Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan, murder me? What the hell was Alan thinking? From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Em Gessen, and this is The Idiot, out March 26th, wherever you get your podcasts.
Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness. It is the only thing we truly know, the only thing we have certain actual first-hand experience of. And yet we don't understand it at all. We don't know what it's made of. We don't know how it works. We don't know why it exists. And the closer we look at it, the weirder consciousness gets. The more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail. I find that so delightful that something so close could remain so mysterious that such a central question about the universe is happening inside of us all of the time. Now, that's not to say we haven't tried to understand or that we haven't learned a lot from those efforts. In his new book, A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness, the science writer Michael Pollan takes a tour of those efforts, of those theories, of those experiments, of those psychedelic trips and meditation retreats.
And he keeps finding himself in stranger and stranger territory, deeper inside the mystery. So I wanted to have him on to talk about it. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Michael Pollan, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Good to be back. So I wanted to begin with an experiment that you participated in during the reporting of this book, where you wore a beeper and tried to record what was going on in your mind when that beeper went off. What did he learn from that?
When's the beeper going to go off? So the experiment was there's a psychologist at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, named Russell Hurlburt. And he's been sampling inner experience, as he calls it, for 50 years. And the way he does it is he equips you with a beeper. You wear this thing in your ear. It emits a very sharp beep.
Yeah.
You know exactly what it was and when it was. There's no, like, reaching for your phone or any doubt about what you're dealing with. And then you're supposed to write down what you were thinking at that very moment. And then you collect a day's worth of beeps, which could be five or six beeps. And... You know, it's got various kind of observer effect problems. You wonder, you know, God, if the beeper went off now, what would I have to say? Oh, that would really be embarrassing. So there is this self-consciousness, but you forget about it over the course of the day. Suddenly you get a beep and you write it down. And, you know, I was struck by how banal my beeps were. I mean, I would be like the one I describe in the book is I'm waiting online at a bakery and I'm deciding, should I buy a roll or use the heel of bread I have at home to make a sandwich for lunch?
This is not profound stuff. And then he interrogates you about them to try to make sense of it and help you become a better student of what's going on in your own mind. Because it turns out very often we don't know what we're thinking. At least I didn't know what I was thinking. And he would say, now, did you speak that? Or did you hear that spoken? I was like, I have no idea. Was it in language or was it an image? And I said, well, there was sort of an image. It was kind of very unspecific, kind of an emoji of a role, not a real role. And he'd take you through it. And it was an incredibly challenging process.
What paradoxes about consciousness are explored?
I want to stay on that for a second. I would say that a lot of thoughts I have, if you push me, they're the feeling of a thought.
Yeah.
I know it's there, but it's not spoken. I'm not looking at lettering on the projector screen of my brain.
It's something less than a fully formed thought. This word thought implies a kind of, you know, roundedness to the thing that just doesn't exist.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–4:31
2
What paradoxes about consciousness are explored?
4:31–12:22
3
How does the beeper experiment reveal inner thoughts?
12:22–33:29
4
What role does William James play in understanding consciousness?
33:29–54:48
5
How do plants demonstrate sentience and consciousness?
54:48–1:29:19