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The Ezra Klein Show
Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness
01:28:12
Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. It’s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We don’t know what it’s made of or how it works or why it exists. But scientists and theorists have been trying to answer those questions, and have made some startling discoveries. The science writer Michael Pollan, known for books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind,” spent five years on the vanguard of this research. And his new book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” shows that the closer you look at consciousness, the weirder it gets. I asked Pollan to walk through some of the places his mind wandered on this journey — including the role of the body and feelings in consciousness, fascinating studies that provide evidence for plant sentience, the researchers who have abandoned their old theories after trying psychedelic drugs, and the possibility that consciousness...
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- [00:01]
Michael Pollan
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- [01:02]
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 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 wanted to have him on to talk about it. As Always, my email ezrielytimes.com. Michael Pollan, welcome back to the show.
- [02:26]
Michael Pollan
Thank you. Good to be back.
- [02:27]
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?
- [02:41]
Michael Pollan
When's the beeper gonna 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 does it is he equips you with a beeper. You wear this thing in your ear. It emits a very sharp beep. You know exactly what it was and when it was. There's no like 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 know, it's got various kind of observer effect problems. You wonder, you know, God, if the beeper went off now, what would I have to say? Oh, that would really be embarrassing. So you're. You're. There is this self consciousness, but you forget about it over the course of the day. Suddenly you get a beep and you write it down. And, you know, 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 online at a bakery and I'm deciding, should I buy a roll or use the gila 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 an image? And I said, well, there was sort of an image. It was kind of very unspecific, kind of an emoji of a role, not a real role. And he'd take you through it, and it was an incredibly challenging process.
- [04:32]
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, they're 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.
- [04:47]
Michael Pollan
It's something less than a fully formed thought. This word thought implies a kind of, you know, roundedness to the thing that just doesn't exist. And many of our thoughts are these wisps of mentation. You know that I love that.
- [04:59]
Ezra Klein
Gossamer wisps of mentation is how you put it in the book.
- [05:02]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. And then also, many people think in totally unsymbolized 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.
- [05:19]
Ezra Klein
He roasts you at the end of the experiment.
- [05:22]
Michael Pollan
Oh, man.
- [05:23]
Ezra Klein
You finish this up and he says that you are low on very little inner mental experience.
- [05:30]
Michael Pollan
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.
- [05:39]
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?
- [05:51]
Michael Pollan
Very different.
- [05:51]
Ezra Klein
And so what was the difference and what do you make of it?
- [05:54]
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, you know, 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, you know, 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.
- [07:09]
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?
- [07:19]
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. I first got acquainted with him when I was working on how to Change youe Mind. Cause 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. That are so long and intricate. That he loses a modern reader about 80% of the way to the period, at least me. But the observations are just so refined. And they kind of 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, you know, the qualities of experience. He goes so far beyond qualia to delve into these details of thinking that it was. 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 Hurlburt's questions.
- [08:56]
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 or a term.
- [09:07]
Michael Pollan
It's a phrase of his.
- [09:08]
Ezra Klein
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, suffusions, feeling of tendency, premonitions, psychic overtones. And you say, perhaps my favorite fringe of unarticulated affinities.
- [09:34]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, the fringe. It's so beautiful.
- [09:36]
Ezra Klein
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 you note 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 the borderlands of mental experience.
- [10:09]
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. And that, you know, 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.
- [10:34]
Ezra Klein
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, like, quite unfamiliar. And I mean, this is one of the great lessons of meditation or psychedelics. More unfamiliar the more you attend to it.
- [10:55]
Michael Pollan
Yes, that is what 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. You know that you're on the verge of sleep or sleepiness and they just pop into your mind, like where did they come from? 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 turn toward literature later in the book for a kind of more subtle understanding of the thought process.
