When you open your eyes in the morning, become aware of the world around you and have your first thoughts about the day ahead, what exactly is happening inside your brain and body? What are the actual mechanisms of consciousness? And how did we go from single-celled organisms to conscious beings? Or, for that matter, are single-celled organisms conscious? All of these questions and more are addressed in Michael Pollan’s new book “A World Appears.” We talk to Pollan in front of an audience at Revolution Hall in Portland.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. How does 3 pounds of tofu-like matter between your ears generate subjective experience? And why does it feel like something to be us? These are the big questions that animate Michael Pollan’s new book. It’s called “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.” Pollan takes readers through his five-year exploration of the nature of consciousness, what he learned from neuroscientists, philosophers, novelists and Buddhist teachers. Pollan is the bestselling writer of nine previous books, including “The Botany of Desire,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind.”
I talked to Pollan earlier this week in front of an audience at Portland’s Revolution Hall.
[Audience Applause]
Miller: I want to start with one of the parts of the book that’s actually one of the most concrete exercises you did. You did something. You took part in a more than 50-year old experiment by a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Can you describe what Russell Hurlbert had you do?
Michael Pollan: Yeah. So at a certain point, I wanted to look at the contents of consciousness, which is to say our thoughts. And I was surprised that not that many people study it. They’re much more concerned with how the brain generates consciousness and some other questions. But I found this guy who studies what he calls inner experience. He samples inner experience. And the method he came up with to do this is he designed, back in 1973, a beeper.
There were no personal electronic devices, right? This is pre all that stuff. So he had to design it himself, and you have this thing you wear on your belt, and you have a little thing in your ear. And at random times of the day, it sends this very sharp sound into your ear and you know exactly what it is. And then you have a little pad and you’re supposed to take it out and write down what you were thinking. It really sounds pretty easy.
I wore this for several days. You don’t wear it all day. You can’t. You’re just too self-conscious. You’re like, what if it goes off now? [laughter] And then what am I thinking? What would I be thinking? So anyway, I did this for several days and after each session, you do a long Zoom with Russell, where he interrogates you because it turns out it’s not obvious what you’re thinking. It’s not obvious, not the content of your thought, but the style in which you’re thinking.
Miller: What are the different versions of thought that he helped you understand you might be experiencing or thinking at any given time?
Pollan: Well, I kind of assumed, I think like a lot of people, but especially because I’m a word person, I’m a writer, that I thought in words. And actually sometimes, but very often, I thought in images or even just kind of abstractions. It was wispier than I thought. But even when you’re thinking in words, it isn’t really clear.
Well, I’ll give you an example. So one beep. I had seasoned, salted a piece of salmon, a filet of salmon, and I was returning it to the fridge, and I was walking from the counter to the fridge. I was like, oh, I forgot the pepper. And that’s when the beep went off. All right, not profound. None of my beeps were profound. [laughter] They were embarrassingly prosaic. So, OK, that’s an easy one, pepper. That was my thought. It’s a word.
Then I talked to Russell that evening and he said, “well, did you hear pepper or speak pepper?” And next time you have a thought that is a word, ask yourself that question. Are you hearing it or are you speaking it? It’s very hard to capture that. Anyway, he’s done this for 50 years. It’s all he’s done. He has this huge set of samples and he has drawn no theoretical conclusions for it. [laughter]
Miller: But in his defense, on purpose, right?
Pollan: Yeah, no, he’s allergic to theory. When I told him I was writing a book about consciousness, he said, “good luck with that.” [laughter] It was not encouraging. But his big finding is that fewer of us think in words than you would think. It’s not a majority, it’s a third. Another third approximately think in images primarily. Obviously it’s mixed sometimes. And then some people speak in unsymbolized thought – it’s neither visual nor verbal. It’s just pure thought. I didn’t really get that one.
Miller: Well, then maybe you can’t answer my question because I don’t get it.
Pollan: I’m not sure I get it either.
Miller: OK.
Pollan: I have to ask him.
Miller: Did you get the sense though that for the nonverbalized thought, there is meaning as opposed to emotion? Pepper makes sense and maybe pepper couldn’t be a nonverbalized thought because it’s necessarily a thing. This is just an example of the challenges of talking about consciousness, I guess. But what does it mean to have a thought …
Pollan: That’s neither.
Miller: That’s neither.
