Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals. And I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know, and another thing to understand. Alan murder me? What the hell was Alan thinking? From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm M. Gessen, and this is The Id-iot. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness. It is the only thing we truly know, the only thing we have certain actual firsthand experience of. And yet we don't understand it at all. We don't know what it's made of. We don't know how it works. We don't know why it exists. And the closer we look at it, the weirder consciousness gets. The more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail. I find that so delightful that something so close could remain so mysterious, that such a central question about the universe is happening inside of us all of the time. Now, that's not to say we haven't tried to understand it or that we haven't learned a lot from those efforts. In his new book, A World Appears, a journey into consciousness, the science writer Michael Pollan takes a tour of those efforts, of those theories, of those experiments, of those psychedelic trips and meditation retreats. And he keeps finding himself in stranger and stranger territory, deeper inside the mystery. So I wanted to have him on to talk about it. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Michael Pollan, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Good to be back. So I wanted to begin with an experiment that you participated in during the reporting of this book where you wore a beeper and tried to record what was going on in your mind when that beeper went off. What did you learn from that? When's the beeper going to go off? So the experiment was, there's a psychologist at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, named Russell Hurlburt. And he's been sampling inner experience, as he calls it, for 50 years. And the way he does it is he equips you with a beeper. You wear this thing in your ear. It emits a very sharp beep. You know exactly what it was and when it was. There's no, like, reaching for your phone or any doubt about what you're dealing with. And then you're supposed to write down what you were thinking at that very moment. And then you collect a day's worth of beeps, which could be five or six beeps. And, you know, it's got various kind of observer effect problems. You wonder, you know, God, if the beeper went off now, what would I have to say? Oh, that would really be embarrassing. So you're, there is this self-consciousness. But you forget about it over the course of the day. Suddenly you get a beep and you write it down. And, you know, I was struck by how banal my beeps were. I mean, I would be like, the one I describe in the book is, I'm waiting online at a bakery and I'm deciding, should I buy a roll or use the heel of bread I have at home to make a sandwich for lunch? This is not profound stuff. And then he interrogates you about them to try to make sense of it and help you become a better student of what's going on in your own mind. Because it turns out very often we don't know what we're thinking. At least I didn't know what I was thinking. And he would say, now, did you speak that or did you hear that spoken? I was like, I have no idea. Was it in language or was it an image? And I said, well, there was sort of an image. It was kind of very unspecific, kind of an emoji of a roll, not a real roll. And he'd take you through it. And it was an incredibly challenging process. I want to stay on that for a second. I would say that a lot of thoughts I have, if you push me, they're the feeling of a thought. I know it's there, but it's not spoken. I'm not looking at lettering on the projector screen of my brain. It's something less than a fully formed thought. This word thought implies a kind of, you know, roundedness to the thing that just doesn't exist. And many of our thoughts are these wisps of mentation, you know, that... I love that gossamer wisp mentation is how you put it in the book. Yeah. And then also many people think in totally unsymbolized thoughts, which I don't really understand what those would be if they're not words and not images. But his finding after 50 years of this is that we think in very different ways. He roasts you at the end of the experiment. Oh, man. You finish this up and he says that you are low on... Very little inner life. ...mental experience. Yeah, I didn't know how to take this. I mean, we all think we have a lively inner life, but absence of one? It never occurred to me. That raises a question for me, which is, to what degree was what you were recording in this experiment different than your perception of how your mental life feels to you in a day? Very different. And so what was the difference and what do you make of it? I just assumed I had a little more going on than he thought I had. But part of the reason he came to that conclusion is I argued with him a lot. I found the whole idea of separating thoughts into these discrete chunks absolutely impossible. When I was on that bakery waiting in line, there was the smell of baked goods and cheese. They sold cheese at this place. There was the image of this woman in front of me who had this very loud plaid skirt on that was kind of hideous. There was, you know, my awareness of the other people there. Did I recognize anybody? I often bump into people I know here. My thoughts were so inter-infected, you know, by one another, one thought coloring the next. And he just kept drilling down until I absolutely would separate all that. But I had read a lot of William James at this point. He's got this amazing essay on the stream of consciousness, and he's an incredibly acute observer of the nuance and subtlety of our thoughts. And he talks about things like the unarticulated affinity between two thoughts or how one thought colors the next and then the other, and that it is a stream and you can't pull anything out of the stream without completely disturbing it. Let's talk about William James because he always ends up the godfather, the leading source of metaphor in any book like this. Who is he? So William James is the father of psychology in America. He is now regarded more as a philosopher, and that's because psychology is so empirical now. He was really, I don't know if he used this word, but he acted like, wrote like a phenomenologist, which is to say about the lived experience of thought. I first got acquainted with him when I was working on How to Change Your Mind because he'd written The Varieties of Religious Experience, and there's a fantastic chapter there on mystical experience. And he experimented with drugs himself to look at these kind of outer reaches of consciousness. He's kind of