Michael Pollan

And mind stuff is a word or a term he uses.

I want to quote you quoting him here because I love this.

You're writing, "...the objects of our thoughts can never be completely disentangled from what James variously calls their auras, halos, accentuations, associations, suffusions, feeling of tendency..."

premonitions psychic overtones and you say perhaps my favorite fringe of unarticulated affinities yeah the fringe it's so beautiful but but talk to me a bit about that because i do think that i do a meditation often where you note what is going on in your attention and you note your thoughts and and even within thoughts you note did i hear that did i see that did i feel that and

And it always also seems to me to be doing a kind of violence.

I'll sink into a dream a little bit.

And what was that exactly?

It wasn't quite a word.

It wasn't quite a visual.

All this stuff that you just quoted, tell me a little bit about

the borderlands of mental experience.

stream of consciousness and try to understand that scientifically I feel like one of the central questions of your book and one reason I like the topic of consciousness so much is that it is the only thing we have actual experience of it is the most familiar thing to us yeah

and yet actually like quite unfamiliar.

And I mean, this is one of the great lessons of meditation or psychedelics, more unfamiliar, the more you attend to it.

Well, let's stay with the scientists for a little while, at least.

One of the things you try to do in the book is track their efforts to reduce consciousness to something measurable and maybe proto-human, non-human.

You have a great chapter on plants.

And I guess maybe a place to start with the plants is you taught me something I didn't know, which is you can anesthetize a plant, right?

Isn't that mind-blowing?

Can you talk a bit about that experiment and what it seems to imply?