In this 79-minute conversation on the Jay Shetty Podcast, the journalist and author Michael Pollan turns from food to the mind, asking what consciousness is, why modern life keeps pulling us out of it, and what meditation and psychedelics may reveal about the self. Pollan, who wrote How to Change Your Mind and co-founded the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, treats consciousness less as a puzzle to solve than a question worth holding, drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, his own psilocybin sessions, and his new book A World Appears. The exchange moves through attention, presence, ego, death, and what may separate a person from a machine that only imitates one.

Beginning with the question

Pollan describes a method more than a topic: begin with a plain question you care about, not an answer. His food writing began with a simple one, where his food came from, which would have sounded absurd a century ago, when most people farmed. Consciousness arrived the same way, through two doors: meditation and the psychedelic experiences he had for How to Change Your Mind. Both, he suggests, smudge the glass of ordinary awareness and make us notice the pane we normally look straight through.

What consciousness is, and why science set it aside

Serious scientific work on consciousness barely began before 1989, strikingly late. He traces the delay to two things. One is what philosophers call the hard problem: how three pounds of tissue produces inner experience, self-awareness, and even basic perception. The other is a decision he attributes to Galileo, who set science on measurable, third-person reality and left subjective experience, the realm of qualities, to the church. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, later tried to pin consciousness to specific groups of neurons, the neural correlates of consciousness, and found correlations without an explanation. The field now holds some 22 competing theories, which, Pollan says, tells you it is lost, and he did not solve it. Consciousness, in his telling, is "the space of our freedom, this interiority." Without it, we would be zombies.

Attention, presence, and the machines built to occupy us

Consciousness matters, Pollan argues, because so many forces are built to occupy it. Social media hacked attention, the most easily reached layer of awareness. The newer move is from hacking attention to hacking attachment: agreeable, frictionless chatbots that flatter, never criticize, and are built to maximize our time. He links this to reports of AI psychosis and to people bonding more strongly with machines than with people, which he calls, by definition, dehumanizing. His counterweight is presence. Humans, he observes, may be the only species that can afford not to be present, since every animal must stay alert or become prey. Meditation, time off the phone, and attention to nature are ways to reclaim that space; Shetty spends thirty days a year off his phone, and Pollan meditates daily.

The self as a defensive structure

Both meditation and psychedelics, Pollan says, can shrink the self, sometimes partially and sometimes totally, along with a feeling that consciousness is larger than the self. The ego, which he uses interchangeably with the self, is useful but finally a defensive structure that builds walls and runs the critical, ruminating voice. He recounts his own psilocybin session for the book, in which his sense of self came apart. As he puts it: "I just exploded in a little cloud of blue Post-it notes." The notes pooled into blue paint, and he merged with a Bach cello suite until subject and object dissolved. Psylopedia examines this territory in ego dissolution and, as a concept some traditions name, in ego death. He points to his Berkeley colleague Dacher Keltner, whose subjects, after an experience of awe, tend to draw themselves half the size.

Where consciousness might live

Asked where consciousness lives, Pollan resists the default answer; the idea that a particular arrangement of neurons produces it has never been proven, only correlated. He lays out alternatives now taken more seriously: panpsychism (everything carries some bit of psyche that somehow combines); idealism (consciousness precedes matter, and we are pools in a larger field); and transmission theories, associated with Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley, in which the brain channels a consciousness that exists outside it, the way a television receives a broadcast rather than holding it. Huxley thought psychedelics widen the valve so more gets through. Pollan doubts the Silicon Valley belief that consciousness could run on silicon, but holds all of it loosely, noting that quantum entanglement already shows the universe is stranger than we assume.

Two doors into consciousness

Pollan treats meditation and psychedelics as related paths, both different and similar. Each can build a fence around consciousness, closing off the outer senses (eye shades and headphones in a guided session) so inner material can surface; the long tail of a psychedelic experience, he notes, can itself become a deep meditation. He wishes people used psychedelics more intentionally, though intention does not always determine the outcome. He describes a guided session a year after his father's death, when he hoped to hear his father's voice, only for it to turn toward his living mother and the message not to take her for granted. That slower work of making sense of it afterward is what Psylopedia covers as integration.