Pollan: Well, our feelings are not symbolized, right? I mean, you have feelings, you have intuitions. There are many things that don’t have to … It’s a second-order thing to move either to a visual or a verbal symbol.
Miller: So emotions would be that category?
Pollan: Yeah, I think that would be one example. So that’s interesting. I mean, we have this word “thought.” And we think we know what we mean by it. But it’s this umbrella term for a lot of other things. So we’re actually not thinking the same way as other people, and that we each have our own style.
But what was alarming in my case is … So I had a lot of problems with Russell’s method and we would argue a lot. I had been reading “William James on the Stream of Consciousness” and I’ve been reading Proust, and they have very similar things to say about the kind of nuance of words and the nuance of experience. And James talks a lot about the stream of consciousness, a beautiful essay. I think it’s called “The Stream of Consciousness.” And he talks about the relationship between words. And that there’s no word that stands alone. There’s no thought that stands alone. It’s colored by the thought that came before and it colors the next one, and it’s a very dynamic process. He has phrases like the unarticulated affinities between two thoughts.
And Proust, too, talks about how specific you take something and you assume we all agree what a rose is or a roll is, but of course we’re each bringing a history of associations to that and it doesn’t mean the same thing to two people. So anyway, I was constantly arguing with him. Well, no, I can’t separate this. Yes, I was thinking about a roll … all my beeps were about food [laughter], almost all. I was standing in line at a bakery and deciding whether to buy a roll or not, and that was my thought. I said, “but I was also smelling the baked goods and the cheese that was being sold there, and I noticed this terrible plaid on this woman’s skirt.” There’s so many things going on, the simultaneity, and he really had trouble, and he kept saying that before the footlights of consciousness?
So we argued a lot. And then at the end, our last briefing – and we had many of them – he said, “I’m a little uncomfortable telling you this, but my conclusion is you do not have a lot of inner experience.” [laughter] And he said, “Your inability to separate out all these things suggested to me that you were kind of backfilling.” He didn’t put it this way, this yawning hole of personality or something. Anyway, that was disturbing. And I don’t think he’s right.
Miller: Do you think he’s right?
Pollan: [laughs] No.
Miller: Let’s move on from Russell. What’s your best working definition of consciousness?
Pollan: I like simply subjective experience, that we have experience and that it’s from a point of view. And another definition I quite like is the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay in the ‘70s called “What Is it Like to be a Bat?” And he said, if it is like anything to be you or a given creature, then you must be conscious. It is not like anything to be your toaster. We don’t think. And I don’t wanna offend any toaster rights people that might be in the audience, [laughter] but it feels like something to be us and I think we all kind of get that intuitively.
Miller: One of the theories that you explore in the book is that human consciousness is complicated enough that if we want to understand consciousness, it might be helpful to look at beings like plants that have, if not necessarily consciousness, maybe consciousness, but maybe some kind of sentience. And so you talked to a bunch of really fascinating plant scientists who showed you what, to me, were extraordinary things that plants can do and the things that plants can sense. Can you give us a sense for what plants can do in addition to the five human senses?
Pollan: Yeah, they have about 20 senses, which is kind of incredible. They can sense pH, they can sense a whole lot of molecular attractants or repellents. They do have our senses, most of them, they have sound. If you play a recording of a caterpillar munching on a leaf, a plant will produce chemicals to repel caterpillars and other chemicals to alert other plants in the vicinity. They can see, which is a weird concept. There’s a vine that changes its leaf shape to mimic the plant that it’s colonizing. How does it see that leaf shape? We have no idea.
Plants know where they are in space, bean plants when they’re twirling, looking for something to hold on to. I always thought it was kind of arbitrary and they just bumped into something. If you do a time lapse account of that, you will see that the bean plant – and one of these is on my website, I just posted a consciousness resources thing and you could see this video, it’s really cool – is casting itself right at the pole and it knows where the pole is. So how does it know that? It may be echolocation like the bat because when the cells of plants separate or reproduce, they emit a little sound, and they may bounce that off of things and be able to hear it.
You can teach plants. You can condition them and they will remember something for 28 days, which is astonishing. That’s longer than a fruit fly. They only remember things for 24 hours. The same anesthetics that knock us out will knock out a plant. And you think, well, aren’t they always knocked out? No. [laughter] No, they have states of alertness and then states of not. So, a Venus flytrap, for example, if you give it anesthetic, the same kind of ones we use in surgery, will not react for a period of time. So that suggests they have two states of being, and it is maybe like something to be the Venus flytrap being awake.