- [11:40]
Ezra Klein
Well, let's stay with the scientists for a little while at least. One of the things you try to do in the book is track their efforts to reduce consciousness to something measurable and maybe proto human, non human. You have a great chapter on plants, and I guess maybe it's place to start with the plants is you taught me something I didn't know, which is you can anesthetize a plant.
- [12:06]
Michael Pollan
Isn't that mind blowing?
- [12:08]
Ezra Klein
Can you talk a bit about that experiment and what it seems to imply?
- [12:11]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. 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
- [12:26]
Ezra Klein
each other in ways that lay men don't even. I was like, that seems fine.
- [12:30]
Michael Pollan
No, it's fighting words in the field. Okay, so they're 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.
- [12:52]
Ezra Klein
Do you want to say the difference in your mind between those two words?
- [12:55]
Michael Pollan
Sentience is a kind of more 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. You know, bacteria can do this. They have chemotaxis, right? 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, like the stream of consciousness, like self reflection, like the fact that we're aware, that we're aware. Most other creatures are just aware. Although we recently Learned that chimps have imagination, which is kind of mind blowing.
- [13:40]
Ezra Klein
How do we learn that?
- [13:41]
Michael Pollan
Experiments. They got chimps, as I recall, to play a kind of tea party game, you know, as you would play with a kid. And, you know, they're pouring an empty pitcher into cups and they get completely into the game. 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.
- [14:07]
Ezra Klein
So anesthetized plants.
- [14:09]
Michael Pollan
Yes. 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 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, they won't react. 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. And, you know, there's this at least
- [14:56]
Ezra Klein
two states of being.
- [14:57]
Michael Pollan
At least two states. Right. Two that we've identified. Lights on, lights off. That to some implies consciousness. You know, 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.
- [15:31]
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.
- [15:39]
Michael Pollan
Yes. It's internal.
- [15:40]
Ezra Klein
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.
- [15:56]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, this sort of threw me off.
- [15:58]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, Toast with it.
- [15:59]
Michael Pollan
Right.
- [15:59]
Ezra Klein
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.
- [16:07]
Michael Pollan
I don't think it's like anything to be a toaster.
- [16:09]
Ezra Klein
Right.
- [16:10]
Michael Pollan
In either state.
- [16:11]
Ezra Klein
The fact that something has response to stimuli doesn't necessarily imply it has a subjective experience.
- [16:19]
Michael Pollan
Right. 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, like 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. 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. There are these characteristics that mark a creature's ability to sleep, which we thought only belonged to higher mammals, I guess, or. No, Birds sleep too, but we didn't think really simple creatures slept. It turns out even insects sleep. And Julio Tononi is the scientist who came up with these criteria for sleep. And plants meet, I think, all of them, which is interesting. And some take that as evidence of consciousness.
- [17:29]
Ezra Klein
You're a gardener.
- [17:30]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [17:30]
Ezra Klein
Do you think you're causing plants pain by pruning them?
- [17:34]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. 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 screams.
- [17:51]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, the screams of.
- [17:54]
Michael Pollan
And that'll make you crazy.
- [17:55]
Ezra Klein
Grim way to put it.
- [17:56]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. But if you.
- [17:57]
Ezra Klein
Because 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.
- [18:03]
Michael Pollan
Exactly. It doesn't.
- [18:04]
Ezra Klein
So it turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on an industrial scale.
- [18:10]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. Although there's all this worry about this in Silicon Valley, you know, that our tender hearts should go out to these machines that might be conscious. And we owe moral consideration to the machines. Anyway.
- [18:21]
Ezra Klein
I think. Here's my suspicion about that, because I do think it is possible we are 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 ask you would have to do anything about it.
- [18:38]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. And also they Love the conversation about the far future or near far future of, you know, whether it's Boomer or Doomer view, because it's a great way not to deal with what's right in front of us.
- [18:50]
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.
- [19:15]
Michael Pollan
Well, Descartes.
- [19:16]
Ezra Klein
Descartes. It is Descartes.