unreadable, yet he's also a great writer at the same time. There's something about his sentences that are so long and intricate that he loses a modern reader about 80% of the way to the period, at least me. But the observations are just so refined, and they kind of put to shame all the scientists working on consciousness. I mean, I hate to say that because I respect a lot of them, but that he's on to the subtlety of mental experience. And they, of course, are reducing it to fairly simple things like visual perception or qualia, which is their word for, you know, the qualities of experience. He goes so far beyond qualia to delve into these details of thinking that it was, so I had a head full of James when I was doing this experiment, and it seemed to keep doing violence to that. I recognized my thinking more in James than in Hurlbut's questions. One thing I love about James is his precision in describing how imprecise the stuff of the mind is. And mind stuff is a word or a term he uses. I want to quote you quoting him here because I love this. You're writing, the objects of our thoughts can never be completely disentangled from what James variously calls their auras, halos, accentuations, associations, diffusions, feeling of tendency, premonitions, psychic overtones, and you say, perhaps my favorite, fringe of unarticulated affinities. Yeah, the fringe. It's so beautiful. But talk to me a bit about that because I do think that I do a meditation often where you note what is going on in your attention and you note your thoughts. And even within thoughts, you note, did I hear that? Did I see that? Did I feel that? And it always also seems to me to be doing a kind of violence. I'll sink into a dream a little bit. And what was that exactly? It wasn't quite a word. It wasn't quite a visual. All this stuff that you just quoted. Tell me a little bit about the borderlands of mental experience. I think it's just a reminder that our mental life is just far more intricate, complex, and shadowy than we give it credit for. And that, you know, it's in the nature of reductive science to simplify things in order to better understand them. It'd be very weird to start from a Jamesian view of the stream of consciousness and try to understand that scientifically. I feel like one of the central questions of your book, The difference between plants and toasters is complicated, but living things have a sense of purpose. They have directionality. They have good and bad. Any kind of things like that we give to like a thermostat is really just us giving those qualities to the thermostat. The thermostat doesn't care on its own whether it's 70 degrees or 65 degrees. So I don't think it's proof of consciousness, but it's really spooky and interesting. And this researcher in questions, his name is Stefano Mancuso. He's an Italian researcher at the University of Florence. He's also shown how plants sleep. There are these characteristics that mark a creature's ability to sleep, which we thought only belonged to higher mammals, I guess, or no, birds sleep too, but we didn't think really simple creatures slept. It turns out even insects sleep. And Giulio Tononi is the scientist who came up with these criteria for sleep and plants meet, I think all of them, which is interesting. And some take that as evidence of consciousness. You're a gardener. Yeah. Do you think you're causing plants pain by pruning them? Yeah. So you're bringing up the issue that immediately comes to mind when you start hearing about plant consciousness, which is, are we hurting them? When we mow the lawn, is that beautiful scent of freshly mown grass, this scream of suffering? And that will make you crazy. It's a grim way to put it. Yeah. You say it'll make you crazy, but I actually, people know we're causing pain to cows and pigs and chickens. Yes. And they don't think about it. Exactly. It doesn't bother them. So it turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on an industrial scale. Yeah. Although there's all this worry about this in Silicon Valley, you know, that our tender hearts should go out to these machines that might be conscious and we owe moral consideration to the machines. Anyway. I think here's my suspicion about that, because I do think it is possible we're going to make sentient machines, machines that have some experience of what it is like to be a machine. And I think that you will find there's a lot of concern about that until the moment it turns out to be against anybody's interest to ask you. You would have to do anything about it. Yeah. And also they love the conversation about the far future or near far future of, you know, whether it's boomer or doomer view, because it's a great way not to deal with what's right in front of us. One of the things that has struck me, and it's a theme of your book, is our ability as human beings to wall off our experience from that of everything else in the world. I forget the great philosopher you're quoting here, but there is one of them who just doesn't believe animals can feel pain, sees them as functionally robotic. Well, Descartes. Descartes. It is Descartes. Yeah. And that is, in part, helping to justify vivisections of live animals in that era. Dogs and rabbits. Yeah. And it's just like, I have two dogs. I've been around some rabbits. The idea that you would believe those animals are not feeling pain, it actually raises a pretty profound, for me, question about human consciousness and our ability to interpret what we are seeing around what we would like it to be as opposed to what it is. Yeah. And the power of an idea. I mean, he developed this idea that humans had this monopoly on consciousness. I think, therefore, I am. In other words, the thing I know is that I'm a conscious being and nobody else has it. No other creatures has it. And he was so convinced of his own idea that when these animals screamed sounds that we would have no trouble interpreting as suffering, he didn't hear it as suffering. He just thought it was automatic noise. And it is hard to believe. And it's true. I mean, it tells you something about the power of an idea to overcome our feelings, our instincts. But we do this all the time. And, you know, he was so wrong about this. It's not funny. But we see things through an ideological lens, you know, and it shapes what we actually see and hear. And it changed the sound of those screams to him, to meaninglessness. Okay, but you do get into this question of, yes, are we causing mass suffering to plants? Yeah, and I talked to Stefano Mancuso about this and some other researchers. Some, one in particular, believes, yes, we are causing pain to plants. And his take was, but, hey, that's just life. You know, if we don't eat plants, we're down to salt, basically. You