Miller: All of this is without neurons,
Pollan: Yes
Miller: Without a nervous system like we have?
Pollan: So that’s very important, but you can do a lot of neuronal stuff without neurons. I mean, as Mike Levin, this biologist I interviewed quite a few times, said, there’s nothing a neuron does that a normal cell can. It’s just slower.
Miller: And that actually gets to one of the things I loved about this chapter was the way it forces us to reckon with time. How do you think about time in the context of human reality and a tree or a plant?
Pollan: I think it was Stefano Mancuso, one of these plant neurobiologists. They call themselves neurobiologists, knowing full well there are no neurons. They’re just trolling more conventional botanists [laughter]. He told this science fiction story, which turns out to be a “Star Trek” plot, where these creatures come down from another universe and they exist at a much faster scale of time than we. So a second to them is like a day to us, and they see us and they don’t see any movement. And they think we’re just inert material that they can do what they want with. And they turn us into jerky for the ride home. This is what we do to plants.
I’m not saying we should abstain from eating plants, but you may have thought about the question of pain when I was talking about the sentience of plants and that is a subject of debate among these plant neurobiologists. But I was reassured to talk to one who said, pain would not be adaptive if you were a plant. Pain is only adaptive when you can do something about it and move, and plants can’t move, right? They’re rooted in place. So they need to know they’re being chomped on so they can take measures, but it’s not pain. Because I had this idea in my head when I was hearing about all this amazing capability, is that wonderful smell after you mow the lawn of freshly mown grass, is that actually a scream of pain? [laughter] That would change everything, right? Because what would be left to eat? Salt, basically.
Miller: So to come back to us humans or other animal consciousnesses, how did learning about plants, and maybe some version of distributed intelligence or distributed sensing, non-neuron way of taking in the world, responding to it and changing based on that, make you think about our own consciousness differently?
Pollan: Yeah, so I want to go back to something you brought up earlier about sentience versus consciousness and draw that distinction, because I think it’s really important, especially when we think about other creatures besides ourselves. So I distinguish between the two. Sentience is kind of a more base form or basic form of consciousness. It’s simply the ability to sense changes in your environment and have a valence with them. I mean, that some are positive, some are negative, and you avoid the negative and move toward the positive. So it’s a very basic awareness of yourself, but it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of our consciousness. It doesn’t have interiority or self-consciousness or all that stuff.
And sentience may be universal. I mean, I was persuaded by some of the scientists I was interviewing that it may be that sentience is a property of life. Even bacteria, single-celled creatures can sense the environment. Chemotaxis and bacteria recognize molecules that are dangerous to them and molecules that are food, and gravitate toward the latter. So to think of all of nature as being sentient though is a real shift in your perspective. I mean, we have lived in a disenchanted world for most of our lives. The whole project of modern science has headed in that direction and it’s licensed us, like the jerky-making aliens, to exploit nature with some abandon. And it would represent a kind of almost a return to animism, to accept this idea that all living things are sentient.
Consciousness is just the way we do sentience and every species does sentience in a different way depending on its senses, its sensorium, depending on its body type, depending on the scale at which it lives. So for us, it’s very useful to have imagination, interiority and a voice in our heads. That wouldn’t do anything for plants. What plants really need is this gift of biochemistry to make all these cool, interesting molecules that can kill or make you high or whatever, all the amazing molecules they’ve come up with. So I think it would be kind of arrogant for us to think that our kind of consciousness would apply to any other animal and my guess is they all have slightly different versions. And that an octopus’s consciousness with a brain distributed over eight arms is very different from ours.
Now, then the question becomes why does the kind of consciousness we have suit us? Why is it adaptive for us? And I struggle with that and asked a lot of people about that. When you think about it, 90% of what your brain is doing, you’re not aware of, right? It’s doing tons of work right now without you knowing it. It’s governing your heart rate, blood pressure and glucose levels, and taking in lots of information and processing it in interesting ways from your senses. So why is any of it conscious, right? Why isn’t it all automated? Why aren’t we zombies, is really the question. And some of us are [laughter].
The best explanation I heard was that you need consciousness if you are a creature that lives in a social environment as intricate as ours and that we are profoundly, essentially social beings. We can’t live alone. We have a long childhood during which we’re dependent, much longer than any other animal. So if you’re so dependent on other people, you need to be able to read them. And that involves imagination, the theory of mind, it’s called. The ability to see things from another’s point of view, the ability to anticipate what somebody’s going to do. That is too complex to automate, and that in a world that is changing that much and has so many surprises in it, you need consciousness to navigate it.
