Michael Pollan of This Is Your Mind on Plants for A World Appears

From the best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind, This Is Your Mind on Plants, In Defence of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma - A World Appears is a pioneering search for consciousness in the brain and beyond...

A World Appears is the story of the quest to solve the greatest mystery in nature: consciousness. How does it feel to be you with your own personal feelings, thoughts and experiences?

The early 1990s marked the birth of a new science of consciousness, based on the assumption that the phenomenon could be explained in terms of brain activity, but that effort is faltering, and wilder ideas, such as panpsychism, are now getting a hearing. Indeed, there is now reason to doubt that 'objective science' as we have known it since Galileo has the right tools to plumb first-person experience. A World Appears takes Michael Pollan from the laboratories where scientists are searching for the neural correlates of consciousness to encounters with philosophers and novelists and Buddhist monks, whom he finds have just as much to teach us about consciousness, if not more.

Michael Pollan is an award-winning author, activist and journalist. His international best-selling books about the way we live today -including How to Change Your Mind, This Is Your Mind on Plants, In Defence of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma - combine meticulous reporting with anthropology, philosophy, culture, health and natural history. Time Magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife.