The More You Study Consciousness, the Weirder It Gets

Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, joins Ezra Klein to discuss his new book A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. Over several years of reporting, Pollan tracked scientists, philosophers, and meditators trying to explain the one thing everyone has direct experience of and nobody fully understands. The talk runs from a beeper experiment through plant sentience and psychedelic animism to idealism and panpsychism, ending with a retreat into a cave with Zen teacher Joan Halifax.

Sampling the mind with a beeper

Pollan describes an experiment with psychologist Russell Hurlburt, who has spent 50 years "sampling inner experience": subjects wear an earpiece that beeps randomly and must record exactly what they were thinking. Pollan found his own reported thoughts banal and struggled to isolate discrete "thoughts" from what felt like one continuous stream. He turned to William James, whose writing on the stream of consciousness described thoughts as surrounded by "auras, halos, accentuations" and a "fringe of unarticulated affinities" that resist separation.

Are plants sentient, and are we hurting them?

Plant neurobiologists, including Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso, have shown plants can be anesthetized: xenon gas makes a mimosa plant stop responding to touch, then it recovers, suggesting an on and off state. Pollan separates sentience (a basic capacity to sense and respond, which he says even bacteria have) from consciousness, citing philosopher Thomas Nagel's test that a creature is conscious if it is like something to be it. Mancuso's group argues plants register damage but that pain would not be adaptive for something rooted in place. Pollan also raises Descartes, who dismissed animal suffering as automatic noise, a caution about ideology overriding the senses.

Psychedelics, animism, and "the plants taught me"

Pollan links plant consciousness to psychedelic experience: mushrooms, iboga, and ayahuasca push people toward animism more than LSD or ketamine, which he attributes largely to set and setting, Timothy Leary's framework, since plant rituals carry jungle imagery synthetic molecules lack. Ayahuasca users often insist "the plants taught me" the brew's recipe; Pollan stays skeptical but no longer dismisses the claim outright.

What consciousness might be for

Pollan surveys competing theories. One holds that automation breaks down once social life gets complex enough to require anticipating what others are thinking, or theory of mind. Psychologist Alison Gopnik contrasts adult "spotlight consciousness," narrow and goal-directed, with children's diffuse "lantern consciousness," which she says psychedelics can temporarily restore. Neuroscientist Mark Solms, author of The Hidden Spring, argues consciousness arises to resolve uncertainty, such as choosing between hunger and fatigue; Klein counters that psychedelic and childhood consciousness feel like heightened experience rather than uncertainty, and Pollan concedes there may be several distinct kinds of consciousness.

Thinking with the body

Pollan argues feelings, not thoughts, are likely where consciousness begins, citing an experiment in which subjects given ginger before a disgusting image reported less moral disgust once their stomachs settled. Psychologist Kalina Christoff ran fMRI experiments on experienced meditators, finding a four-second gap between hippocampus activity and a person's awareness of the resulting thought. Global workspace theory holds that competing thoughts contest for conscious awareness before broadcasting to the brain, though it struggles to explain why trivial material so often wins. Christoff also argues mind wandering and boredom are undervalued sources of creativity; both hosts say their best ideas arrive on walks or while reading on paper, away from screens.

Idealism, panpsychism, and the brain as a radio

Researcher Christof Koch, who worked with Francis Crick, shifted from assuming the brain generates consciousness to exploring idealism after ayahuasca experiences in Brazil left him with a felt sense of "mind at large," a phrase from Aldous Huxley. Idealism holds consciousness is a universal field that precedes matter; panpsychism holds every particle carries some minimal quantum of it. He mentions a scientist building conscious machines who, after 5-MeO-DMT, described everything as love, one of several mystical experiences that reshaped a researcher's confidence in materialism.

Guarding consciousness, and a cave

Pollan says interest in psychedelics and meditation partly reflects a wish to reclaim "consciousness sovereignty" from phones and platforms; he cites Netflix's Reed Hastings, who once said "our primary competitor is sleep," as a blunt admission of how commercial systems compete for the mind. The final chapter sends Pollan to a Santa Fe retreat run by Zen teacher Joan Halifax, who, rather than answer his questions, sent him to spend days alone in a cave with no electricity. His sense of self loosened there, an experience with echoes of ego dissolution on psychedelics. He closes recommending The Blind Spot by Evan Thompson, Adam Frank, and Marcelo Gleiser; Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann; and Being You by Anil Seth.

Key takeaways

• ●Michael Pollan's A World Appears surveys years of research into consciousness, from experimental psychology to psychedelics to a cave retreat.
• ●A "beeper" experiment with psychologist Russell Hurlburt suggests people often cannot accurately report their own thoughts.
• ●Plants anesthetized with xenon gas show on and off states that raise questions about sentience, though Pollan stops short of calling it proof.
• ●Plant-based psychedelics like ayahuasca produce animistic experiences ("the plants taught me") more than synthetic compounds, which Pollan attributes to set and setting.
• ●Alison Gopnik's "lantern" versus "spotlight" consciousness suggests psychedelics may temporarily restore childlike attention.
• ●Mark Solms proposes consciousness resolves "felt uncertainty," though this does not fully explain psychedelic or childhood experience.
• ●Christof Koch's ayahuasca experiences pushed him toward idealism and panpsychism, which treat consciousness as fundamental rather than brain-generated.
• ●Pollan frames meditation, limiting phone use, and time in nature as "consciousness hygiene" against commercial and political pressure.