know, if you give up on animals and plants. Mancuso doesn't think so. He thinks pain would not be adaptive to a creature that can't run away. And the big fact about plants, of course, is they're sessile. They're stuck in place. They're rooted. And that dictates everything about them. And it's the reason why the language in which they work is biochemical, right? They produce chemicals to protect themselves, to intoxicate, to attract all different kinds of things. So he says they're aware that they're being eaten. They often don't mind. The grasses actually benefit from being eaten. And then, of course, there are all the fruits and nuts that, you know, they're happy to give away to mammals. So I don't know where I come out on that. I don't think my plants, when I prune them, I mean, they like being pruned. You know, they respond with more growth and new leaves. And so I'm not too worried about that. There are a lot of things I go through that make me grow that I don't like. I would say. It's been a consistent experience of my life. Well, this is short-term, long-term frame, right? Perhaps when you cut them with the secateurs, that bothers them. But they respond in a really constructive way. There is also another more complex way plants are operating on this book, which is that some of this book is motivated by experiences you've had with psychedelic mushrooms. Right, which are not exactly plants, but okay. Fine. You'll get letters. I'm just saving you the trouble. And you have had an experience there that I have heard from many others, which is a kind of openness to animism that may not have been there before. Yeah, that's a very common experience on psychedelics. The world seems much more alive than it does in normal times. You know, animism is very interesting because it's kind of our default as a species. You go around the world, you look at traditional cultures, they believe that there's a spirit infusing especially living things, but also rocks and cliffs and sky and clouds and everything. And most kids are animists until they go to school. And then we kind of knock it out of them. So it's interesting that we exist in this un-animist bubble of Western scientific materialism. But you push in any direction or travel in any direction or have a psychedelic experience and suddenly questions are raised about it. And I think that's what's interesting about what these plant neurobiologists are doing. They're returning us to a, if it's not full-scale animism, it's a reanimated world where there is just, and I did come out of this research experience of looking at plant consciousness or plant sentience with a sense that the world is more alive than I thought. I was just weighing whether or not I want to ask you this question, but I think I do. Go for it. So something I have noticed from psychedelic circles, which I'm much less plugged into than you are, is people who work with plant psychedelics over long periods of time tend to find themselves or believe themselves into as working with plant or spiritual intelligences. People who do mushrooms or iboga or ayahuasca, right? There's a sense of there being something on the other side. In a way that artificial psychedelics, ketamine, LSD, people do not sort of leave believing there's like an LSD spirit on the other end of the phone. And just as somebody who's, you know, one of your previous books was on psychedelics and doing this book, that the reason I think people get pushed towards animism isn't necessarily the more narrow question of what happens when you anesthetize a plant, but people having some kind of experience there where they feel there are plant intelligences communicating to them. Especially on ayahuasca. Especially on ayahuasca. Which is a plant-based, right? It's two plants. It's a brew of two plants. And if you ask most ayahuasqueros, how did anyone ever figure out the recipe? Because it's so obscure that these two plants cooked together would have this effect and neither by themselves has any effect or much of any effect. And they'll tell you the plants taught me. And they will mean it. And we don't know through the lens of Western science how to listen to that. It sounds ridiculous to us. You know, I mean, if I came out anywhere on this whole book, it's like my mind is much more open than it was to a lot of weird stuff. Just because the normal stuff hasn't really panned out that well. Now, why would the plant-based psychedelics be more likely to do this than the chemistry-based psychedelics? I think there it's set and setting. You know, Timothy Leary's great contribution was explaining that the psychedelic experience is shaped profoundly by the physical setting in which it takes place and the mindset, the mental setting that you bring to it. When you're using a plant-based psychedelic, you, I mean, the imagery is all jungle imagery. You know, people see leopards and they see vines. Do you think that's because of set and setting or because there's something in the? I think it's set and setting, yeah. So you don't buy the shamans who tell you to put on our shoes in a semi-efficient manner. Put on our shoes. And, but it involves putting these blinders on. So there's a trade-off. And one of the things psychedelics do, and Alison made this point to me also, is return us to lantern consciousness. And, you know, she said in an interview with me and to other people, you know, when she first tried LSD, which wasn't until, I think, her sixties, she realized, oh, this is how the kids are thinking. They're tripping all the time. And she said, just have tea with a four-year-old and you'll see. And there's a lot of truth to that, I think. I want to get at another theory of what consciousness is for. I think the language in the book is consciousness is felt uncertainty. Yeah, isn't that beautiful? That is very beautiful. Although in practice, I find it very unpleasant. But what does that mean? So the phrase comes from a scientist named Mark Soames, who is a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst in South Africa. And he's written a really interesting book called The Hidden Spring. And his theory is that consciousness arises when you can't automate things. And in this case, he's talking about the fact that you might have two competing needs. Let's say you're hungry and you're tired and you have to decide which to privilege. And that takes decision-making. And what consciousness does is open up this space to resolve uncertainty. So if everything was predictable in the world and you could be certain when this happens, that happens, you know, and you had a kind of neat algorithm to deal with contingencies, you don't need it. But a lot of life presents us with uncertainty. And that's when consciousness arises. I think I've thought about this