From the best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind, a pioneering search for consciousness in the brain and beyond When it comes to consciousness, there is one point scientists, philosophers and artists all agree on: 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 inner life scientifically even look like? What began for Michael Pollan as a startling awareness of his own consciousness soon evolved into a deeper fascination with this strange and elusive phenomenon. In A World Appears, Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness from several radically different perspectives – scientific, philosophical, spiritual, historical and psychedelic – to see what each has to teach us about this fundamental fact of our lives. Here Pollan ventures beyond the brain labs attempting to find neural explanations for our felt reality, and discovers the latest cutting-edge advances in the field. He introduces us to plant neurobiologists studying nature’s surprisingly complex intelligence; neuroscientists and psychoanalysts attempting to engineer feeling into AI; and novelists recreating our slippery stream of consciousness. Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness uncovers a world far deeper than our everyday reality – and perhaps even beyond it.