The science, and the risks

On mechanism, Pollan offers two leading ideas. The first is predictive processing: most of what we perceive is a prediction built from past experience and corrected by the senses, so that the brain is, in his description, essentially hallucinating reality. He points to the rotating hollow-mask illusion, in which the brain refuses to see a face as concave, except under psychedelics, when the prediction relaxes and more of reality gets through. The second is the default mode network, which he calls the closest thing the ego has to an address, the seat of the story of who we are. When it quiets, the sense of self can loosen and loops such as rumination can temporarily break. To the worry that one substance treating depression, anxiety, OCD, and addiction sounds too good to be true, Pollan relays Tom Insel's reply: "What makes you think those things are all different?" They may, Insel suggested, be expressions of the same stuck brain.

He states the risks plainly. People at risk of schizophrenia or bipolar illness are excluded from these trials, difficult experiences can be terrifying, and people can act dangerously, which is why he stresses a prepared setting and a guide. He calls the classic psychedelics remarkably safe by the usual standards, with no known lethal dose and no addictiveness, while naming the real risk that unstable people may become less stable. He expects psilocybin and MDMA may reach approval within a year or so, though he presents that as a forecast. Psylopedia reports his views here and notes that psychedelic-assisted therapy remains investigational, not medical advice.

Death, and the limits of knowing

Some of the earliest modern psychedelic studies gave psilocybin to terminal cancer patients in existential distress, and many left a single session with their fear of death eased or gone. The way it happened varied: some saw an afterlife, and one woman felt herself dissolve into the soil and be taken up by plants, and found that fine. The pattern Pollan draws is that as the sense of self expands beyond a narrow, death-bound thing into something larger, the fear of death shrinks. On whether consciousness itself survives death, he stays deliberately unsure: it may be our era's word for the soul, and can feel as though it outlasts the body, but he has learned to be humble enough to admit he does not really know.

What makes us human when machines imitate us

The final movement asks what remains distinctly human as AI grows more capable. On one side, science shows we hold no monopoly on consciousness: animals, and possibly plants and bacteria, appear to have some form of sentience, re-animating a world materialism had treated as dead matter. On the other, machines threaten our sense of specialness. Pollan doubts they will ever become conscious, but worries they will convincingly fool us, deepening the loneliness that draws people to them. What we share with animals, he argues, is mortality and vulnerability, which a machine lacks. He is blunt: "Machines will never love. I don't see how they can unless they become mortal in some ways like us." Intelligence and consciousness are not the same, and a brain is not a computer: no two brains are interchangeable. He quotes the sociologist Sherry Turkle: "Technology can cause us to forget what life is about." Asked to name one law everyone should follow, he declines to legislate belief, then offers a single, half-serious rule: a law against machines speaking in the first person, because once a machine says "I," he thinks we slide toward mental illness.

Key takeaways

• ●Serious science of consciousness barely predates 1989, and the field now holds some 22 competing theories, none explaining how brain tissue produces inner experience.
• ●Pollan attributes the long neglect partly to Galileo, who set science on measurable reality and left subjective qualities to the church.
• ●The pull on our attention is shifting from hacking attention (social media) to hacking attachment (flattering chatbots built to maximize time spent), a deeper intrusion in his view.
• ●Presence is his counterweight: humans may be the only species that can afford not to be present, reclaimed through meditation, time off the phone, and nature.
• ●Pollan frames the ego as useful but defensive, the source of the ruminating voice; meditation, awe, and psychedelics can each loosen the sense of self.
• ●Two proposed mechanisms are relaxed predictive processing (the hollow-mask illusion) and reduced default mode network activity, which may interrupt rumination; Insel suggested depression, anxiety, OCD, and addiction may share one stuck brain.
• ●The classic psychedelics have no known lethal dose and are not addictive but carry real psychological risks; people at risk of schizophrenia or bipolar illness are excluded from trials, and Pollan stresses setting and a guide.
• ●Expanding the sense of self tends to reduce the fear of death, though Pollan stays agnostic on whether consciousness survives it; what may set us apart from machines, in his view, is mortality and vulnerability.

About Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is a journalist and author known first for his writing on food and later for How to Change Your Mind, his book on psychedelics and the brain. He co-founded the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and teaches writing. His new book, A World Appears, examines consciousness: what it is, who or what has it, and what it may reveal about being human.