A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times, TIME, and Oprah Daily

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind , a panoptic exploration of consciousness--what it is, who has it, and why--and a meditation on the essence of our humanity

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature's greatest mysteries. 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, when 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, bringing radically different perspectives--scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic--to 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 gray matter could generate a subjective point of view--assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived 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 "plant neurobiologists" 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.

In Pollan's dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The science of consciousness is comparatively young, which Pollan (This Is Your Mind on Plants) dramatically illustrates with debates barely three decades ago that asked whether we can know what makes the interior world. The difficulties of measurement and not crossing a line into religious territory have left consciousness the purview of philosophers and poets throughout the recent centuries of modern scientific method. Pollan aims to unify these questions and explore what we can know and how we can think about consciousness without viewing humans as strictly utilitarian or magical. Questions include what constitutes sentience, how emotions arise and for what purpose, the nature of thought (with a fascinating examination of stream-of-consciousness literature), how the concept of a self is constructed, and--beyond art and science, following the turn Pollan's work has taken in recent years--what psychedelic drugs and experiences can teach humans about the mind and the ego. As a science writer who fully immerses himself in the questions of his work, Pollan's consciousness itself is on full display, and this is thoroughly compelling reading. VERDICT Pollan's accessible and wide-ranging study of the interior world elucidates complex ideas across science, art, and philosophy.--Margaret Heller

Kirkus Book Review

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 onself-confidence andself-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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.