Michael Pollan: Wake Up & Reclaim Your Attention

Summary

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Good Life Project – Michael Pollan: Wake Up & Reclaim Your Attention

Host: Jonathan Fields
Guest: Michael Pollan
Date: March 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Jonathan Fields dives deep into the nature of consciousness with acclaimed author Michael Pollan, exploring why our attention is under siege and how we might reclaim it. Pollan, whose new book A World: A Journey into Consciousness bridges neuroscience, philosophy, and lived experience, challenges listeners to consider not only the science behind awareness but also how presence and attention shape the “good life.” Together, they unpack distinctions like consciousness vs. sentience, the roots of selfhood, the role of feelings versus thoughts, and the impact of technology and distraction on our mental health. The conversation is rich with scientific insight, personal anecdotes, and a call to cultivate presence.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Consciousness Matters – The Siege of Attention

• [04:32] Michael Pollan: “Your consciousness is the most precious thing you own. It is that space of privacy and freedom in our minds, and it's under siege right now from so many things in our world.”
  • Our attention is constantly commodified by social media, news, and powerful algorithms.
  • The rise of relationships with machines (AI, chatbots) further encroaches on our mental space.
  • Maintaining “consciousness hygiene” becomes essential for mental health.

2. The Mystery of Consciousness and the Subconscious

• [08:06] Michael Pollan: “Brains exist to keep bodies alive... what's the mystery is why is any of it conscious? Why isn’t it all automatic? Why aren't we zombies?”
  • Most brain functions are unconscious, handling survival.
  • Consciousness evolved likely due to the complexity of human social life.
  • Reference to research (Kalina Christof, UBC): Thoughts become visible in brain scans up to 4 seconds before we become aware of them – what happens in that “gap”?

3. Creativity, Meditation, and “The Muse”

• Discussion of day-to-day creativity and where ideas come from.
  • [13:48] Michael Pollan: “Creativity is not very well understood... Defending that space—like using the Jerry Seinfeld rule for dedicated writing time—is crucial.”
  • Emphasis on the need to create room for undistracted, free-flowing thought and daydreaming.
  • Distraction (from tech, news, etc.) often blunts our access to creativity and self-awareness.

4. Connecting Consciousness: Art, Imagination, and Love

• Consciousness is not just private—art, fiction, poetry, and conversation allow us to bridge the gulf between individual experiences.
  • [15:45] Michael Pollan: “The novelist knows something very special about consciousness... it's a way for us to enter the consciousness of other people.”

5. Distinguishing Sentience from Consciousness

• [20:08] Michael Pollan: “Sentience is the larger set and consciousness is a kind of sentience... Sentience is the ability to sense your environment, while consciousness is how humans do sentience—and probably some other mammals and birds.”
  • Sentience goes down to bacteria; consciousness requires a “self-awareness.”
  • Plants have intelligent behavior without brains—showing life’s diversity in experiencing (or reacting to) the world.

6. Primacy of Feeling Over Thought

• [24:05] Michael Pollan: “There is a strain of thinking... perhaps more important and coming before thoughts. Feelings are generated way back in the brain stem, and the source of consciousness may be back there.”
  • Emotional (bodily) awareness precedes rational thought in human consciousness.
  • Cases where children or animals without cortexes can show signs of consciousness stress the role of the brainstem and feelings.
  • Feelings like hunger, social shame, or pride direct our attention and agency: “We make better decisions when we feel, not just think.”

7. Multiplicity and Types of Consciousness

• [28:32] Michael Pollan: “There are different kinds of consciousness. Alison Gopnik talks about ‘spotlight’ and ‘lantern’ consciousness.”
  • Spotlight consciousness: Focused, task-oriented (e.g., this interview).
  • Lantern consciousness: Broad, diffuse, more open—like a child’s mind or daydreaming—nourished by play, altered states, and non-linear experiences.

8. How We Think Isn’t Universal

• [34:17] Michael Pollan: Describes his experience with researcher Russell Hurlburt’s beeper study:
  • People’s inner experiences differ: some think in words, others in images, or abstractions; some have little inner monologue at all.
  • The assumption that everyone’s inner experience matches our own is false.

9. The Enigma of the Self

• [39:21] Michael Pollan: “The self is a creation of consciousness, probably its most ambitious creation... It certainly keeps things organized to think you have a self.”

  • Philosophers and Buddhist thinkers note the “self” vanishes upon introspection—there’s no stable “thinker” behind thoughts.

  • Michael’s own experiment (with meditation and hypnosis): perhaps there are many selves, shifting by context or memory.

  • The ego/self is useful, but can also be restrictive—shrinking the self (through meditation, psychedelics, awe) can open us to greater connection.