- [19:17]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [19:17]
Ezra Klein
And that is in part helping to justify vivisections of live animals in that area. 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 painful, 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.
- [19:47]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. 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 creatures 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 meaninglessness.
- [20:45]
Ezra Klein
Okay, but you do get into this question of. Yes, are we causing mass suffering to plants?
- [20:48]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. And I talked to Stefano Mencuzo 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. You know, if we don't eat plants, we're down to salt, basically. You know, if you give up on animals and plants. Mancuse 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 the language in which they work is biochemical. Right. 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, you know, 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. You know, they respond with more growth and new leaves. And so I'm not too worried about that.
- [21:54]
Ezra Klein
There are a lot of 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.
- [22:01]
Michael Pollan
Well, it's a short term, long term thing. Right. Perhaps when you cut them with the seculars, that bothers them, but they respond in a really constructive way.
- [22:09]
Ezra Klein
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.
- [22:18]
Michael Pollan
Right. Which are not exactly plants. But okay, fine, you'll get letters. I'm just saving you the trouble.
- [22:29]
Ezra Klein
And you have had. You have an experience there that I have heard from many others, which is a kind of openness to animism.
- [22:41]
Michael Pollan
Yes.
- [22:42]
Ezra Klein
That may not have been there before.
- [22:44]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, that's a very common experience on psychedelics. The world seems much more alive than it does in normal times. You know, 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 in infusing especially living things, but also rocks and cliffs and sky and clouds and everything. And most kids are animus till they go to school, and then we kind of knock it out of them. So it's interesting that we exist in this unanimous bubble of Western scientific materialism. But 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 a. If it's not full scale animism, it's a reanimated world where there is just. And I did come out of this research experience of looking at plant consciousness or plant sentience with a sense that the world is more alive than I thought.
- [23:47]
Ezra Klein
I was just Weighing whether. And I want to ask you this question, but I think I do go for it. So something I have noticed from psychedelic circles, which I'm much less plugged into than you are, is people who work with plant psychedelics over long periods of time tend to find themselves or believe themselves into as working with plant or spiritual intelligences. People who do mushrooms or iboga or ayahuasca, there's a sense of there being something on the other side in a way that artificial psychedelics, ketamine, LSD people do not sort of leave believing there's like an LSD spirit on the other end of the phone. And just as somebody who's, you know, one of your previous books was on psychedelics and doing this book, that the reason I think people get pushed towards animism isn't necessarily the more narrow question of what happens when you anesthetize a plant. But people are having some kind of experience there where they feel there are plant intelligences communicating to them.
- [24:51]
Michael Pollan
Oh, yeah. Especially on ayahuasca.
- [24:53]
Ezra Klein
Especially on ayahuasca, which is a plant based.
- [24:55]
Michael Pollan
Right. It's two plants. It's a brew of two plants. And if you ask most ayahuascaros, how did anyone ever figure out the recipe because it's so obscure that these two plants cooked together would have this effect and neither by themselves has any effect or much of any effect. And they'll tell you the plants taught me and they will mean it. And we don't know through the lens of Western science how to listen to that. It sounds ridiculous to us. I mean, if I came out anywhere on this whole book, it's like my mind is much more open than it was to a lot of weird stuff, just because the normal stuff hasn't really panned out that well. Now why would the plant based psychedelics be more likely to do this than the chemistry based psychedelics? I think there it's set and setting. You know, Timothy Leary's great contribution was explaining that the psychedelic experience is shaped profoundly by the physical setting in which it takes place and the mindset, the mental setting that you bring to it. When you're using a plant based psychedelic, you. I mean, the imagery is all jungle imagery. You know, people see leopards and they see vines. And do you think that's because of
- [26:06]
Ezra Klein
set and setting or because of something in the.
- [26:08]
Michael Pollan
I think it's. I think it's set and setting, yeah.
- [26:11]
Ezra Klein
So you don't buy the shamans who tell you, we were told this by the plants?