Miller: What did you learn about where consciousness resides in our brains and in our bodies?
Pollan: Well, when this field got started … It really doesn’t get started, the modern study of consciousness, till the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, and that’s when Francis Crick, fresh off of his Nobel Prize for discovering DNA, along with James Watson and one other collaborator whose name I forget ...
Miller: Rosalind Franklin.
Pollan: Franklin, thank you. Thank you. She often gets neglected, so I’m glad we nailed that one down. He thought, OK, well, reductive science worked for me. We found DNA. For my next trick, we’re going to find the neural correlates of consciousness, which is to say those regions of the brain or that network or set of neurons responsible for subjective experience. And they found certain correlations, like 20 Hz brain waves seemed to be correlated with consciousness. But they realized pretty soon that that really didn’t tell you anything. It’s a correlation. It still doesn’t get you from these 3 pounds of tofu-like gray matter between your ears to subjective experience. It doesn’t get you from matter to mind. It’s a huge gulf. And we still haven’t crossed it.
The assumption is that brains produce consciousness, but all efforts to prove that have, so far, not worked out. And some researchers have started entertaining other ideas. One is that, yes, the brain is obviously critically involved, and if you injure it or give it a drug, consciousness changes. So clearly the brain is involved, but that doesn’t mean the brain generates it. And one theory that seems kind of out there, but the evidence is similar for the brain theory, is that the brain is a receiver. It’s sort of like a radio or TV receiver and that there’s consciousness at large, as Aldous Huxley put it, and we tune into it. Huxley had this wonderful image of the reducing valve that there’s a lot more consciousness than we get and that because of the imperatives of survival we take in only the dribble of consciousness we need to get by. And psychedelics, for him, opened up that reducing valve.
So this is an idea that’s floating around that consciousness is out there and we channel it in some ways – it’s sometimes called idealism. Another theory that’s being seriously entertained that also sounds crackpot, but again, the normal theories are not working out too well, is panpsychism. And that is the idea that everything, including the particles in this table, have some eensy weensy little bit of psyche so that consciousness doesn’t arise, it’s already here. And then the challenge becomes, well, how do you get from those little bits of consciousness, that all presumably all your cells have, to this organized consciousness of a being like us. It’s called the combination problem, and that hasn’t been solved either.
And if it sounds really crazy to you, don’t forget that it was only 200 years ago that we discovered, Michael Faraday discovered, electromagnetic waves. These waves are passing through us all the time and they’re just part of reality, but we didn’t know they existed. And once we added that to the stock of reality, we also figured out how to use them to transmit information and do all sorts of things.
Miller: That’s a helpful last bit there because I think there was a part of me that was thinking, yes, this does sound crazy. [laughter] And maybe where my mind goes is I accept it because I use electromagnetic waves very, very often, they’re very good.
Pollan: Yes. [laughter]
Miller: They’ve been very helpful for me, my life. [laughter] But somehow Wi Fi, cell signals, radio and TV, it feels different than my own thoughts. My own thoughts seem special to me. And like mine, my experience of reality, surely that can’t be just way more of something than exists in this table in front of us. That’s where my ego goes, I guess.
Pollan: Yeah. I do think our consciousness – and this is one of the reasons I don’t think AI can be conscious and we can talk more about that later – but it’s so specific. We bring a lifetime of experience to objects that seem like they have a universal meaning, but they’re different to all of us. I mean, I was saying earlier, like a rose, often it’s used as an example of qualia, of the qualitative nature of consciousness. But every experience you’ve had with a rose, every association, every story, it means something slightly different to you, and it can’t be easily translated.
Proust talks about this really beautifully. He talks about impressions. The word “impression” means the same thing in French and English. When we perceive something, we tend to concentrate on the object, but in fact, the impression goes two ways. It goes into us too and shapes our perception, our impression of that object. It might as well be encrypted. It’s so specific to us. And you know as a writer when you’re trying to describe something, how little of it you actually get across given how rich your associations are with it.