  • Memorable exercise:

    “Imagine your mind as a house with many rooms, and there's a thief in the house. Go room by room looking for the thief, and you will not find it, and then sit with that absence. That thief is the self...”
    (41:48, paraphrasing from a Buddhist monk's teaching)

  • On Awe and the Self:

    “Awe shrinks our sense of self... He does an experiment where he has people draw a stick figure of themselves... After awe, they draw themselves half the size.”
    (44:56, referencing research by Dacher Keltner)

10. A “Don’t Know” Mind: Wisdom in Uncertainty

• [45:36] Michael Pollan: “I learned... from Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher... stresses the importance of a don't know mind, about sitting with our uncertainty.”
  • Sometimes we have to accept not knowing—being present to the mystery can be more important than holding answers.

11. The Good Life: Presence Above All

• [47:52] Michael Pollan: “To live a good life... To be present, to be present to the life. We spend so much time distracted and not living our lives... Being present, fully present, which is something, by the way, every other creature does all the time.”

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• “Your consciousness is the most precious thing you own.” (Pollan, 04:32)
• “Why isn’t it all automatic? Why aren’t we zombies?” (Pollan, 08:06)
• “Lantern consciousness... you are taking in lots of information from all over the place.” (Pollan, 29:02)
• “There are times I’m thinking in abstractions. But that exercise of like looking at how you are thinking... is just a very interesting exercise.” (Pollan, 38:11)
• “The self is a creation of consciousness, probably its most ambitious creation of consciousness.” (Pollan, 39:21)
• “We have some technologies for altering [the ego/self]: meditation being one too. There’s a selflessness that can emerge from meditation and awe.” (Pollan, 44:35)
• “Being present, fully present... every other creature does all the time, right? They can’t afford to be anything less than fully conscious, fully present to their environment or they’ll get eaten. But we... can check out on being present. And we do all too much.” (Pollan, 47:52)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |---------------|--------------------------------------------------| | 04:32 | Pollan on why consciousness matters now | | 08:06 | The mystery of thought and the four-second gap | | 13:48 | Creativity’s roots in attention and distraction | | 20:08 | Sentience vs consciousness (plants, animals) | | 24:05 | The primacy of feelings over thoughts | | 28:32 | Plurality of consciousness: spotlight & lantern | | 34:17 | How people differ in their inner experiences | | 39:21 | The self: constructed, elusive, and many-sided | | 44:56 | Awe and experiences that shrink the self | | 45:36 | Don’t-know mind and the wisdom of uncertainty | | 47:52 | To live a good life: Presence above all |

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Tone and Style

The conversation is thoughtful, curious, open, and at times gently humorous. Both Pollan and Fields approach consciousness as a profound mystery, blending scientific rigor with humble admission of its unanswerability. The mood is inviting—encouraging listeners to explore, reflect, and reclaim what makes life vivid and meaningful.

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Takeaways for the Listener

• Our attention and consciousness are increasingly fragmented and commodified; reclaiming them is vital for a good life.
• Consciousness operates on levels and shades—from feeling to focused reasoning to diffuse presence.
• The “self” may be less fixed—and less real—than we assume, but this needn’t be frightening; it opens new paths to connection and presence.
• Practices like meditation, awe, and diverted attention can help us return to presence and awareness.
• The “good life,” according to Pollan, centers on being present—not chasing answers, but living the questions and the now.

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Transcript

[Jonathan Fields]

So your consciousness is actually the most precious thing you own. Yet most of us are essentially letting it be sold to the highest bidder. According to my guest today, Michael Pollan, between the constant pings on our phones and the noise of the world, we've ended up in this place where we're less aware and less present than we've ever been before. It feels a bit like our minds are under siege. So today we're going deep into what it actually means to even be conscious and how we can start to reclaim that space. Michael Pollan is someone who needs little introduction. A widely acclaimed multi time New York Times best selling author, his latest work, A World A Journey into Consciousness, it might be his most personal and mysterious yet. We talk about everything from this strange 4 second gap in our thinking to intelligent behavior of plants that don't even have brains. A conversation that truly challenged a lot of my own assumptions about who is actually quote, running the show in my own head.

[Interviewer/Host]

So excited to share this conversation with you.

[Jonathan Fields]

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[Interviewer/Host]

You know, it's really good to be back in conversation with you. Last time we were together to talk, it was in the context of your deep dive into the world of psychedelics. And I think that opened a lot of people' minds and hearts. It came out at a moment where so much has changed, but also a lot has stayed the same. And now you really, you've gone deep into the idea of consciousness. So as I sit here, you know, we can have this esoteric conversation about consciousness, a philosophical debate about consciousness. But I'm thinking of our, somebody in our community who's, you know, like, who just kind of says to themselves, look, I'm in the middle years of my life. There's a lot going on in the world, a lot going on in my life. Why should I care about a conversation about consciousness?