part of the book more than any other. And I think that's in part because the way my mind works, and I'm not sure how generalizable this is, my thoughts attract to uncertainty in my life. I just ruminate and ruminate and ruminate over whatever I am typically most emotionally uncertain about. Not always, by the way, the most useful forms of uncertainty. There are other unsolved problems it would be better if my mind was interested in thinking about, but I get it. So on the one hand, this idea that there is something at the very least that is attracting the spotlight of my attention to uncertainty feels true. But I also have a couple of questions and problems with it. One is that it doesn't seem like what we're talking here about is exactly consciousness. I mean, what you were just saying about the child or about the adult on psychedelics, they are not attracted to uncertainty in the same way. The experience of psychedelic consciousness expansion is in many ways, I think, less of the experience of felt uncertainty. It's a very good point. It becomes much more about experience, whereas uncertainty, at least in the way I experience it in my consciousness, tends to be a much more spotlighted, much less experiential. Like it's a distraction from experience. Yeah, I think that's right. I haven't really thought about that that much. One of my takeaways is that we have to be kind of pluralists of consciousness, that there are many different kinds and that psychedelic consciousness should be counted as one of them or the mystical forms of consciousness that James talks about. And then there's everyday consciousness and spotlight consciousness. And that, so I think we all have a toolkit to some extent and we experience, I mean, the kind of consciousness you experience as a meditator is very different than the kind you do at work, right? Or when writing. I mean, writing is a great example. That's a very peculiar form of consciousness. So the other thing I was thinking about with this was consciousness is felt uncertainty. Felt where? Because I think we think of consciousness as a thing happening in our minds. Something I think actually that has come out of my meditation for me, but then I loved seeing how much of it there was in your book, is recognizing how much is happening in the body. Yeah. I think that's my biggest discovery as someone who lives in his head most of the time, how important having a body is to being conscious. You know, we identify with our heads more than our bodies, right? Maybe because our eyes are there. I don't know. But consciousness probably arises with feelings first. It starts with things like hunger and itchiness. And as it gets filtered into the cortex, becomes the kind of complicated thinking that we pride ourselves on. I think that feelings are based in the body finally. It's how the body talks to the brain. And we have to remember this very simple fact, which is the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. We're not just a support system for this amazing three pounds of tofu in our heads. And once you realize that, you realize that the messages coming from the body are really important to the brain. And these feelings are the beginning of conscious experience. And if you didn't have them, it's questionable whether you would have consciousness. There's no doubt, I think, that the experience of consciousness is some kind of interplay between both. I feel uncertainty in my solar plexus. I think about things I'm uncertain around in my brain. Exactly. And where do you experience disgust? Like moral disgust? It's in your belly. You have a great experiment in the book about people given ginger. Can you describe that study? Sure. So this scientist, Kalina Christoph Haji-Livia, a psychologist, her field is spontaneous thought, which is, I hadn't thought about that as a field. And that includes things like daydreams and mind-wandering and creative thinking and flow. And to try to understand this, she's very interested in the question of how things get from our unconscious into our conscious awareness. Because we know there's a lot going on below the threshold of awareness. So she works with trained meditators, people who have like 10,000 hours experience meditating, puts them in an fMRI, gives them a button to press as soon as the thought intrudes. Because even if you're an experienced meditator, it's going to happen. She says it happens every 10 seconds for everybody. She said the great lesson of meditation is the mind cannot be controlled. It's very freeing to people trying. What was interesting about this is that when people pressed the button, she would look back at when something popped out, when there was activity in the hippocampus, which is the source of memories and other stuff as well. But she was watching that as a source of a thought. And it took four seconds between the fMRI showing activity in the hippocampus and the person being aware of that thought. So what is happening? Four seconds in the brain time is like an eon. What is happening for a thought to transit from the unconscious to the conscious? And why does it take so long? And she doesn't know. I'm sorry, I can't pay this off. But one of the theories called global neuronal workspace theory, which is that there are thoughts competing with one another for access to our conscious awareness. And they're kind of, you know, this Darwinian process. And only the most salient ever gets into the workspace and then broadcast to the whole brain. The problem with this theory is there's a lot of trivial stuff that somehow gets through, at least in my case. I think there's a lot of traffic going back and forth. And that's something also that you happen not just during meditation, but during psychedelic experiences. Lots of unconscious material that comes up. I actually find this to be a problem with meditation for me, which is that there's a lot of meditation that is about open awareness or trying to watch things happen nonjudgmentally. But the very act of having awareness is very clearly changing what is happening in my brain. So the more awareness I have, the more my brain feels slightly, or my mind feels somewhat controlled. And the less awareness I have, the more I'm going to get these sort of little wisps of mentation. Yeah. So there's a meditation teacher I really like whose meditations are on YouTube named Michael Taft. And his attitude is like, look, the machinery of the mind is going to go on, but just put it down the way you'd put down your phone. And just, you know, let it do its thing. You can just ignore it. And I find that very helpful. And I have this sense of a little buzzing going on in this corner, you know, of like thoughts that I'm not paying attention to. But, you know, as Kalina shows, it's