- [26:15]
Michael Pollan
No, but there's like 5% of me that was like, okay, maybe, uh huh. I'm kind of. I've entered this never say never realm with this research.
- [26:49]
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- [27:19]
Michael Pollan
I'm Robin and I am excited to open my Crossplay app. I'm challenging John, my colleague at the New York Times.
- [27:26]
Ezra Klein
Robin played the word grunge, which has a G, which is four points. She got that triple word multiplier.
- [27:32]
Michael Pollan
I am going to take facts and make it faxes for 30 points.
- [27:36]
Ezra Klein
I might just take another two letter word here with whoa. Gets me at 23. I think this will put me back in the lead. If my maths are mathing.
- [27:44]
Michael Pollan
I like to play it more from a strategic point of view and see where I can block the other player from scoring high.
- [27:50]
Ezra Klein
I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and coworkers and also you get to learn new words. Crossplay, the first two player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today.
- [28:01]
Michael Pollan
I think he thinks he has this in the bag, but I'm not so sure.
- [28:09]
Ezra Klein
So certainly the mainstream interpretation of what consciousness is is that as life becomes more complex, as unlike plants, we're moving around, that you have an escalating complexity in conscious experience in order to achieve goals in the world that consciousness is being created through evolutionary pressure.
- [28:33]
Michael Pollan
It's adaptive.
- [28:34]
Ezra Klein
It's adaptive.
- [28:35]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [28:36]
Ezra Klein
One thing you do is go through a couple of the ideas of what it could be adaptive towards. Tell me some of them.
- [28:42]
Michael Pollan
So I'm going to back up a little bit to make sense of this idea. One of the big questions is your brain. At least 90% of what it's doing, you're not aware of. It's doing all this work, monitoring your body, maintaining homeostasis, perceiving things in your environment without you being consciously aware of it. You know, peripheral vision, smell, you know, touch, all these kind of things, temperature. So the question then becomes, if this automatic machine is so good at what it does, why does any of it become conscious? That's part of the hard problem of consciousness. Why aren't we just zombies, you know, wouldn't that have been simpler? And the reasons. And to some extent these are evolutionary, just so stories, but they're persuasive that basically you can automate things until you get to a level of complexity. And for us, it's our social lives. The fact that we are fundamentally social beings, absolutely dependent on other people, with a long period of complete dependence for babies in children compared to other species. Social life cannot be automated. It's just too complex. So you need to be able to anticipate what I'm likely to say, how a remark is going to land. We call it theory of mind, this idea that we can imagine our way into other people, basis of compassion and things like that. So once we entered this realm of great complexity, automating our responses just wasn't going to work. And the creatures that had consciousness, that could imagine what was going on in another human's head did better than people who didn't and failed to imagine what was going on in someone else's head. I find that a pretty persuasive theory.
- [30:28]
Ezra Klein
I guess one question it raises is you look at a baby or a one year old, they are very, very socially dependent. And I think they're clearly having a very intense experience of consciousness, a more intense one than I have. My consciousness is much better at filtering out information than theirs is.
- [30:49]
Michael Pollan
You have spotlight consciousness.
- [30:50]
Ezra Klein
I have spotlight consciousness. So I'm curious to hear you talk a bit about that, because on the one hand, it feels like that idea would imply consciousness becomes richer as you become more goal directed. But I think it's quite clear that it becomes narrowed as you become more goal directed.
- [31:06]
Michael Pollan
I think you could make a case that young children are more conscious than we are.
- [31:10]
Ezra Klein
I think it's almost inarguable.