[Michael Pollan]

Well, because your consciousness is the most precious thing you own. It is that space of privacy and freedom in our minds, and it's under siege right now from so many things in our world. We have a president who's taking up a huge amount of headspace on a daily basis. Space that could be used for other things, more nurturing, more positive things. We have a social media ecosystem that is essentially trying to buy and sell your attention. Attention being a manifestation or how we direct our consciousness to this or that. And now we're entering this era of people forming deep relationships with machines, chatbots, and they are also intruding on our consciousness. Obviously, you need to be conscious to use a chatbot or, you know, scroll on Twitter, but minimally so. So I sort of feel we're less conscious than we could be, and then we should be, and that it's a space of awareness we need to reclaim for ourselves, because that's part of mental health, is keeping that space clean. We need a little bit of consciousness hygiene. So that's what I would say is the reason why it matters. It's something we don't always think about. We take for granted. It is sort of the water we swim in. But once you start thinking about it, it's endlessly strange and interesting. And I didn't think about it very much for many, many years. And it was my experience with psychedelics and also in meditation, and the two interests kind of came up at the same time, that both those activities have a way of kind of smudging the windshield. And suddenly you realize, oh, there's a windshield. What's that about? Why is it this way and not that way? And this is not at all uncommon. I mean, in meditation, we're taught to look at our minds and how it. How our minds operate, where thoughts come from, who's thinking those thoughts. And many, many people who've experimented with psychedelics find themselves thinking up riddles about consciousness, trying to understand what it is. So, you know, I think it's one of the most important things we can think about, actually, is our consciousness and the consciousness of others, too. You know, we're not transparent to one another, but we have ways of connecting our consciousnesses, you know, whether it's through art or conversation. And so I'm very interested in that, too. How to break down that wall that separates every consciousness from every other one.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah. So this word conscious, then, consciousness. I think a lot of us have probably heard two phrases often used sometimes in relationship. Conscious and subconscious, or less than conscious. And we've kind of walked through life, and maybe we've kind of said, okay, so there's the conscious way that we move through the world, meaning what we're aware of in the less than conscious or subconscious meaning scripts running in the background that are having a very real influence on us and the world around us, but we're not aware of them. That feels very reductionist to me, Very sort of, like, oversimplified. And maybe this whole conversation is going to be deconstructing this. But the big question then, I think, is, what is consciousness? What is the distinction between this thing that we consider to be the conscious world or us being conscious and this less than conscious or subconscious side of things.

[Michael Pollan]

Well, our brains are doing all sorts of things outside of our awareness. They're regulating your body in all sorts of ways. Remember, brains exist to keep bodies alive. It's not the other way around. Your brain is, you know, maintaining your blood pressure, blood gases. It's taking in lots of information that you're not even aware of. It's monitoring how hungry you are and your digestion. And what's the mystery is why is any of it conscious? Why isn't it all automatic? Why aren't we zombies? And that's a question that I explore in the book. But there's certain things we need a space of decision making that we can't automate. Our social life, for example, is so intricate, it's so complicated to. And we are fundamentally social beings to engage with another, to be able to anticipate what they're thinking in order to act in an appropriate way. It's incredibly complex, our social lives. And that probably drove the need for something like consciousness. The fact that you can't automate a human in a social environment. There are just too many variables, too many surprises. So that would be my best guess as to why we're conscious at all. So in addition to all the homeostatic work your brain is doing to keep your body at the. At the right temperature and, you know, right blue blood glucose level, all this kind of stuff, there are mental contents that we are not aware of and that pop into consciousness in a. In a way that is very mysterious. You know, we've all had this experience of hypnagogic consciousness. You know, just when you're falling, falling asleep, and suddenly an image or a snatch of narrative will pop into your head and you have no idea where it came from. When you meditate, the unpredictability of thought in meditation is endlessly interesting to me. You know, thoughts that you didn't think simply appear. Are they coming from something called the subconscious? We don't really know. The subconscious is kind of a metaphor for things below our level of awareness. There's a scientist in the book named Kalina Christof, who's at University of Brit Columbia, and she studies how thoughts get into our awareness. And she puts very experienced meditators who can really quiet their mind in an FMRI with a button to press when a thought intrudes. And what she has found, and that's quite amazing and hard to explain, I don't think we have an explanation yet, is that she sees the activity of a thought on the mri, which is activity in the hippocampus, it's coming out of memory 4 seconds before it registers in consciousness. So there is some quite elaborate and time consuming. I mean, four seconds in brain time is huge amount of time. There is some process that a thought has to undergo to enter our conscious awareness. And maybe there are things trying to keep it out of our conscious awareness. So it has to navigate these roadblocks or, or maybe it's competing with other thoughts to get into our conscious awareness. We really don't know. But if we could understand that four second gap, that would be significant. And that's something she's working on. So there's a lot we don't understand. You know, we think, we think our thoughts, that we feel our feelings. But who is we? Who is I? When you meditate, you realize pretty quickly that the thoughts come unbidden and from who knows where and that the mind is just a much stranger place than we, than we think about in ordinary moments. And you don't need to take psychedelics to figure that out. Meditation will do it. 20 minutes of meditation just watching your mind. And you know, there's a famous meditation exercise where you're supposed to look for the thinker of the thoughts or the feeler, the feeler of the feelings. And good luck to you because you won't be able to find anything. And that's a whole other mystery of the self, right?

[Interviewer/Host]

It's like, who is the looker looking for?

[Michael Pollan]

And the self has no physical address in the brain.

