Michael Pollan has spent much of his writing life persuading readers to take another look at the things they think they already understand: food, plants, psychedelics, even their own habits. A World Appears pushes that impulse to its limit. Pollan attempts a guided tour of the human mind — where it came from, what it does, and why a world “appears” behind our eyelids at all. Many writers have entered the consciousness arena only to lose themselves in abstraction or technobabble. Pollan avoids both. His prose is crisp, his pace steady, his structure tight. And though the subject is cosmic, the tone stays grounded.
For readers wary of fashionable mysticism or Silicon Valley soul-searching, this book may seem suspicious. But Pollan never asks you to suspend common sense. He begins by recounting the scientific cold war around consciousness, which includes bar bets between neuroscientists, the almost obligatory cameo of René Descartes, and the maddening truth that you can blueprint the brain like a luxury condo and still have no idea why thoughts insist on arriving with feelings attached.
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