- [31:11]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. Which is a kind of interesting thing that we prune consciousness down the way we're pruning so many things in the brain as we age. But this idea of lantern versus spotlight consciousness I found very powerful. I learned it from Allison Gopnik, who's a child psychologist, developmental psychologist at Berkeley. And she gave me a lot of good advice as I was embarking on this. The first was never forget that the kinds of people working on these questions about consciousness are not typical in their consciousness. These are people who can sit in a chair for a really long time, read books for a really long time, think out problems. They have an extreme version of spotlight consciousness, which she calls professor consciousness. So that was very helpful. She contrasts this with children's consciousness, which she calls Lantern consciousness. So instead of having that one degree of attention focused on some object, they're taking in information from all 360 degrees. It seems very undisciplined, very unfocused. You find it when kids get to school, some kids can sit there and do it, and a lot of kids can't because they're still taking in information from all these sides. It's interesting. It allows them to solve problems that adults can't solve. They think outside the box, they have more divergent thinking. And then as time goes on, we narrow our focus. It allows us to get a lot done, to put on our shoes in
- [32:35]
Ezra Klein
a semi efficient manner.
- [32:38]
Michael Pollan
But it involves putting these blinders on. So there's a trade off. And one of the things psychedelics do, and Allison made this point to me also is return us to lantern consciousness. And she said in an interview with me and to other people when she first tried LSD, which wasn't until I think her 60s, she realized, oh, this is how the kids are thinking. They're tripping all the time. And she said, just have tea with a four year old and you'll see. And there's a lot of truth to that, I think.
- [33:11]
Ezra Klein
I want to get at another theory of what consciousness is for. I think the language in the book is consciousness is felt uncertainty.
- [33:20]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. Isn't that beautiful?
- [33:22]
Ezra Klein
That is very beautiful, although in practice I find it very unpleasant. But what does that mean?
- [33:28]
Michael Pollan
So the phrase comes from a scientist named Mark Soames, who is a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst in South Africa. And he's written a really interesting book called the Hidden Spring. And his theory is that consciousness arises when you can't automate things. And in this case, he's talking about the fact that you might have two competing needs. Let's say you're hungry and you're tired and you have to decide which to privilege. And that takes decision making. And what consciousness does is open up this space to resolve uncertainty. So if everything was predictable in the world and you could be certain when this happens, that happens, you know, and you had a kind of neat algorithm to deal with contingencies. You don't need it. But a lot of life presents us with uncertainty, and that's when consciousness arises.
- [34:22]
Ezra Klein
I think I've thought about this part of the book more than any other. And I think that's in part because the way my mind works and I'm not sure how generalizable this is, my thoughts attract to uncertainty in my life. I just ruminate and ruminate and ruminate over whatever I am typically most emotionally uncertain about. Not always, by the way, the most useful forms of uncertainty. There are other unsolved problems it would be better if my mind was interested in thinking about. But I get it. So, on the one hand, this idea that there is something, at the very least, that is attracting the spotlight of my attention to uncertainty feels true. But I also have a couple of questions and problems with it. One is that it doesn't seem like what we're talking here about is exactly consciousness. I mean, what you were just saying about the child or about the adult on psychedelics. They are not attracted to uncertainty in the same way. The experience of psychedelic consciousness expansion is, in many ways, I think, less of the experience of felt uncertainty.
- [35:24]
Michael Pollan
It's a very good point.
- [35:25]
Ezra Klein
It becomes much more about experience. Whereas uncertainty, at least in the way I experience it in my consciousness, tends to be a much more spotlighted, much less experiential. Like it's a distraction from experience.
- [35:39]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, I think that's right. I haven't really thought about that that much. One of my takeaways is that we have to be kind of pluralists of consciousness, that there are many different kinds and that psychedelic consciousness should be counted as one of them. Or the mystical forms of consciousness that James talks about. And then there's everyday consciousness and spotlight consciousness and that. So I think we all have a toolkit to some extent, and we experience. I mean, the kind of consciousness you experience as a meditator is very different than the kind you do at work. Right. Or when writing. I mean, writing is a great example. That's a very peculiar form of consciousness.