[Interviewer/Host]

I mean, it is really interesting, right, because we're both writers just for fun on the side. Right now I've been working on fiction, which I've never done before. I have no idea what I'm doing, no idea. But I'm just kind of playing and having fun and I'll just sit down and every day I have a practice. I sit for 90 minutes and with no expectation. I use the Jerry Seinfeld rule when he was writing jokes. Apparently the only rule, I don't have a word count, I don't have a page count. My only rule is the only thing that I can do is write or think about writing or just gay off into the distance. I can't do anything else.

[Michael Pollan]

I like to gaze off into the distance.

[Interviewer/Host]

That is, frankly, most of the time.

[Michael Pollan]

That's valuable time.

[Jonathan Fields]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Interviewer/Host]

What I'm getting at is that all these things over time are starting to emerge onto the page. I have no idea where they're coming from. These aren't experiences that I've had in the Past. These aren't characters or worlds that I have inhabited in the past. These aren't lines that I've said in the past. They're not relationships that I have experienced in a meaningful way. And yet they're coming from somewhere. And I sit down every day and I don't sit down saying, okay, this is the next piece of the outline. You know, I'm just going to like now detail it out. I just wait for the muse to appear.

[Michael Pollan]

And she's been appearing.

[Interviewer/Host]

And I wonder if that's part of what we're talking about here.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, it may be. I mean, creativity is not very well understood. This same scientist who did the work with the meditators, you know, study her field is spontaneous thought and she studies daydreaming and mind wandering. You know, she's very interested in where these thoughts and narratives come from. And that's part of what I'm talking about. Going back to your first question of why it's so important to defend this space. And that Jerry Seinfeld rule is a defense of that space. You can only do this in this, in this time. He's basically saying, give free play to your consciousness and perhaps your unconsciousness without letting the news intrude, without scrolling on your phone. Phone, without all the distractions we have. Because I think a lot of us are afraid to be in our minds. It's kind of easier to distract ourselves. And there's so many amazing distractions thanks to technology and, and just, you know, this hyper content based culture we're in. So that when you do clear the, the decks to be creative, to meditate, it's all part of that defense of that space. Very interesting things arise. Now for some people, scary things arise and that can happen too. People who struggle with trauma, people who ruminate excessively and get stuck in loops of unproductive and sometimes destructive thought. And I think that is one reason people are willing to forego their being conscious and rather be less conscious. And of course people use alcohol and other drugs for the same reason, to dull their consciousness. But the novelist is a, is a very interesting character and I think knows something very special about consciousness. And it's one of the reasons this book is not just about the science of consciousness. I leave science at a certain point somewhat frustrated at what it's failed to figure out. And look at philosophy and look at fiction and poetry and look at Buddhism too, that there are these other ways of knowing and they're just as valid as science. And the novelist knows a lot about consciousness because the novelist is going into the consciousness of other people and it is a way for us to enter the consciousness of other people. We know a lot about, you know, Emma Bovary's consciousness now. She it's true she's just a fictional character, but it gives us an opportunity to see see the world from the point of view of another person and learn how other people think. I think we have a des to cross that gulf between consciousnesses. I mean, love is part of the way we do it, and imagination is another way we do it. We imagine our way into other people's heads.

[Jonathan Fields]

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[Interviewer/Host]

You bring into the conversation also the notion of sentience. How is this different or what role does it play?

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, I try to draw a distinction between sentience and consciousness. If you think of them as sets, sentience is the larger set and consciousness is a kind of sentience. It's the most basic form of consciousness. So all beings, I would say all living beings have some sentience, but only some of them have consciousness. Sentience is the ability to sense your environment, recognize what is positive or negative in valence, you know, whether it benefits you or hurts you, and then able to move away from one and toward the other. I mean all living things need to, you know, this is chemotaxis and bacteria, right? Or other, you know, single celled creatures. So I think sentience goes way down to the bottom of, you know, the tree of life. Consciousness is how humans do sentience and probably some other mammals and probably birds and some cephalopods, you know, octopuses and stuff. And, and it's a complexified version of sentience that has things like a sense of a self, has a self consciousness. You know, this kind of Recursive, reflexive qualities we have that we're not just aware. We're aware that we're aware. I don't think the bacteria are aware that they're aware, although, who knows? Well, we don't know. This is all, you know, when it comes to other creatures, we're guessing, you know, we do it based on their behavior. We have things like the mirror test. You know, certain animals put them in front of a mirror with a mark on their head and they'll like, go like that. So they have some sense that that figure in the mirror is me. Some animals pass it, some don't. So, yeah, we have behavior to guide us in these decisions, but they're definitely provisional. We can't be sure. And, you know, we need a complicated consciousness for the reasons I was discussing earlier, the fact that we have a very intricate social life. Other animals might not. They might not need things like what's called theory of mind, which is the ability to imagine what someone else is thinking, which is very important to humans. It wouldn't do a plant any good to have the kind of consciousness we have. All it needs is a kind of basic sentience, and it puts as much energy as we put into evolving consciousness. Plants have put into biochemistry. You know, they really, they're into. They're really good at biochemistry, better than we are. They're inventing, you know, thousands of compounds. Some of them defensive, some of them psychedelic, some of them, you know, they're, they use chemicals because they can't, they can't run away. They're stuck in place. So they need, they need a different kind of sentience than we do, and they need chemistry while we need consciousness. So I, I think it's arrogant of us to just assume that other beings have the same kind of consciousness, if any, than we do. I think, think each being has the kind of sentience or consciousness that suits its sensorium, its body type, its niche in the ecosystem.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, I mean, what's interesting there also is, I think a lot of us, if you're familiar with the word sentience or sentient, you probably heard the phrase sentient being. I think that's often the way that it's laid out. And then immediately, as soon as we hear the phrase sentient being, we're like, oh, that means person.