So one of the frustrations I had with consciousness science, and one of the reasons I moved away from it, in a way, and started looking at literature and other ways of knowing about consciousness, is that they were dealing with a very simplified version of consciousness, which was essentially like visual perception. How does a world appear? And I understood why because that’s hard enough, but they weren’t dealing with these qualities of mental experience in the way William James did, or Proust or Joyce, who really got at something that I recognized as, yeah, this is more like my consciousness than the version I was hearing from the scientists I was interviewing. And that’s the nature of reductive science. You have to simplify things sometimes to understand them. But it’s important to keep in mind what you’ve bracketed, what you’re not dealing with, and that’s the content of consciousness.
Miller: So let’s dig deeper into AI. Is it too much of a simplification of where you ended up in your thinking for me to say that you don’t think AI can ever be conscious because it’s not embodied? They don’t have real bodies. And even more importantly, AI as we know it can’t die.
Pollan: Computers may be very different in 50 years.
Miller: Or in five.
Pollan: Yeah, or in five, it’s true. But the kind of AI that’s now being envisioned, I don’t think can be conscious. And most people in Silicon Valley would say yes, it can, it’s just a matter of time. But they’re operating on an assumption that I think we have to question. And that assumption is that the brain is a kind of computer and like computers you could run different algorithms. Consciousness is essentially an algorithm or software that you could run, and why just meat, why not silicon?
Miller: A predictive machine.
Pollan: Yeah, and the problem with that is that’s a metaphor, that the brain is a computer. And metaphors, there’s a scientist I quote in the book who said the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance, which I think is a great line. And we haven’t been vigilant about this metaphor. If you press on it, it sort of falls apart. Just to give you a couple of examples. There’s no distinction in the brain between hardware and software. This is such a central part of the Turing machine of computers that you can run software on any number of different computers and you have this total distinction. But in the brain, every memory you have, every experience you have physically changes the brain. Your brain is physically different from mine because it was pruned. You start with all these connections and they get pruned as you grow up by different life experiences. So the idea that you could run a different software, different consciousness on a brain, just like on a computer, falls apart.
Neurons are a little bit like transistors. They fire or they don’t fire. But they’re analog in a lot of other ways because they’re affected by chemistry too, not just electronics. So drugs affect them, neurotransmitters affect them, hormones affect them, how much they fire. So they have this whole analog identity also. So I don’t think that holds up.
But the biggest problem I see you alluded to, which is feelings. The evidence I was most impressed with in the people studying consciousness is the idea that consciousness may begin, not with thought in the cortex – which we think of as the most advanced human part of the brain, the outer layer – but with feelings and feelings in the brain stem, so really primitive. Consciousness begins with things like hunger, itch and pain, and it comes out of the body. And remember, the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. We’re so cerebrocentric that we forget this. So the function of feelings is to help the brain manage the body and maintain homeostasis. Feelings are when it means you’ve fallen out of this range of things, you have to stay in range to stay to survive.
So that would suggest that you need feelings for consciousness and that’s a problem for computers. Now, they report feelings. But are they real? And there’s a belief in Silicon Valley that if you can simulate it, it’s as good as being it. And that’s true for certain things. If you simulate thought and you apply it to playing chess or Go, that’s as good as the real thing, right? But simulated feelings are not as good as the real thing. The point about feelings too, and you alluded to this, is that unless you have a body that’s vulnerable and probably mortal – I mean, it is mortal – because of that, your feelings would have no weight at all. You could completely ignore them because bad feelings weren’t gonna lead to a bad outcome.
I think the real question is even if I’m right, it might not matter because these chatbots are gonna convince us they’re conscious. They already are. Yeah, that’s right. People are falling in love with them. Seventy-two percent of teenagers in America are turning to AI for companionship right now. That’s really troubling because these are, again, not real relationships. They’re simulated relationships that we take to be real. And if you think about it, they lack some very important things that relationships have, like friction, right? The AIs are totally sycophantic and they make people feel great, but we learn from the friction of relationships. That’s how we figure out who we are and what we think.
I interviewed Sherry Turkle, who’s this wonderful sociologist at MIT. And she had this great line: “Technology can make us forget what we know about life.” And what she meant is, when you have a conversation with a machine, on one level it feels like a conversation, but think about how simplified that version is. You’ve given up on body language. You’ve given up on eye contact. You’ve given up on intonation. And we just accept it. So we reduce ourselves to the level of the machine rather than bring the machine up to our level. It’s kind of like the idea, the emoji in a way is the symbol of this, right? Accepting emojis is a version of emotion. But we do.
Miller: Let’s move on from AI.