- [36:15]
Ezra Klein
So the other thing I was thinking about with this was consciousness is felt, uncertainty. Felt where? Because I think we think of consciousness as a thing happening in our minds. Something I think, actually that has come out of my meditation for me. But then I loved seeing how much of it there was in your book is recognizing how much is happening in the body.
- [36:38]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, I think that's my biggest discovery as someone who lives in his head most of the time. How important having a body is to being conscious. You know, we identify with our heads more than our bodies. Right. Maybe because our eyes are there, I don't know. But consciousness probably arises with feelings first. It starts with things like hunger and itchiness. And as it gets filtered into the cortex becomes the kind of complicated thinking that we pride ourselves on. I think that feelings are based in the body. Finally, it's how the body talks to the brain and we have to remember this very simple fact, which is the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. We're not just a support system for this amazing 3 pounds of tofu in our heads. And once you realize that, you realize that the messages coming from the body are really important to the brain. And these feelings are the beginning of conscious experience. And if you didn't have them, it's questionable whether you would have consciousness.
- [37:47]
Ezra Klein
There's no doubt, I think, that the experience of consciousness is some kind of interplay between both. I feel uncertainty in my solar plexus. I think about things I'm uncertain around in my brain.
- [38:00]
Michael Pollan
Exactly. And where do you experience disgust, like moral disgust? It's in your belly.
- [38:05]
Ezra Klein
You have a great experiment in the book about people given ginger. Could you describe that?
- [38:10]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, this is a very cool experiment. They gave people ginger before exposing them to some morally distasteful event or something, or image. And the people who had the ginger were less disgusted because their stomachs were settled. So our feeling of moral disgust is kind of channeled through our gut, which is such a weird idea. But that's probably true of a lot of feelings and that it has enormous implications for this discussion about AI, whether it can be conscious. Because feelings are not just signals. They're not just bits of information. They contain information. You're getting a lot of information from a feeling, but that's the residue of the feeling. There's something more somatic about it, and it's very hard to imagine how computers could get to that. And feelings have no weight. If you don't have a vulnerability, if you don't have the ability to suffer and perhaps be mortal otherwise, a feeling is just more information. And we know feelings are a lot more than that to us.
- [39:12]
Ezra Klein
I want to describe an experience I just had. While we were doing that, I wrote a note to myself to come back to this part of the conversation later, to maybe clip it out, because I think it's particularly good. One thing I find I need to do during these podcasts is pay very close attention to my body, because what happened there is not that I had a thought. This is good. Come back later. What happened there is that my skin got pricklier and I noticed a heightened sensitivity, and that was an alert to my mind to start paying attention. Well, what am I trying to pay attention to? I see this all the time in the podcast. My body has reactions to things that are going on, and then my mind has to interpret why that is happening. And the body is smarter about things. Than the mind which created the questions. Document I walked in here with is, but it's such a strange experience that something just happened in like my chest and my hands that told me my body thinks this part of the conversation was good and to put it into my brain so I could write a little note to come back to it later.
- [40:24]
Michael Pollan
So William James writes about this. You have feelings, emotions and thoughts. Right? And emotions are more the physical manifestation of feelings. I can tell your emotions, I can't tell your feelings. Those are internal. He said basically, they start in the body. Anger starts with a racing heart or something like that. And then the brain interprets. Why did the heart start racing? Why did blood pressure go up? Maybe it's fear. So the brain is constantly interpreting the messages it's getting from the body. And the body is thinking on its own, feeling on its own, reacting to its environment in a million different ways. And it totally changes how you think about consciousness and the potential of automating this or the potential of digitizing it. If feelings are that, if feelings come first, feelings bear more thought in that where do they come from? How can they be simulated?
- [41:23]
Ezra Klein
Feelings and bodies bear more thought.
- [41:26]
Michael Pollan
This is something embodiment that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon and that the brain in a vat. Right Meme just. No, it just doesn't work. Ditto the downloading of consciousness onto a machine. The dream of the transhumanists. You're not going to have a body. How's that going to work?
