Ezra Klein: 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. Michael Pollan, welcome back to the show.

Michael Pollan: Thank you. Good to be back.

Ezra Klein: 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?

Michael Pollan: 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, I have no idea. Was it in language or was it in image? And I said, well, there was sort of an image. It was kind of very unspecific, kind of an emoji of a roll. Not a real roll. And he’d take you through it. And it was an incredibly challenging process.

Ezra Klein: I want to stay on that for a second. I would say that a lot of thoughts I have, if you push me there, the feeling of a thought, 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 roundedness to the thing that just doesn’t exist. And many of our thoughts are these wisps of mentation. That I love that "gossamer wisps of mentation" is how you put it in the book

Michael Pollan: Yeah and then also, many people think in totally uncivilized thoughts, which I don’t really understand what those would be if they’re not words and not images. But his finding after 50 years of this is that we think in very different ways. He roasts you at the end of the experiment. Oh man, you finish this up and he says that you are low on inner mental experience. Yeah I didn’t know how to take this. I mean, we all think we have a lively inner life, but absence of one? It never occurred to me

Ezra Klein: that raises a question for me, which is to what degree was what you were recording in this experiment different than your perception of how your mental life feels to you in a day.

Michael Pollan: Very different.

Ezra Klein: And so what was the difference and what do you make of it.

Michael Pollan: I just assumed I had a little more going on than he thought I had. But part of the reason he came to that conclusion is I argued with him a lot. I found the whole idea of separating thoughts into these discrete chunks absolutely impossible. When I was on that bakery waiting in line. There was the smell of baked goods and cheese. They sell cheese at this place. There was the image of this woman in front of me who had this very loud plaid skirt on that was kind of hideous. There was my awareness of the other people there. Did I recognize anybody? I often bump into people I know here. My thoughts were so inter infected by one another. One thought coloring the next. And he just kept drilling down until I absolutely would separate all that. But I had read a lot of William James at this point. He’s got this amazing essay on the stream of consciousness, and he’s an incredibly acute observer of the nuance and subtlety of our thoughts. And he talks about things like the unarticulated affinity between two thoughts, or how one thought colors the next and then the other, and that it is a stream and you can’t pull anything out of the stream without completely disturbing it.

Ezra Klein: Let’s talk about William James, because he always ends up the godfather, the leading source of metaphor in any book like this. Who is he?

Michael Pollan: So William James is the father of psychology in America. He is now regarded more as a philosopher. And that’s because psychology is so empirical now. He was really I don’t know if he used this word, but he acted like wrote like a phenomenologist, which is to say about the lived experience of thought. And I first got acquainted with him when I was working on how to change your mind, because he’d written the varieties of religious experience, and there’s a fantastic chapter there on mystical experience. And he experimented with drugs himself to look at these kind of outer reaches of consciousness. He’s kind of unreadable, yet he’s also a great writer at the same time. There’s something about his sentences that are so long and intricate that he loses a modern reader about 80 percent of the way to the period, at least me. But the observations are just so refined and they put to shame all the scientists working on consciousness. I mean, I hate to say that because I respect a lot of them, but that he’s onto the subtlety of mental experience. And they, of course, are reducing it to fairly simple things like visual perception or qualia, which is their word for quality qualities of experience. He goes so far beyond qualia. So I had a head full of James when I was doing this experiment, and it seemed to keep doing violence to that. I was. I recognized my thinking more in James than in Hurlbert’s questions.

Ezra Klein: One thing I love about James is his precision in describing how imprecise the stuff of the mind is, and mind stuff is a word. A phrase of his, yeah, 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, effusions, feeling of tendency, premonitions, psychic overtones." And you say, perhaps my favorite "fringe of unarticulated affinities." Yeah, the fringe. It’s so beautiful. 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 your thoughts and even within thoughts you note. Did I hear that? Did I see that? Did I feel that? 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 that. The borderlands of mental experience.

Michael Pollan: I think it’s just a reminder that our mental life is just far more intricate, complex, and shadowy than we give it credit for. It’s in the nature of reductive science to simplify things in order to better understand them. It’d be very weird to start from a Jamesian view of the 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, and yet actually quite unfamiliar. And I mean, this is one of the great lessons of meditation or psychedelics more unfamiliar the more you attend to it.

