like something to be you? Scientists, philosophers and artists tend to agree on that much, yet nobody has explained how a mind produces feelings, thoughts and a sense of self. Michael Pollan takes on that puzzle in A World Appears, a wide-ranging look at what consciousness is, who or what might possess it, and why it matters. The difficulty he starts from is a strange one: we are so immersed in our own inner lives that we have almost no distance from which to study them, much as a fish has none from which to see the sea.

The neuroscientists who took up the question in the early 1990s mostly assumed the brain generates our experienced reality, and they set out to show how roughly three pounds of gray matter could give rise to a subjective point of view. Pollan goes to the frontier of that work, where some researchers are now weighing bolder theories that step away from strict materialism. Along the way he meets plant neurobiologists hunting for the earliest hints of awareness in plants, researchers trying to build feelings into artificial intelligence, and psychologists and novelists who try to capture the texture of the restless stream of thought.

Rather than lean on one discipline, Pollan draws on scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic perspectives, asking what each can reveal about the central fact of being alive. The author of How to Change Your Mind guides readers through a territory that proves deeper and stranger than everyday life suggests.

The book is as much a meditation on human nature as an investigation. Its larger aim is to show how we might use the gift of awareness more deliberately, to connect more fully with the world around us and with our deepest selves.