- [41:48]
Ezra Klein
I think if somebody was to go out into self improvement, podcast world or school or anything, and their fundamental question was, how do I get smarter? How am I more intelligent? The answer you basically get has to do with training your mind, studying, reading more, journaling in the morning, whatever it might be. And there's actually very, very little about deepening the connection between your mind and your body. As I have gotten older and as my work has become more creative, I think I've come to think it's a huge mistake that a huge amount of just what I've had to get better at over the years is paying attention to my body, such that then my mind can do something with these signals that are not always easily interpretable, but have some intelligence that I don't feel like I am in control of.
- [42:46]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, and we misinterpret them. I mean, think about, you've got young kids, when they're hungry, they will misinterpret that as frustration or anger. And you realize, oh, they just need to eat. And then they'll be Fine. So we do go through a process of learning how to interpret what our body is telling us. But it's true as adults, where do you go to learn that? I mean, meditation a little bit, doing body scans and things like that. I've done meditation practices where the focus is very much on the body and what's going on in every different part of the body. But I think we would be wiser if we learned how to do this and paid better attention to our bodies. And I also think, I mean, in a way, this is the lesson of Antonio Damasio's first book in 1994, Descartes Error, it was called. And he was basically showing that feelings and emotions should be admitted into the decision making process. And he proved that people who couldn't experience emotion or feelings made worse decisions than people who could. And that there was a kind of a gut check. You know, we have all these words for the gut and thought. And there's a. There's some kind of buried deep in the language is this understanding that our gut has something important to tell us about a decision. And so he kind of rehabilitated feelings and emotions in the whole science of the brain. But basically we've been drumming feelings and emotion out of our understanding of the brain for hundreds of years. And I don't know why. I mean, this idea of the pinnacle of human consciousness is the cortex or the kinds of people who do this research are just really out of touch with their bodies.
- [44:32]
Ezra Klein
I like that as a hypothesis.
- [44:36]
Michael Pollan
I'll be hearing from some of them.
- [44:37]
Ezra Klein
Well, fair enough. I want to pick up on something you said in there about the sequencing, about how feelings often precede thoughts. There's a great piece of research you bring up that is research done on meditators who are asked to note when they're interrupted in their meditation by a thought. Can you describe that study?
- [45:00]
Michael Pollan
Sure. So this scientist, Kalina Christoph Haji Levia, psychologist, her field is spontaneous thought, which is. I hadn't thought about that as a field. And that includes things like daydreams and mind wandering and creative thinking and flow. And to try to understand this, she's very interested in the question of how things get from our unconscious into our conscious awareness. Because we know there's a lot going on below the threshold of awareness. So she works with trained meditators, people who have like 10,000 hours experience meditating, puts them in an FMRI, gives them a button to press as soon as a thought intrudes. Because even if you're a experienced meditator, it's going to happen. She says it happens every 10 seconds for everybody. She said the great lesson in meditation is the mind. Mind cannot be controlled. It's very, very freeing to people trying. What was interesting about this is that when people press the button, she would look back at when something popped out, when there was activity in the hippocampus, which is the source of memories and other stuff as well. But she was watching that as a source of a thought. And it took four seconds between the. The FMRI showing activity in the hippocampus and the person being aware of that thought. So what is happening four seconds in the brain? Time is like an eon. What is happening for a thought to transit from the unconscious to the conscious? And why does it take so long? And she doesn't know. I'm sorry, I can't pay this off. But one of the theories called global neuronal workspace theory, which is that. But there are thoughts competing with one another for access to our conscious awareness. And they're kind of, you know, this Darwinian process. And only the most salient ever gets into the workspace and then broadcasts to the whole brain. The problem with this theory is there's a lot of trivial stuff that somehow gets through. At least in my case. I think there's a lot of traffic going back and forth. And that's something also that you happen not just during meditation, but during psychedelic experiences. There's lots of unconscious material that comes up.
