A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness Michael Pollan Penguin (2026)
Humans and other animals have subjective inner mental lives, seeing, smelling, imagining, remembering and feeling emotions such as anger and boredom. These experiences are innate but remain utterly unpredictable on the basis of the physical sciences — nothing explains how living matter can love or hate, daydream about sex, or fear for the future.
As journalist Michael Pollan recounts in A World Appears, the use of a handful of organic compounds can demonstrate that these sensations are constructs shaped and formed by the brain — and that these sensations can be expanded considerably. “In small doses, psychedelics smudge the pane of normal perception,” he notes. “The experience defamiliarizes everyday consciousness, allowing us to see it freshly.”
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The author’s own experiences with psychedelics were what initiated his exploration of consciousness. A World Appears is a beautifully crafted, personal account of his five-year-long quest to understand how scientists, philosophers and novelists explore the nature of conscious experience.
The modern era of consciousness research began in the early 1990s. Researchers sought to tackle what philosopher David Chalmers called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness: the challenge of explaining why any physical process — be it neurons firing at particular frequencies or the transmission of information through specific regions of the brain — should ‘feel’ like anything at all.
Researchers began trying to identify the brain circuits and cells that lead to the experience of consciousness in mammals. They focused on the neocortex, the brain’s outermost layer, which is often assumed to be responsible for consciousness.
Although this lofty goal of identifying brain circuits is yet to be achieved, in parallel, scientists have developed formal, empirically testable theories that relate consciousness to underlying neural circuits. Pollan focuses on two of them: integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory. I have skin in the game, having long backed one of these theories, so I will refrain from saying anything more except that they remain disputed and that Pollan interviewed me several times for this book. But Pollan’s heart isn’t in theories — he prefers the buzz of lived qualitative experience to the bloodless abstract quantities needed to construct mathematical models.
Staying stable
A World Appears starts with the topic of sentience — effectively the feeling of being alive, or proto-consciousness. Pollan, a lifelong gardener and plant lover, interviews philosopher Paco Calvo and two plant biologists, Stefan Mancuso and František Baluška. They argue that plants are sentient, can be anaesthetized and can solve problems — and that they must therefore be considered intelligent. Perhaps, Pollan muses, neurons are not needed for sentience. Their importance might be overestimated because of how crucial the brain is for humans.
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