Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Skip to contentSkip to site index new video loaded: Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness transcript Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness Pollan, a science writer, spent five years trying to understand how consciousness worked. The more he learned, the weirder things got. 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 firsthand 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 can 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 it, 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 want to have him on to talk about it. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@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 you 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. Exactly what it was and when it was. There’s no 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 never know when it’s going to go off. It’s got various kind of observer effect problems. You wonder, God, if the beeper went off now, what would I have to say. Oh, that would really be embarrassing. So you’re there is this self-consciousness, but you forget about it over the course of the day. And 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 on line 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,