Michael Pollan: Yes, that is really interesting. I mean, the more I thought about consciousness, the more elusive the phenomenon becomes. And meditators get acquainted with this pretty quickly. You realize pretty quickly that you have thoughts that you are not thinking. You have images that you haven't conjured, where did they come from? You’re on the verge of sleep or sleepiness and they just pop into your mind. And, this idea of thoughts, thinking themselves is bizarre to most people. But I just think the poets and novelists are further along than the scientists as they often are. And that’s one of the reasons I kind of turned toward literature year later in the book for a more subtle understanding of the thought process.

Ezra Klein: Well, let’s stay with the scientist for a little while. At least. One of the things you tried to do in the book is track their efforts to reduce consciousness to something measurable, and maybe protohuman nonhuman. 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 which is you can anesthetize a plant. Isn’t that mind blowing? Can you talk a bit about that experiment and what it seems to imply?

Michael Pollan: So there’s a group of scientists, botanists, and they call themselves plant neurobiologists, which is a very tendentious thing to say because there are no neurons involved in plants. They’re trolling more conventional botanists. I think I appreciate when people troll each other in ways that laymen don’t even understand I was like, oh, that seems fine. No, it’s fighting words in the field.

Ezra Klein: O.K, so they’re plant dorks.

Michael Pollan: Plant dorks. Absolute plant dorks. And they do all these experiments to see how intelligent plants are, how much they can respond and solve problems. And they’ve also done experiments to try to determine if they’re conscious or I would use the word sentient is more reasonable, although they will use the word conscious.

Ezra Klein: Do you want to say the difference in your mind between those two words?

Michael Pollan: In my mind, sentience is a kind more base form, basic form of consciousness. It’s what perhaps all living things have. It’s the ability to sense your environment and recognize what’s the valence. Is that a positive or negative thing happening? and then respond appropriately. Bacteria can do this. They have chemotaxis. They can recognize molecules that are food and molecules that are poison and act appropriately. So it’s a very basic form. Consciousness is how humans do sentience. And we’ve added lots of bells and whistles the stream of consciousness self-reflection the fact that we’re aware that we’re aware other most other creatures are just aware. Although we recently learned that chimps have imagination, which is kind of mind blowing.

Ezra Klein: How do we learn that?

Michael Pollan: Experiments they got chimps, as I recall, to play a kind of tea party game as you would play with a kid and they’re pouring an empty pitcher into cups they get completely into the game, and they. And there’s some reason you can tell that they know it’s not real. So they’re imagining this. Every time we build a wall and say, only humans can do this, we find that actually no other animals can. So anesthetized plants. So one of the experiments these guys did was take anesthetics that work on humans, including a really bizarre one called xenon gas. I say it’s bizarre because xenon gas is inert, yet somehow it puts us out if you expose us to the gas. Which is weird because there’s no chemical reaction going on. And if you take a carnivorous plant or a sensitive plant, mimosa pudica, which is the one, the tropical plant, if you touch it, it kind of collapses its leaves and you give it the xenon gas or any number of other anesthetics that work on us. There’ll be a period where they appear to be asleep, and then they’ll regain their ability. So the fact that plants have two states of being is a very pregnant idea.

Ezra Klein: And there’s this at least two states of being at least two states.

Michael Pollan: Two that we’ve identified on and off, right. Lights on, lights off. That to some implies consciousness. There’s the famous definition of Thomas Nagel, who wrote this great essay called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" And his test for consciousness is if it is like anything to be a creature, that creature then is conscious. So it is like one thing when the plants are awake and it is like something else when they’re not, or it’s no longer like anything. But the switch in state is very much like consciousness.

Ezra Klein: Let me hold you on that, because as I understand the Thomas Nagel essay, it’s that it is like something to the organism. Yes it’s internal. And so you could imagine a situation where a world in which it is not like anything for the plant to be awake. You give actually an example related to this in the book, where you say when you plug a toaster in Yeah, you threw me off Yeah toast with it. But when you plug it out, we don’t think it is like something different or unlike something for the toaster to be turned off. I don’t think it’s like anything for it to be a toaster. In so in either state, the fact that something has response to stimuli doesn’t necessarily imply it has a subjective experience.