Pollan: Yeah.
Miller: And talk about mortality, aging and death. I think a lot of us are familiar with the ways that our brains change as we get older, in some ways that we’re not thrilled with in terms of memory. But I’ve personally thought less about how our consciousness changes as we get older. But your book occasioned, that made me think about that. What did you learn about consciousness changes as we age?
Pollan: The best example we have is the consciousness of children to older children.
Miller: Can you describe that?
Pollan: Yeah, so Alison Gopnik is a psychologist, developmental psychologist at Berkeley, and a colleague and a friend. And she makes a distinction between lantern consciousness, which is what children have, and spotlight consciousness, which is what we have when we get older. Spotlight consciousness is the ability to block out, essentially put blinders on and focus on something, and it’s something indispensable as soon as you get to school. You have to sit in a chair and focus on what the teacher says. But it is what allows us to get things done and be productive. You get your radio show made. It gets my books written, but it’s at a sacrifice. The blinders are eliminating a whole lot of interesting stuff that kids take in.
Lantern consciousness is just the idea that they take in information from 360 degrees and not just one or two or three, and it’s very disorganized. It looks like ADHD to us because they’re going from this to that, but they are mastering the world through that process. And when Alison tried LSD for the first time in her late 50s or early 60s, she realized this is how kids think and that kids are tripping all the time [laughter] until they get to 5 or 6. And she’s on to something, I think, because on psychedelics, focus is very difficult. You do take in sensory information, all different kinds, and it’s almost overwhelming how much you take in, but also a lot of internal material comes up too. So it’s not the perfect analogy.
I’m sure it changes as we get older, but in unpredictable ways. I don’t know that there’s a model quite like the one she has for children. She also warned me about another kind of consciousness or an extreme version of spotlight consciousness that she calls professor consciousness. And this is before I started on the book, and she was saying don’t ever forget that the kinds of people who work on consciousness have a very particular kind of consciousness, which is to say, they can sit in a chair for many, many hours reading a book or thinking and writing and they have a level of focus and abstraction that most people don’t have. And that was helpful.
Miller: After you talk to all these scientists and philosophers and as you were saying, getting in various ways frustrated by feeling like you were hitting a dead end, you sought out a Zen Buddhist teacher ‒ an anthropologist and an activist in New Mexico ‒ named Joan Halifax, and you’d hoped and thought you would stay in her retreat center and interview her, but she had other ideas. She wanted you to basically spend big chunks of your days for a number of days in a cave on the property.
Pollan: It’s true.
Miller: What did you do in that cave? How did you fill your hours? [laughter]
Pollan: I have to back up a little and explain this. I was working on the chapter about the self. The self is one of the more interesting manifestations or constructs of consciousness that we have this idea that there’s a self, that the person I was when I was 13 and the person I am now somehow are connected, even though all our cells have turned over and I’ve changed in profound ways. But we have this golden thread that we say is our self. That may be illusory.
So I had met her somewhere and she’s a very wise woman. She’s in her early 80s, but incredibly spry, and she had described Upaya, this retreat center she built in Santa Fe – which is a wonderful place – as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I thought, I need this experience to write about selves. So I asked her if I could come and hang out and interview her. I should have known that a Zen priest would be kind of allergic to concepts and kind of intellectualizing all this, and she obviously thought I was way too lost in my head and I needed some Zen education. So she sent me to this cave that they have.
She has a retreat center beyond the retreat center where she sends people sometimes. And, it was way up in the mountains, 50 miles north of Santa Fe. And the cave was just a cell dug out of a south-facing hillside with a sliding glass door on one side, a tiny bed, a little meditation platform, and no running water and no power. There was a little solar collector, enough to charge your reading light. So, there I was. It was a really interesting experience in a lot of ways.
What I did was chop wood and collect wood for a fire. It was quite cold at night. I swept, I dug little pit toilets in the woods and meditated for hours. It was so quiet there and I had so little to do. And obviously I was offline. I mean, I wasn’t connected to the world and I didn’t have to work in any way. I couldn’t really work. I meditated for longer than I’ve ever been able to meditate before. But more than that, the ritual of my days became a meditation. It was weird. I was meditating better, just sweeping and doing those things. Ritual is a funny way. It relieves you of volition in a funny way, which is part of what the self is. And I did feel the softening of the borders of self because I wasn’t with anyone else. And, I realized the extent to which we reinforce this illusion that we have a distinct self because we talk to each other and we grant you that privilege or whatever.
