A WORLD APPEARS

A page-turner that explores the hidden world of the mind.

Pollan’s latest begins with a wager between a philosopher and a scientist back in 1998, one premised on the discovery of the brain’s physical basis for consciousness, which the scientist predicted would “comprise a small set of specialized neurons responsible for subjective experience.” The scientist, Christof Koch, didn’t quite get there in the specified 25-year limit for the discovery, presenting the philosopher, David Chalmers, with a case of fine wine for winning the bet. We’re still not there, but neuroscientists are making headway, with two competing models, global workspace theory and integrated information theory, leading the charge. (Koch favors the latter.) But along the way, scientists have also learned much more about the components of consciousness (sentience, feeling, thought, and awareness of self) in animal minds and, possibly, even in plants (“ancient, brainless, and largely immobile”), which some researchers hold can feel pain. Pollan, who has written about food, plants, and psychoactive drugs, combines all three topics in this survey of the many ways people think about thinking, with the insight that people who have experience with the last are more inclined than others to ascribe consciousness to nonhuman beings “both living and nonliving,” possibly even to the level of viruses. Indeed, there is widespread agreement, psychedelics or not, that nonhuman animals have the same neurological substrates that enable consciousness in humans. The science in Pollan’s book is heady and sometimes even headache-inducing, but he delivers plenty of ponderable insights, such as this: “Why do we cling to the idea of a self, placing great value on self-confidence and self-esteem, while simultaneously spending so much effort on self-transcendence, whether through meditation or psychedelics or experiences of art, awe, and flow?”

A fluent survey of what we know—or think we know—about the mind.