Michael Pollan: That’s true. The difference between plants and toasters is complicated. But living things have a sense of purpose. They have directionality. They have good and bad. Any kind of things like that we give to a thermostat is really just us giving those qualities to the thermostat. The thermostat doesn’t care on its own, whether it’s 70 degrees or 65 degrees. So I don’t think it’s proof of consciousness, but it’s really spooky and interesting that plants can. And this researcher in question, his name is Stefano Mancuso. He’s an Italian researcher at the University of Florence. He’s also shown how plants sleep. They’re like characteristics that mark a creature’s ability to sleep, which we thought only belonged to higher mammals, I guess. Or no birds. Birds sleep too. But we didn’t think really simple creatures slept. It turns out even insects sleep. And Giulio Tononi is the scientist who came up with the criteria for sleep and plants meet I think all of them, which is interesting. And some. And some take that as evidence of consciousness.

Ezra Klein: You’re a gardener. Yeah. Do you think you’re causing plants pain by pruning them?

Michael Pollan: So you’re bringing up the issue that immediately comes to mind when you start hearing about plant consciousness, which is, are we hurting them? When we mow the lawn, is that beautiful scent of freshly mown grass, the scream Yeah the scream suffering? And that’ll make you crazy.

Ezra Klein: A great way to put it. But if you say it’ll make you crazy. But I actually people know we’re causing pain to cows and pigs and chickens and just don’t think about it.

Michael Pollan: Exactly so it turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on an industrial scale. Yeah although there’s all this worry about this in Silicon Valley that our tender hearts should go out to these machines that might be conscious. And we owe moral consideration to the machines. Anyway, I think here’s my suspicion about that because I do think it is possible we’re going to make sentient machines, machines that have some experience of what it is like to be a machine. And I think that you will find there’s a lot of concern about that until the moment it turns out to be against anybody’s interest to act. You would have to do anything about it. And also, they love the conversation about the far future or near far future of whether it’s boomer or doomer view, because it’s a great way not to deal with what’s right in front of us.

Ezra Klein: One of the things that has struck me, and it’s a theme of your book is our ability as human beings to wall off our experience from that of everything else in the world. I forget the great philosopher you’re quoting here, but there is one of them who just doesn’t believe animals can feel pain, sees them as functionally robotic.

Michael Pollan: Well, Descartes.

Ezra Klein: Descartes And that is in part helping to justify vivisections of live animals and rabbits. And it’s just like I have two dogs. I’ve been around some rabbits. The idea that you would believe those animals are not feeling pain, it actually raises a pretty profound for me question about human consciousness and our ability to interpret what we are seeing around what we would like it to be, as opposed to what it is

Michael Pollan: Yeah that and the power of an idea. I mean, he developed this idea that humans had this monopoly on consciousness. I think, therefore I am. In other words, the thing I know is that I’m a conscious being and nobody else has it. No other creature has it. And he was so convinced of his own idea that when these animals screamed sounds that we would have no trouble interpreting as suffering. He didn’t hear it as suffering, he just thought it was automatic noise. And it is hard to believe. And it’s true. I mean, it tells you something about the power of an idea to overcome our feelings, our instincts. But we do this all the time. And he was so wrong about this. It’s not funny, but we see things through an ideological lens, and it shapes what we actually see and hear. And it changed the sound of those screams to him to into meaninglessness.

Ezra Klein: So then what about plants. Are we causing mass suffering to plants? Yeah,

Michael Pollan: and I talked to Stefano Mancuso about this and some other researchers. Some one in particular believes yes, we are causing pain to plants. And his take was but hey, that’s just life. If we don’t eat plants, we’re down to salt, basically. If you give up on animals and plants. Mancuso doesn’t think so. He thinks pain would not be adaptive to a creature that can’t run away. And the big fact about plants, of course, is they’re sessile, they’re stuck in place, they’re rooted, and that dictates everything about them. And it’s the reason why they’re the language in which they work is biochemical. They produce chemicals to protect themselves, to intoxicate, to attract all different kinds of things. So he says, they’re aware that they’re being eaten. They often don’t mind. The grasses actually benefit from being eaten. And then of course, there are all the fruits and nuts that they’re happy to give away to mammals. So I don’t know where I come out on that. I don’t think my plants, when I prune them, I mean, they like being pruned they respond with more growth and new leaves. And so I’m not too worried about that.