But what was really important to me here is it helped me execute a turn that I didn’t expect to do when I started this book. And I went into this book with the usual journalistic approach – which is also very Western and very male, I think – of problem/solution. That was the frame. And if I thought hard enough, I would find out which theory of consciousness was the right one. And I narrowed that aperture down. It was a professor of consciousness, basically. I had lost so much of what consciousness was, the experience of it. And I realized, yes, there’s the problem of consciousness, but then there’s this marvelous fact of consciousness, the fact that we have this interior space where we have complete privacy and mental freedom. And I really got in touch with that.
It’s funny, my wife who’s a painter, along the way, like when I was very frustrated about not finding answers, she said, “not knowing can be a very powerful thing.” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a book to write, lady. [laughter]
Miller: My audience demands answers. Or I demand answers.
Pollan: Yeah, and Joan, when the first time I interviewed her, she prefaced it by saying, “I’ve divested from meaning.” Which did not augur well for the interview. [laughter] But anyway, she, my wife and her and Jorie Graham – this poet who I interviewed – made me get in touch with the fact that we should be focused on the fact we’re not as conscious as we might be. We’re not as conscious as we once were, speaking of changes in consciousness. We’re not as conscious as the animals. Now that sounds really weird.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Pollan: Well, if you think about it, there’s a line from Jorie Graham’s poem that I quote to this effect: “Because of our technologies, because of all the safety we’ve built around us in civilization, we can afford not to be present.” Animals can’t. They have to be present all the time or they get eaten, basically. Bad things happen, so they’re maximally conscious. Their consciousness may not have all the elaborate bells and whistles we do, but whatever that consciousness is, they are there except when they’re sleeping, and they sleep lightly compared to us. And that we are also squandering our consciousness right now, that there was an urgency, I realized, that I hadn’t been in touch with. And that when we talk about social media hacking our attention, we’re really talking about our consciousness. Attention is how we aim our consciousness, right? What we choose to fill it with.
That has led to … Think about, you’re standing in line at the cafe and you’re waiting for the barista to foam your drink, and what do you do for those two seconds of boredom? You take out your phone and you start scrolling. When you do that, you’re giving away your consciousness. The alternative, of course, is daydreaming, fantasizing, thinking what you’re gonna have for dinner in my case [laughter]. But we’ve given that time away, that headspace away. We also have a president who commands so much of our attention every day. There’s never been a president like that.
And now we’re getting to this other really alarming phenomenon that we talked about, which is that chatbots, AIs, are hacking not just our attention but our attachments. They’re getting between us and other people, and these emotional attachments are so important and such an important part of our consciousness. That we are settling for these simulated relationships and falling into them, I think is another threat to our consciousness. So I think that we’re polluting our consciousness in certain ways and that we need to practice some forms of consciousness hygiene and take it back. So that was a real shift in my understanding.
Miller: What are the precepts for you of consciousness hygiene?
Pollan: Well, taking a break from technology, very important. Fasts or Sabbaths, I think, are really useful. I think meditation is a really healthy way to draw a kind of fence around your consciousness. Obviously, you don’t engage with technology when it’s happening, but you’re alone with your thoughts and the sheer weirdness of it. I mean, that’s what constantly strikes me, that we don’t know what our thoughts are. We don’t know who’s thinking them. We have thoughts that think themselves. It’s really weird in there [laughter]. So, being alone with your thoughts.
I actually think I would add to consciousness hygiene, psychedelics. The occasional psychedelic experience is really an exercise in what is called spontaneous thought. There’s a researcher who studies it. She’s made a study of daydreams, mind wandering, intuition and those bolts from the blue. And she feels strongly that psychedelic experience promotes or nurtures spontaneous thought and that spontaneous thought is not trivial. It doesn’t get a lot of attention because it’s not productive and most of the work on cognition pays attention to decision making, rationality and all this stuff. But it’s very interesting that she studies this area that hasn’t gotten much attention. But she claims it’s very important to how we make meaning of our lives. And obviously, we know it’s very important to creativity.
Miller: Michael Pollan, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.
Pollan: Thank you, Dave. Always a pleasure.
[Audience applause]
Miller: Michael Pollan is the author of 10 books of nonfiction. His latest is called “A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.” He talked in front of an audience at Portland’s Revolution Hall in collaboration with Powell’s Books.
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