Breadcrumbs
Join us in welcoming back Michael Pollan to 黑料福利社 to celebrate his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan鈥檚 latest book offers a panoptic exploration of consciousness鈥攚hat it is, who has it, and why鈥攁nd serves as a profound meditation on the essence of our humanity.
How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, exploring radically different perspectives鈥攕cientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic鈥攖o see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.
When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view鈥攁ssuming the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to 鈥減lant neurobiologists鈥 searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.
Michael Pollan is the author of ten books, including This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore鈥檚 Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine. A Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow, Pollan has taught writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University. In 2010, Time named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.