Ezra Klein: There are a lot things I go through that make me grow that I don’t like. I would say it’s been a consistent experience of my life.

Michael Pollan: Well, it’s a short term, long term thing. Perhaps when you cut them with the secateurs that bothers them, but they respond in a really constructive way. There is also another, more complex way plants are operating on this book, which is that some of this book is motivated by experiences you’ve had with psychedelic mushrooms. Which are not exactly plants, but O.K, Fine. You’ll get letters. I’m just saving you the trouble. And you have an experience there that I have heard from many others, which is a kind of openness to animism. Yes that may not have been there before. Yeah,

Michael Pollan: that’s a very common experience on psychedelics. The world seems much more alive than it does in normal times. Animism is very interesting because it’s kind of our default as a species. You go around the world, you look at traditional cultures. They believe that there’s a spirit infusing, especially living things, but also rocks and cliffs and sky and clouds and everything. And most kids are animists till they go to school. And then we knock it out of them. So it’s interesting that we exist in this unanimous bubble of Western scientific materialism. But you, you push in any direction or travel in any direction or have a psychedelic experience and suddenly questions are raised about it. And I think that’s what’s interesting about what these plant neurobiologists are doing. They're returning us to if it’s not full scale animism, it’s reanimated world. And I did come out of this experience not the psychedelic experience, but the research experience of looking at plant consciousness or plant sentience with a sense that the world is more alive than I thought.

Ezra Klein: You talk about consciousness as a reducing valve, as a filtering mechanism of sensory experience. And we’ve talked a little bit about the wider, more lantern like consciousness of children, whom we. I wonder how different the experience of being conscious in advanced modernity with a smartphone and a task list, and we are really training ourselves to narrow down to be successful in the economy. We have structured and much of the Western, not only Western world at this point, we have altered what it means to be human. And I wonder how much you’ve made the experience of consciousness increasingly unsatisfying by can overtrain any muscle. And what we are doing staring in a narrowed way at a computer. I mean, there’s all this great neuroscience on networks between wide gaze and narrow gaze, which I really feel when I look out over a mountain range. And when I look at my phone, you can feel we have narrowed how it feels to be human being.

Michael Pollan: We have. But it’s not too late. I mean, tell me about your consciousness, sovereignty, ideas as you’re moving in here into consciousness hygiene. Well, I’ve thought a lot about how can we protect this space and one of the things I’ve been talking a lot about protecting our consciousness and what a precious space of interiority we have. And it’s this place of mental freedom. But I realized for some people going there, it doesn’t feel good that these are people who ruminate a lot. And I’m prone to a lot of rumination, which is very circular thinking, often not productive. It keeps you focused on something, but not in a way that’s making progress. Usually it’s a spiral. Maybe so, but also realizing you can take some control over your consciousness and that we need to do more to defend it. And meditation is one great way and as challenging as it can be. You feel like, here’s my mind, I’m with my mind. It might be painful. It might not be. But no one is telling me what to think. I’m not. We spend so much time thinking the thoughts of other people, the rants of other people and the obsessions of other people. Meditation is, I think, a really interesting way to put a fence around your consciousness. You put down your phone, you still have a pad because you’re just trying to get rid of those to do things. But when it’s working really well, there’s great pleasure in watching the show go by and the things I wasn’t expecting to think about suddenly and imagery and all this kind of stuff. I do have an internal life, contrary to what that guy said.