[Jonathan Fields]

Right?

[Interviewer/Host]

Another sentient being.

[Michael Pollan]

No, I mean, Buddhists would say it's all these animals. And I would add the plants to that. You don't need brains to have brain like behavior. And we have lots of evidence of that. I mean, brains Neurons are like just excitable cells that are particularly long and fast.

[Interviewer/Host]

Talk to me about feelings and thought here also, because we like to believe, I think, as human beings, well, you know, we're rational, thoughtful things like that. Thought is the thing that kind of determines so much. You kind of make a counter argument that says so much of what we're talking about is really feelings based and embodied.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. So I followed a lot of different researchers who have different theories of consciousness. And as time went on, I became persuaded that there is a strain of thinking that goes through consciousness research, beginning with a researcher named Antonio Damasio at usc who encouraged us to put feelings on the agenda as perhaps more important and coming before thoughts. You know, when we think about consciousness, we think of this ultimate apex human achievement and tied to rationality and the cortex, you know, the front of the brain, the more evolutionarily recent part of the brain. But he showed that feelings come first and that feelings are generated by way back in the brain stem and that the source of consciousness may be back there. And that only after we have a feeling, which is really the body's way of talking to the. To the brain. You know, the simple feelings of hunger and thirst and cold or warmth. And these show up in the brain stem, in a particular structure in the brain stem. And only later does the cortex get involved in figuring out how to get a meal if the signal is hunger. And that he's basically suggesting that consciousness begins with these simple feelings and gets complexified later. Mark Soames is a neuroscientist in South Africa who's taken this theory further. And the evidence for it is that there are occasionally children born without a cortex. They just have liquid up here. They're not capable of higher thought at all, but they're still conscious as long as their brainstem is intact. They show emotion, they show awareness, they show some sense of being there. The lights are on, and this is somewhat controversial, but we've also decorticated animals, taken out their cortex and demonstrated that they're still conscious. So I think we have to look at feelings as potentially more important part of the story than we have. And that thoughts and rational thinking, as much as we prize it, is a kind of a knock on effect. It helps us realize the goals that are formulated by our feelings. Damasio has also done research showing that people make better decisions when they feel, not just think, and that we make these gut checks and that feelings are a way for us to try out in the body what deciding this way or that way would mean. And so it's a greater emphasis on the body, which is, of course, the source of feelings. Most feelings begin with homeostasis, when we leave the homeostatic set point we want to be at. And that applies to, you know, the biological functions, but it also applies to social functions. Because I asked him, I said, well, okay, that. That accounts for hunger and thirst and. And tiredness and all this, but what about the more social emotions? And he said, well, we have a homeostatic set point for our place in society. And when we depart from that, from a feeling of shame perhaps, or pride, that gets our. Our attention too, and leads to thinking in the cortex, eventually to how to maintain that social standing because we are so such fundamentally social beings. So, yeah, I came out of this thinking that feelings are more essential. And, you know, we. We've. We've sort of tied ourselves in knots about consciousness in part because we started with the visual system, trying to understand how images become conscious to us. And the weird thing about the visual system is that we see things we're not necessarily conscious of. I mean, and there. And there's something called blindsight. There are people who are blind who nevertheless somehow recognize what's in their environment. Whereas if started with hunger, a feeling that obviously has to be felt, maybe the whole problem wouldn't have been so difficult.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, I feel like we love to prize ourselves as being, quote, intelligent beings, and we see that as the primary differentiator between us and all the other beasties on the planet. So it's like that feels like that should be at the top of the pyramid. That is.