very hard to control this material and things are going to bubble up. And they're interesting. Well, I guess one of my deep and fundamental questions about being a human being is why I attend to what I attend to. If I could go and talk to the algorithm in my mind in the way that increasingly you can, you know, go tell Claude what is, how does he want Claude to act? I would change the algorithm. I would worry less about interpersonal conflict in my life. I would spend a lot less time thinking about whether or not people are mad at me. But there is some process by which I hate the term global workspace theory as a description of what is going on in the mind. It's so bloodless and... ...bloodless and built on personal computers in 1998. And productivity ideas. Yeah. But that idea that things are competing, and somehow or another, some part of my mind is running some kind of process to decide what comes into the spotlight of attention. And if it's really shocking, there's a car accident next to me or a... Yeah, there are shortcuts. Yeah, like all of a sudden, it'll move me there entirely. But moment to moment, there's some kind of competition, and what comes up, I can be aware of it, but the more aware I am of it, the less in control that I feel, which is one of the great and slightly terrifying lessons of meditation. And so that question of the unconscious doesn't seem mild to me. That is the factory producing thoughts. Where all this stuff comes from. And then something is deciding what to put in the front shelf. So you're thinking about it in terms of an algorithm and a massive data, and different things could get pulled into it. That's not a bad metaphor. I mean, we don't know exactly how it works. There is still this question of, if the workspace idea is true, everything we think should be of some consequence. And we all know that's not true. And so why do things that are completely trivial or banal enter our consciousness? You know, Freud would say we're suppressing more important things. But there is clearly a way that the mind learns what to think about over time. So to use the example of my kids, it is quite clear to me that my children do not spend any time during the day thinking about things they have to do in the future. They might think it's about things they want to do in the future. But they're never like, ah, you know, I think it's been a while since my last pediatrician appointment. I might need some shots. Right. You leave me with my mind alone for much time at all, and a to-do list begins bubbling through. It's very, very persistent. I mean, I meditate with paper near me to just get things out of there and onto the paper so I don't keep thinking about them. Somewhere along the way, I went from being a kid who was pretty present in his life and thought more, I think, about things I wanted to think about and became somebody whose mind has bent towards productivity. Not the only thing that happens in my mind, but it is clearly a favored topic. Yeah. And it makes you successful. I mean, you know, there are standards by which that makes sense. That's how should it... So what I would say about that is you brought up something a minute ago where you said, well, the problem with this theory is that why does so much triviality emerge? But I mean, couldn't you just say, well, it is overapplied rules? Like my biggest complaint about my mind is I think too much about relational stress. But you grow up, you have a family, you're very dependent on caregivers. It's very easy to imagine how a mind would bend towards really... Yeah, I was bullied in school, right? You know, being out of joint in relationships can really harm you. So it's not unclear to me how my mind might have overlearned the rule, scan for relational threat at all times. Right. And so I'm curious about that, that learning. Like clearly something is happening over time that is not the same in all people. It's dependent on life experience. You know, people who grew up in times of famine tend to store more food when they're older, right? There's something happening here. And also, and that pleasure is not driving this, right? I mean, it's success. You are learning algorithms, if we're going to use that computer metaphor, that are, even though it doesn't feel good, are promoting the kind of behavior that's going to solve problems and keep everybody happy, maintain the peace, you know, all these kind of things. So our minds are, you know, invested in our success, not our pleasure. I mean, one of the things, you know, I talked a lot about how psychedelics inspired this book, but meditation did too, because as soon as you stop to examine what's going on in your mind, which many people don't do, but now tens of millions of people do do, especially since the pandemic, there are a lot more meditators than there were, is how strange our minds are and how little volition is involved and that we think we're calling the shots as conscious human beings, but to a remarkable extent, we're not. And where that material is coming from, we can call it the unconscious. We don't really know, but it's just de-familiarized, right? I mean, you're just distranged from your own mental processes. And this whole idea that that great meditation exercise, you know, will look in your brain for who's thinking those thoughts, who's feeling those feelings, and you won't find anybody. Talk to me about a state of mind that has come up briefly in our conversation already that I think is between unconscious and goal-directed, which is the wandering mind. And I think it's something we don't... I think we have come to diminish its role. Oh, yeah. I think so. So what is it and what do we know about it? Well, the wandering mind is just what's happening when you're bored. That's the precondition, in a way, for a wandering mind. It's like, I've got nothing to do. There's no task here. I'm just killing time. And suddenly, we're off and daydreaming or mind-wandering. They're very similar things. I forget how Kleenan distinguishes them, but she does. She thinks it's a really important part of life that we haven't studied because it's not productive and that all the work in psychology goes into productive areas of thought. I think that's changing now. You know, you have people studying awe and emotions that are not necessarily productive, but awe is very useful. So she just thinks this is a space of creativity and that a lot of creative thinking comes out of mind-wandering and daydreaming. And, you know, it's something novelists do all the time, right? I mean, they get pretty good at daydreaming. And she says we've lost this. You know, the space of our interiority for this kind of thinking is diminished because of our distractions, our technological distractions. I want