Ezra Klein: So sure you do. Michael, we believe you for sure. You’re not just a zombie here. No Something you said a minute ago pinged for me, which is often people actually don’t like being put in a room with their consciousness. There’s a famous old quote I don’t have the speaker in memory, but it says huge amount of the world’s problems come from man’s inability to sit-in a room by himself. Yeah, I remember I was in a period of meditation a couple of years back, and I was trying to meditate a lot because a lot was happening in my life. And I felt like I was just getting more and more upset. And I remember talking to Will Kabat-Zinn, who’s a great meditation teacher in the Bay Area who we both know. He said to me something I’ve never forgotten. He said, oh, so you’re not enjoying the process of insight. And I actually think this is part of actually a lot of things to say. You leave me with my mind alone for much time at all. And a to do list begins bubbling through it. It’s very, very persistent. I mean, I meditate with paper near me to just get things out of there and onto the paper so I don’t keep thinking about them. Somewhere along the way, I went from being a kid who is pretty present in his life and thought more. I think about things I wanted to think about or and became somebody whose mind has bent towards productivity Yeah, not the only thing that happens in my mind, but it is clearly a favored topic Yeah

Michael Pollan: and it makes you successful. I mean, there are standards by which.

Ezra Klein: Well, that makes sense. I’ve just met people who are increasingly working on attentional liberation movements, the friends of attention being a good example of this. It just came out with a new book. And I’ve met people creating schools on this. And there isn’t an interesting way burbling around a kind of sense that a attentional freedom is an increasingly political and structural question. I think we see it fairly clearly with our kids, but I think we know it with ourselves, too, and it’s very hard to think about how to create a coherent politics around it and activism around it. And also nothing is more fundamental, including to how politics works than what kind of attention you’re cultivating in a society Yeah, absolutely. Attention is a collective resources I think is an under is a underplayed frame for this attention is a collective capacity that is being exhausted by people like Trump. By certain ways, the media and algorithmic media works, and a society with a more irritable, distracted, and diminished capacity for attention is going to be politically different than a society with a healthier form of

Michael Pollan: oh, it’s going to be easier to manipulate. Definitely it’s going to be angrier. It’s going to be angrier. I mean, the more we allow these kind of intrusions on our consciousness or exploitation of our attention. I mean, I think they’re very similar things. The less it’s a space of freedom and you give up the space of freedom and you’re thinking other people’s thoughts and you’re much more vulnerable to manipulation. And if you really nurture your own mind and your own sense of consciousness, you’re much less likely to fall for lies. You’re much more likely to think independently. How? you know. How do you think independently when you’re scrolling? You react, but you’re not setting the agenda. You’re letting an algorithm set the agenda. I think we’re vulnerable to the kind of politics that you’re talking about. But it is the nature of capitalism to intrude on more and more of our lives, more and more of our time. There was an interview with the president of Netflix who was explaining, in regard to competition over an acquisition or something like, we’re not competing with other streaming services. We’re competing with your dream time Yeah, this is Reed Hastings years ago, who said our primary competitor is sleep Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Klein: It’s one the more dystopic things I’ve heard a CEO say.

Michael Pollan: I know it really is. And they are competing with the part of our consciousness that wants to think its own thoughts. Because there’s more money to be made if we think their thoughts.

Ezra Klein: Always our final question what are three books you would recommend to the audience. Three books for you.

Michael Pollan: Well, a book that was really influential in the writing of this book is a book called "The Blind Spot" It’s by a philosopher, Evan Thompson, and two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser. It’s a critique of Western science, and it makes a very powerful case that the blind spot of the physical sciences is inability to deal with lived experience. Another book that was really influential as I was working on the stream of consciousness is a stream-of-consciousness novel by Lucy Ellmann called "Ducks, Newburyport" It’s 1,000 pages, one sentence. And that sounds I know that sounds really daunting and I’m not going to pick that up. You can open it anywhere you want, read 10 pages, you can listen to the audiobook, you can fall asleep, pick it up again. It’s still there. It’s like this pool you can enter. And it’s all the thoughts of this middle class, middle aged woman who lives in Ohio, who has a home baking business. Lastly, there was a book about conscience. There were several books on consciousness I liked, but the one I want to recommend is "Being You" by Anil Seth. He’s an English neuroscientist, and it’s a book about the self, and he treats the self as a perception. And he’s one of the great explainers of consciousness and mental phenomenon in general. His TED Talk about reality is as a controlled hallucination has been one of the most popular ever. And he discusses that here too. But it’s a really good primer on consciousness with specific attention to the self. So those would be my three.

Ezra Klein: Michael Pollan, thank you very much.

Michael Pollan: Thank you.