[Michael Pollan]

Well, yes, and the other reason for that is the kinds of people who work on these questions. You know, these are scientists and professors. These are people who, like, prize their minds above everything else. I think we have to understand that they have a unique kind of consciousness. And no doubt it privileges rational thought and logic and things like that. But that's not all of us. And there are other ways to be conscious. I mean, the other thing I came out of this thinking is that we should be more pluralists in our. You know, that there are different kinds of consciousness. Alison Gopnik, a psychologist I consulted when I was researching the book, talks about. She talks about professor consciousness as a very particular kind, but she also talks about lantern and spotlight consciousness. And this is a very interesting distinction. Spotlight consciousness is what we have right now because we're focused on each other. And what we're saying in this conversation, it's very narrowed, it's very directed, and it's it's purposeful and it gets things done. But there is another kind of consciousness called lantern consciousness, or what she calls lantern consciousness, where you're taking in information not from that one degree, but from all 360 degrees. And this is the consciousness that children have before they go to school and we kind of knock it out of them because they need to sit and focus on what the teacher's saying. But before that, their minds are just wandering all over the place. You know, you can't keep them on track. And that's because they're learning about their world and how it works. And we get a taste of this kind of consciousness. I think when we're daydreaming, when you're working on your fiction, it's less directed and more open. She uses the word numinous. It's glowing with significance. And of course, psychedelics also gives you a taste of that lantern consciousness. You know, you can't really focus, but you are taking in lots of information from all over the place. So I think we shouldn't narrow our definition of consciousness to just one type. And that that is the lesson of both meditation and psychedelics, of course, that you can put yourself in altered states of consciousness. And we do it every day. You know, we go from our work life and that kind of focus or our screen life to walking in the woods where you're taking in information from lots of different degrees.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me that we would think about it as different, almost like categories of consciousness. And maybe we move fluidly from one to another, as in whatever supports the mode that we're in.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, we contain multitudes in that given

[Interviewer/Host]

time or the relationship. Indeed.

[Jonathan Fields]

And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life project is sponsored by Wild Alaskan Company. So not every improvement in life is loud. Some are quiet, subtle. You don't even realize how much friction they were creating until they're gone. And that's been true for me with how we get seafood into our home. What used to feel like one more thing to second guess has become just simple and steady. When a Wild Alaskan Company box arrives, there's a real sense of ease. The portions are clear, the sourcing is transparent, and cooking feels uncomplicated again. Lately I have been having fun with some new air fryer recipes for their co host salmon. It cooks evenly, tastes great with very little added, and makes weekday meals feel thoughtful without extra effort. Just so yummy and easy. Everything is 100% wild. Caught never farmed and sourced from Alaska in ways that support healthy oceans and fishing communities. It's frozen off the boat to lock in flavor and quality, and the flexible membership fits real life. Not all fish are the same. Get seafood you can trust. Go to wildalaskan.com goodlife for $35 off your first box of premium wild caught seafood. That's wildalaskan.com goodLife for $35 off your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. Good Life Project is sponsored by Pura. So after winter stillness, spring kind of makes me want to open windows and clear clutter and just kind of reset the feel of the room. And Pura makes a real difference. Pura is a sleek app controlled diffuser that pairs with clean, safe fragrances so you can pick your scent and set the intensity and just schedule it to match your day. Their spring collection is inspired by places like blooming gardens and sunlit terraces. So if you want a small sensory shift that changes the energy at home, try Pura. Open the door to Spring with Pura or just click the link in the show notes. Good Life project is sponsored by Gab Wireless.

[Interviewer/Host]

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[Jonathan Fields]

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[Interviewer/Host]

You make a really interesting point also. So like under the domain of thought, which is this idea that we tend to think that, well, we all have language, you know, we all have symbolisms in our lives, we all have images. And at the end of the day, aren't they pretty much all the same?

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah, no, it's Right.

[Interviewer/Host]

And it's like, no, we just assume that they are, but wildly, wildly different inner experiences.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. This was a very interesting experiment I did. There's a scientist at the University of Las Vegas named Russell Hurlburt, who's very interested in sampling inner experience. And he gave me a beeper that I wore for several days, and it went off at random times. And I was supposed to write down. He gave me a little pad and a pencil, and I was supposed to write down exactly what I was thinking at the moment the beep went off, which turns out to be very challenging. And what he's found. He's been doing this for 50 years. He's done thousands of people. And it turns out that different people think in different ways and that the word think is an umbrella term for three or four very different modes. So there are people who think in words. We would have thought that that was most people, that language is how we phrase our thoughts. Turns out it's only about a third of the people he's tested. Other people have visual language, and they see their thoughts or they see whatever they're thinking about. And then there's still others who have very abstract thought. I can't even understand exactly what it is. But they see things or. Or think things in abstract terms. There are no images and no words. And then he said, there are people who have very little inner life at all.

[Jonathan Fields]

So.

[Michael Pollan]

So I did this, and I found that. I asked him why this is, you know, and he said that the word thinking kind of covers for a lot. We assume when beginning with our mother says, I'm thinking about something, that means there's something going on inside. And we automatically assume it's the same thing that goes on inside me, but it isn't. So we know less about each other's thinking than we think. And that was a real revelation to me and to him. I mean, this is the big finding. He's also found that it's very hard to isolate a thought and that thoughts really come in a stream, and the prior one influences the current one and the current one influences the next one. And so to get that discreet thought and isolate it, you know, it's like capturing fireflies or something.

[Jonathan Fields]

It's.

[Michael Pollan]

It's very hard to do, but it's a very interesting experiment. And, you know, anyone can do it and just kind of like, you know, I don't know, set your phone to go off at a certain time and think, well, what am I thinking and how am I thinking it?

