A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness

Join Michael Pollan, one of the greatest narrative-non fiction writers in the English language, to celebrate his latest book, A World Appears.

Pollan has already brought us conversation-changing books investigating our relationship with food, plants and psychedelic drugs with his 2018 bestseller How to Change Your Mind. He now pulls the lens back even further to go deeper, with an exploration of consciousness itself.

The fact that each of us has a subjective experience of the world continues to be one of the greatest mysteries in nature. How is it that what goes on the brain is accompanied by feelings, by thoughts and by a sense of self? How far is consciousness, or at least sentience and some level of selfhood, shared amongst animals, and even plants? Is the whole of the natural world alive with agency?

In A World Appears, Pollan investigates how we experience consciousness from several radically different perspectives – scientific, philosophical, spiritual, historical, literary and psychedelic. He meets the neuroscientists doing cutting-edge science of the mind and brain; biologists studying the beguiling and complex intelligences of plants; psychoanalysts attempting to engineer feeling into AI; and contemporary novelists recreating our slippery stream of consciousness. And all the while he tests their findings and assumptions against his own experience – of being Michael Pollan.

For at the heart of the book is his own case study in self-consciousness - a reckoning of these ideas with Pollan’s personal experience of being an embodied and aware, conscious human. Both subject and guide, self-deprecating and often humorous, Pollan offers the reader a way into their own minds in a breathtaking journey of self-discovery that leaves us transported and smarter, inhabiting nothing less than a new view of the world.

Michael Pollan is an award-winning author, activist and journalist. His international bestselling 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, the painter Judith Belzer.