to challenge, not that she believes this, but this idea that it's a non-productive form of thought. I think it... Oh, I think it is very productive. It's just how are you defining productivity? I would say the biggest barrier for me and productivity, true productivity, which is the ability to do better with the same amount of resources that you already have, is that I don't spend enough time with my mind-wandering. And it is routine that the absolutely most creatively important times I will spend, I thought I was taking a break. I thought I was doing something else. I wasn't... I wasn't just driving my mind further into the ground, flicking through web pages when I was already too tired to absorb information. Then all of a sudden I'll have the insight or I'll realize where I should call this person or... And I don't know where it comes from, but it's those moments of inside epiphany creatively that comes into my head. And turn on the spotlight. Mm-hmm. That the spotlight gets in the way because of those blinders. And I think when you're daydreaming or mind-wandering, the blinders are kind of opened up and you're taking in information from more places. She argues that it's just the belief that this is unproductive thought because nobody wants mind-wandering workers, right? The capitalists want us to be, you know, spotlight consciousness. And the example she gave is like, right now, my job is to grade blue book exams and that's what I should be doing, but my real life project is making sense of my life and having a fulfilling life and I would be better off taking a walk or mind-wandering. So there's a tension. There's a tension there between what the economy considers productive thought and what emotionally is productive thought or creativity. Or what the economy should consider productive thought if it were smarter. It just, you can't quantify it on the hour-to-hour level. That's right. One of the most interesting mind states for me is a mind state I functionally only have when I am reading something on paper without screen distractions around me, which is it becomes, my mind becomes highly associational. And I'll be reading and then I'll look up and I'll have ideas. They're often not about the book at all. It's like the book itself is a scaffolding of a certain kind of attention, but I'm aware and I'm awake. And so I'm noticing other things. It is by far my most creative state. Do you have a pencil or a pen in your hand? Yeah. And it is achieved more easily on airplanes than anywhere else because then you really don't have distractions, but it can happen at a coffee shop. But it won't happen if I'm looking at a screen. Right. And so it's made me think about how if we wanted humans to be more productive, more creative, more... I think a lot of our received beliefs about this are really wrong. We'd want to put people more in touch with their bodies. We'd want to teach them how to find states of open association and mind-wandering. You want to put yourself in the way of inspiration more often because it's not controllable in the way we wish it were. Completely agree. Colleen edited this book, The Oxford Companion to Spontaneous Thought. And there is a history of spontaneous thought that looked at how incredibly creative people, composers, novelists, how they spent their days. And they only worked like four or five hours. They spent a lot of time in unstructured wandering, walking. And we all know there's a connection between creative thinking and walking. It's much more likely to break through if you're stuck in And that that's why the brain is involved in a critical way. And if you damage the brain, you damage consciousness or anesthetize the brain or whatever, but it's involved in a different way. And the evidence kind of works the same either way, whether you say the brain generates consciousness or channels consciousness. It's hard to make a case that one is better than the other. You know, the term scientists use is that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, which sounds really scientific, but if you press, it's just abracadabra. It really, it doesn't really explain anything. What is the difference between idealism and panpsychism? Panpsychism is the idea that every little bit, every particle has a quantum of consciousness, of psyche, and that in the same way, 200 years ago, we added electromagnetism to the stock of what reality consists of, material reality consists of, we should add psyche. It's another thing. So in a way, it's a new materialism or it's materialism with something added to it. It's a big price to pay for your theory that you're adding something completely new to the stock of reality. But, you know, it solves the problem of where consciousness comes from. It comes from everywhere. It's just, it was already here. So these ideas are, you know, they, I mean, when I first learned about them, I thought, these are crazy. But then you realize that materialism has kind of hit a wall with consciousness studies and that there is this gap that we can't seem to cross from a very good theory, like workspace theory, to, well, wait a minute, when you say you're broadcasting to the whole brain, who's receiving that broadcast, you know? And then you have other people saying, well, consciousness is just an illusion. But an illusion is a conscious experience. So what about the subject? And that's where everybody starts waving their hands. What level of plausibility do you assign to that? To what? I guess either, but I think I'm thinking of the more novel brain is radio receiver. I have to say, I don't know. You know, it's weird to spend five years on a book and come to an answer like that. But, you know, as I said at one point, this is a book where you may know less at the end than you do at the beginning, but you'll know a lot of other things. It's a very fun tour. I told you at the beginning of this, I'd give you my theory of the book towards the end of our conversation. When we sat down around How to Change Your Mind, your book on psychedelics, I told you that I thought that was a book about the mind posing as a book about psychedelics. And I kind of think this is a book about psychedelics posing as a book about the mind because, and not to do violence to it, both were actually about their subject, but it is striking to me how often in this book, it's not just Coke, there is the scientist who is building, I think a robot trying to make consciousness and then does, I think, five MEO DMT and realizes everything is love. There's your mushrooms. There's a lot of people who note offhandedly that they are, there seems to be something here that it has caused a larger ontological shock than I think a stylized description of, well, you ingested a chemical, of course, you had a