[Jonathan Fields]

Right.

[Michael Pollan]

Because that's the next question.

[Interviewer/Host]

And then the very act of noticing and asking the question is probably going to change it.

[Michael Pollan]

Yes, that's the other thing. I mean, there's no. And I pressed Russell on this and he said, well, yeah, it's like dropping, you know, something into a forest. Certain creatures are going to scurry away, but you'll get a picture pretty much of what the forest is. But yes, the act of observation changes things. And I got. I was so self conscious wearing this beeper that I would often be thinking to myself, what would I be thinking if it went off now? And I was so happy to be done with this experiment.

[Interviewer/Host]

I want to be thinking like a good, like cool, interesting, reasonable thought when it goes off. So let me make sure I'm doing good.

[Michael Pollan]

Cool. Yes, I know my thoughts, most of my thoughts were so banal. You know, should I buy a roll for my lunch sandwich or should I use a gila bread at home? I mean, it was amazing how banal they were.

[Jonathan Fields]

Yeah.

[Michael Pollan]

I wanted to have some big thoughts, but I didn't.

[Interviewer/Host]

In a way, I want to do that to myself. In a way. I want nothing to do with it

[Michael Pollan]

at the same time.

[Jonathan Fields]

Time. But you do.

[Michael Pollan]

But learning about your style of thinking, I think is interesting. I do think more in words than images. When I do think in images, they're very. They're almost like emojis. They're not that vivid or special or even in color. And there are times I'm thinking in abstractions. But that exercise of like looking at how you are thinking and what role does language play in a. Is just a very interesting exercise. And there's this big fact about yourself we never think about.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, it's pretty wild.

[Jonathan Fields]

Which kind of brings us to what

[Interviewer/Host]

you brought up really towards the beginning of our conversation, which is the notion of the self to start with. Right. Because who is observing all of this? And you're observing yourself.

[Jonathan Fields]

What is the capital S self that

[Interviewer/Host]

we've heard so much about in philosophy and theology and. And where does it come from? Where does it exist or not exist? Why do we even have it? Why do we have a notion of self? Because it seems like a lot of researchers and philosophers will say that we are the only species that has that.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. So the self is a creation of consciousness, probably its most ambitious creation of consciousness. It certainly keeps things organized to think you have a self. And in conventional terms, in our social lives, it's very useful that, you know, you have a self talking to this self. Otherwise it would just be this Cloud of thoughts and feelings, talking to this cloud of thoughts and feelings. So, you know, I talked to. There was a Buddhist monk I talked to about this, and he says, well, you know, a river has a name, but it's constantly changing. The name is purely conventional. When you look at the Mississippi today and in six months you're seeing completely different water. So he pointed out that the self is useful in our conventional lives, in our social lives, but does it really exist? Well, going back to David Hume, the philosopher, in the 1740s, he was very interested in this question of the self. And he decided the best way to figure it out is through introspection. And he kind of went inside himself and reported that he could find no self. He could find plenty of thoughts and perceptions and feelings and memories, but he could find no thinker of those thoughts or feeler of those feelings. There was just this stream that was passing through. So that's, you know, anyone can try that. And it is a. You know, one of the great meditation exercises is go inside and look for who's thinking your thoughts. Good luck, you're going to come up empty.

[Jonathan Fields]

Right?

[Interviewer/Host]

And then the question is, who's looking?

[Michael Pollan]

Yes, that. Well, that. There's that too. Who is looking? So maybe that's your self and you don't see it because you're the self looking. I don't know. I came out of it kind of agnostic because even though there is no self you can point to, there is a sense of self that can actually make things happen, that can decide to change the channel on the television, that can decide to think about this and not that we have some control over our thoughts, not as much as we think. But who is that controller? And I did some exercises. This monk I'm describing, his name is Matthew Ricard. He's a French monk who lives in Nepal, pretty famous. He's done a lot of interesting work on the self. He was a scientist before he became a Buddhist monk. I said, is there any exercises to ascertain whether there is a self or not?

[Jonathan Fields]

And he.

[Michael Pollan]

He gave me one. One was to imagine your mind as a house with many rooms, and there's a thief in the house. Go room by room looking for the thief, and you will not find it, and then sit with that absence. That thief is the self, and you won't find it. So I did this once, and it kind of worked. And then I did it another time when I was hypnotized. I work with a hypnotist at Stanford, a psychiatrist named David Spiegel. And I asked him to put me under and then I would do this little exercise and it didn't come out as predicted. In every room I found a version of me. I found my like 13 year old Bar Mitzvah self. I found my 32 year old new father self. I found my 30 year old, you know, running a magazine self. Each in a different costume. But there were many selves and that may be true too. So the self is a, is a, is, is one of those mysteries hidden in plain sight. We all think we have one. But don't press too hard because you may find you don't. And now what are the implications of that? Well, I think, think we're a little too self minded, selfish. And that when we relax our sense of self, we're more open. I think the self, or the ego as it's often called, you know, is a defensive structure in part, and it builds walls. And when those walls come down, you can connect to other people, to nature. So I think shrinking the self is a worthwhile activity. And now make no mistake, egos are good for a lot of things. They get a lot done, they get books written. On the other hand, they torment us too. They're, they're the critical voice in our head. That's the ego. And the times I've had, I, I've been able to free myself from the ego. And, and I, I described an experience of ego dissolution that I had during a psychedelic experience were wonderful. That is when you get that onrush of sense of love and connection to the universe. And to me it was a piece of music that I experienced more deeply than I've ever experienced a piece of music. Because I had no walls up, I was completely open. So the self's a mixed bag. But you know, we have some technologies for altering it, meditation being one too. There's a selflessness that can emerge from meditation and awe. Experiences of awe. Dakar Keltner, who's a colleague of mine at Berkeley, studies awe. He's written a wonderful book about awe. And he does an experiment where he has people draw a stick figure of themselves on a piece of graph paper. Then he gives them an experience of awe. And it might be river rafting or looking at a beautiful picture of Yosemite Half Dome or something. And then he has them draw themselves again and they draw themselves like half the size. So awe shrinks our sense of self. I mean, we have the sense of something much larger than ourselves. So yeah, so I wrote a whole chapter on the self trying to get to the bottom of it.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah. One of the things I love about the way that you approach yourself and not just the self actually, it's the entire exploration of consciousness is that rather than saying, okay, let's get the definitive answers about all these things, you land in a place that says, look, these all matter. We all have experiences of them. We all make assumptions about them. We all sometimes think, well, it should be this way or that way. But at the end of the day, it's kind of a yes.

[Jonathan Fields]

And.

[Interviewer/Host]

And we really don't know the vast majority of what we're desperate to try and lock down.

[Michael Pollan]

Yeah. I do come out, you know, realizing that if you. So I. I started approaching it in the classic Western male problem solution frame. Okay. This is how we've been taught to think about things. But there was another frame, and I learned this at the end of the book from Joan Halifax, who's a Zen teacher who I spent some time with at in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she has a retreat center. She's a very wise woman. She's like 83. She's like, had amazing life experiences. And she, you know, stresses the importance of a don't know mind about sitting with our uncertainty. But the other thing I learned from her and others that I interviewed was, yes, there is this problem of consciousness, but there's also the fact of it. And let's pay a little more attention to the fact we have it it. And we're not using it as we might, we're not protecting it as we might. And I have an experience at the end of the book where I go up into the mountains at her behest and spent three or four days meditating in a cave. And it was a very profound experience. You know, no power, no running water, nothing to do all day. Very long days of meditating. But everything became a meditation. Splitting wood, digging pits, whatever I was doing, sweeping the threshold of my cave. And I realized that I had, in my drive to understand consciousness, I had narrowed my perspective right to that focal consciousness. And I had lost track of this wonder that was all around me and got back in touch with that. So, yeah, this is an unusual book in that you may know less at the end than you do at the beginning, but what you know will be sturdier.

[Interviewer/Host]

I love that. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I've asked you this question in the past, but it's been a number of years now in this container of Good Life project, if I offer up the phrase to live A good life. What comes up

[Michael Pollan]

to be present, to be present to the life. I mean, we go through, we spend so much time distracted and not living our lives and just realizing, you know, there was a meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who, you know, he was teaching us about how to do a walking meditation, which I found really hard at first to do. I said, what do you have in your head when you're doing a walking meditation? And he said, just this. Just this, just this. Right? Closing out things you could really be present to. What the next footsteps step was going to reveal about the earth and the plants and the, and the world you're, you're, you're walking on. So to me, and God knows, I, I don't do it all the time. I'm as distractible as anybody. But being present, fully present, which is something, by the way, every other creature does all the time, right? They can't afford to be anything less than fully conscious, fully present to their environment or they'll get eaten. But we, because of our relative safety and technology, can check out on being present. And we do all too much. So I would put that right at the center.

[Interviewer/Host]

Thank you.

[Jonathan Fields]

As always.

[Michael Pollan]

Thank you, Jonathan. This is a pleasure.

[Jonathan Fields]

Hey, before you go, be sure to tune in next week for our conversation with Anthony Klotz about why we quit, when to stay, and how to make wiser decisions when work just suddenly feels off, or relationships or really just life. And make sure you're following the show wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss this episode. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me.

[Interviewer/Host]

Jonathan Fields, editing, helped by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young.

[Jonathan Fields]

Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already

[Interviewer/Host]

done so, please go ahead and and

[Jonathan Fields]

follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too.

[Interviewer/Host]

If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring.

[Jonathan Fields]

Chances are you did because you're still listening here.

[Interviewer/Host]

Do me a personal favor, a seven second favor.

[Jonathan Fields]

Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share

[Interviewer/Host]

it with more, that's awesome too. But just one person, even then, invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered. To reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing

[Jonathan Fields]

off for Good Life Project.

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