chemical experience, would naturally suggest. It's a totally unsatisfying explanation. Yeah. Well, I think that the interest in psychedelics is partly an interest in taking back our consciousness and exploring it. Because one of the things that happens, you know, the day you do a psychedelic is not a day you're looking at your phone. It's a day that you've put a fence around if you're doing it right and not just walking around the streets of Manhattan, you know, tripping, but you're doing it with some intention and you reclaim your mind for a period of time and you explore it. And, you know, this idea of expanding consciousness, there's a line in Aldous Huxley that I've always really liked. He believed in this transmission theory of consciousness, which he got from Henri Bergson, who really was the person who first put that forward, was that in normal times, our brains admit only the trickle of consciousness we need to get through the day, to be productive, to do what we need to do. But there's so much more. And what he said psychedelics did is open what he called the reducing valve so that more consciousness got in. What was that consciousness? To him, it was the mind at large, but I find it's also sensory information, bodily information. I mean, sometimes trips are incredibly somatic and they're all about the body and other times they're about, you know, visual material, but it's ours. It's mine, right? Although some people go to a divine place about it. And so I think it's, I, you know, I'm just out there starting to talk about consciousness and I'm like, I'm curious that people are so interested in consciousness. Like I didn't expect this when I started on this book. Really? Yeah, no, I didn't. And it seemed like a very academic topic. And I think two things have changed that. One is the fact that I think we feel our consciousnesses are just full of bullshit right now. And there's so much stuff we don't want to be thinking about that we're thinking about. And you know, you take phones away from kids and they're actually grateful, even once they get over the shock of living without a phone for a day or while they're in school, because our consciousness is under pressure from everyday life, capitalism, and the need to succeed, you know, financially. We happen to have a president who intrudes on our consciousness for a lot more of the day than any of us have had experience before with previous presidents. So I think there's some desire to get back to some more sovereignty around our consciousness. And psychedelics are part of that too. And there is also AI, that that is, you know, I say in the book, we're entering a Copernican moment of possible redefinition of what it means to be human. On the one hand, we have all these animals and even plants that turn out to be conscious, what we used to think was our special thing. And on the other side, we have these machines that are going to be smarter than we are. And some people think they'll be conscious. But whether they can or not, we're going to think they're conscious and act on that basis, which raises all sorts of problems. So who are we exactly if we're not the smartest, most conscious being? And are we more like the animals who can feel and die and suffer? Or are we more like the thinking machines who speak our language? You talk about consciousness as a reducing valve, as a filtering mechanism of sensory experience. And we've talked a little bit about the wider, more lantern-like consciousness of children. I wonder how different the experience of being conscious in advanced modernity with a smartphone and a task list, and we are really training ourselves to narrow down, to be successful in the economy we have structured in much of the Western, though not only Western world at this point. We have altered what it means to be human. And I wonder how much we've made the experience of consciousness increasingly unsatisfying by, like, you can overtrain any muscle. Yeah. And what we are doing, staring in a narrowed way at a computer, I mean, there's all this great neuroscience on the difference between wide gaze and narrow gaze, which I really feel when I look out over a mountain range and when I look at my phone, you can feel... The shrinking of the chest. The shrinking and the tightening of the chest and the... The posture. The posture. ...screens, yeah. We have narrowed how it feels to be a human being. We have, but it's not too late. You know, I mean... Tell me about your consciousness sovereignty ideas as you're moving in here into... Consciousness hygiene. One of the things I've been talking a lot about, protecting our consciousness and what a precious space of interiority we have. And it's this place of mental freedom. But I realized for some people going there, it doesn't feel good, that these are people who ruminate a lot. And I'm prone to that too, to a lot of rumination, which is, you know, very circular thinking, often not productive. It keeps you focused on something, but not in a way that's making progress, usually. It's a spiral maybe. But also realizing you can take some control over your consciousness and that we need to do more to defend it. And meditation is one great way. And as challenging as it can be, you feel like, here's my mind, I'm with my mind. It might be painful, it might not be, but no one is telling me what to think. You know, we spend so much time thinking the thoughts of other people and enduring the rants of other people and the obsessions of other people. Meditation is, I think, a really interesting way to kind of put a fence around your consciousness. You know, you put down your phone. You still have a pad because you're just trying to get rid of those to-do things. But when it's working really well, there's great pleasure in watching the, you know, the show go by and the things I wasn't expecting to think about suddenly and imagery and all this kind of stuff. I do have an internal life, contrary to what that guy said. Sure you do, Michael. We believe you for sure. You're not just a zombie here. Something you said a minute ago pinged for me, which is often people actually don't like being put in a room with their consciousness. There's a famous old quote, I don't have the speaker in memory, but it says, huge amount of the world's problems of psychedelics, I think, is helping people with terminal cancer. But anyway, I was working on the self chapter at the time, and you know, there's this Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion, which I've struggled with in various ways. I understand sort of how it's true, but yet self seems to be still working in my life. And I wanted to talk to her about that, and she had described her retreat center, which is called Upaya, It's in Santa Fe, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. It's like, oh, that sounds interesting. I should go get deconstructed. So that's why I went. And I got there and I spent a couple days with the adepts and the monks, but then she said, you know, I think we should go up to the retreat. And she said, we'll go up there and you'll stay in the cave. And I'm like, the cave? That's like, that's not my kind of thing. I'm not a camper. And she said, don't worry, it's a five-star cave. So we get there and then after this 25-mile dirt road, and then there's another half-mile hike out to the cave and there's no electricity and there's no running water and somebody's dug into this hillside these caves and with a glass door on one side overlooking this meadow. And there I was for the next three or four days and she kept ducking my interviews and at one point she said, I've divested of meaning. I was like, oh shit, this is not good for the journalist conducting interviews. But like a meditation retreat that you were describing, it is almost a psychedelic experience when you're alone with yourself and the borders of self attenuate. They become kind of more porous. You realize the extent to which our identity as selves is a social identity and it's reinforced by everybody we talk to because they're treating us like a self, so we must be a self. But if you're absolutely alone in the middle of nowhere and you have no access to media, it softens. And then I was meditating for hours at a time and it was very interesting because life became like a meditation. In fact, I had more profound meditations doing chores, you know, chopping wood and sweeping out my little cave than I did when I was sitting on the platform. And it shifted my thinking about consciousness in this way. I had gotten caught in this frame, very Western, very male, of problem-solution. Hard problem of consciousness, solution. And I had trained my attention. I had narrowed, right? I had a focus on that question for five years of really, you know, struggling to understand this. And I suddenly realized, well, there is the problem of attention, but there's also the fact of it. And the fact of it is so marvelous and so astonishing and mysterious. And why aren't I paying more attention to that? Why aren't I being more present? One night I woke up in the middle of the night to go out to pee and there is, it's a new moon and there's no light pollution at all. And the stars, this vault of stars is more numerous and more gorgeous than it's ever been. But it's not out there. It's reaching all the way down to me here that we occupy the same space, the same intergalactic blanket. And it was such a, all my kind of learned ways of looking at the starry sky, you know, we all have these predictions, right? The brain is a prediction machine. All the concepts and the frames just went away and it was just kind of like me, stars, space. And, you know, this is not such an unusual experience, but it shifted my thinking from solving a problem to being within it. You talked earlier about the way this book has a quality of, you read it and maybe you know less, but it adds wonder. Yeah. And it made me think as I was going through different theories, you know, integrated information processing or whatever it's called. Good luck with that. How sad I'd be if any of them are true. If you could prove to me that global workspace theory was the truth of consciousness, if you could prove to me consciousness evolved and all the things I think are a byproduct of an evolutionary process for reducing uncertainty, I would hate it. Well, you know, it's funny. This is a lesson I learned not just from Joan, but from my wife, who's an artist, Judith. And, you know, she was lecturing me about, you know, not knowing has its own power. And of course it is a Zen idea to cultivate the don't know mind. And she's right. It does have a power and that not knowing opens you in a way that knowing closes you down. And that we're very frustrated with not knowing, but it is the state, it is our existential predicament about many, many things. And getting comfortable with it. I mean, it was a long way to go for me to get comfortable with it, but getting comfortable with it, yes. More awe, more wonder in the face of mystery. I think that's a place to end. Also, a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Three books for you. Well, a book that was really influential in the writing of this book is a book called The Blind Spot. It's by a philosopher, Evan Thompson, and two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser. It's a critique of Western science. And it makes a very powerful case that the blind spot of the physical sciences is inability to deal with lived experience. And so for science, you know, red is a certain frequency and red to them is an illusion because it's constructed in the brain. But they're pointing out that humans who experience red as a fact of nature, like any other fact of nature, and you've got to deal with it. So how does science deal with lived experience? It's a fantastic book. Another book that was really influential as I was working on the stream of consciousness is a stream of consciousness novel by Lucy Ellman called Ducks, Newburyport. It's a thousand pages, one sentence. And that sounds really daunting and like I'm not going to pick that up. You can open it anywhere you want, read 10 pages. You can listen to the audio book. You can fall asleep, pick it up again. It's still there. It's like this pool you can enter. And it's all the thoughts of this middle-class, middle-aged woman who lives in Ohio, has a home baking business, and it's everything going on in her head, including scrolling on her phone. But you have to infer that because there's no nothing to orient you. But anyway, it's great fun and really funny and a brilliant book. Lastly, there was a book about, there were several books on consciousness I liked, but the one I want to recommend is Being You by Anil Seth. He's an English neuroscientist and it's a book about the self and he treats the self as a perception. And he's one of the great explainers of consciousness and mental phenomenon in general. His TED Talk about reality as a controlled hallucination has been one of the most popular ever. And he discusses that here too, but it's a really good primer on consciousness with specific attention to the self. So those would be my three. Michael Pollan, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of Ezra Klein's show is produced by Kristen Lin, fact-checking by Kim Frieda. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Jack McCorkadale, Roland Hu, Emma Kilbeck, and Jan Cobel. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Cristina Simolesky and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.