- [47:15]
Ezra Klein
I actually find this to be a problem with meditation for me, which is that there's a lot of meditation that is about open awareness or trying to watch things happen non judgmentally.
- [47:25]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [47:26]
Ezra Klein
But the very act of having awareness is very clearly changing what is happening in my brain.
- [47:32]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [47:33]
Ezra Klein
So the more awareness I have, the more my brain feels slightly or my mind feels somewhat controlled. And the less awareness I have, the more I'm going to get these sort of little wisps of mentation. Yeah.
- [47:44]
Michael Pollan
So there's a meditation teacher I really like whose meditations are on YouTube, named Michael Taft. And his attitude is like, look, the machinery of the mind is gonna go on, but just put it down the way you'd put down your phone and just, you know, let it do its thing. You can just ignore it. And I find that very helpful. And I have this sense of a little buzzing going on in this corner, you know, of like thoughts that I'm not paying attention to. But, you know, as Kalina shows, it's very hard to control this material. And things are going to bubble up and they're interesting.
- [48:18]
Ezra Klein
Well, I guess one of my deep and fundamental questions about being a human being is why I attend to what I attend to. If I could go and talk to the algorithm in my mind in the way that increasingly you can go tell Claude how it is you want Claude to act, I would change the algorithm. I would worry less about interpersonal conflict in my life. I would spend a lot less time thinking about whether or not people are mad at me. But there is some process by which I hate the term global workspace theory as a description of what is going on in the mind. It's so bloodless and built on personal computers in 1998 productivity ideas. Yeah, but that idea that things are competing and somehow or another, some part of my mind is running some kind of process to decide what comes into the spotlight of attention. And if it's really shocking, there's a car accident next to me or a. Yeah, there's shortcuts. Yeah. Like all of a sudden it'll move me there entirely. But moment to moment, there's some kind of competition and what comes up, I can be aware of it, but the more aware I am of it, the less in control that I feel. Which is one of the greatest great and slightly terrifying lessons of meditation. And so that question of the unconscious doesn't seem mild to me. That is the factory producing thoughts, and then something is deciding what to put in the front shelves.
- [49:51]
Michael Pollan
So you're thinking about it in terms of an algorithm and a mass of data and different things could get pulled into it. That's not a bad metaphor. I mean, we don't know exactly how it works. There is still this question of if the workspace idea is true, everything we think should be of some consequence, and we all know that's not true. And so why do things that are completely trivial or banal enter our consciousness? Freud would say we're suppressing more important things, but there is clearly a way
- [50:26]
Ezra Klein
that the mind learns what to think about over time. So to use the example of my kids, it is quite clear to me that my children do not spend any time during the day thinking about things they have to do in the future.
- [50:42]
Michael Pollan
Right.
- [50:43]
Ezra Klein
They might think it's about things they want to do in the future, but they're never like, ah, I think it's been a while since my last pediatrician appointment. I might need some shots. Right. And 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 was 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. It's not the only thing that happens in my mind, but it is clearly a favored topic.
- [51:30]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. And it makes you successful. I mean, there are standards by which that makes sense. How should it.
- [51:36]
Ezra Klein
So what I'd say about that is you brought up something a minute ago where you said, well, the problem with this theory is that why does so much triviality emerge? But I mean, couldn't you just say, well, it is over applied rules? Like, my biggest complaint about my mind is I think too much about relational stress. But you grow up, you have a family, you're very dependent on caregivers. It's very easy to imagine how a mind would bend towards. Really? Yeah. I was bullied in school. Right. Being out of joint in relationships can really harm you. So it's not unclear to me how my mind might have overlearned the rule scan for relational threat at all times. And so I'm curious about that. Learning something is happening over time that is not the same in all people. It's dependent on life experience. People who grew up in times of famine tend to store more food when they're older. There's something happening there.
- [52:30]
Michael Pollan
And also. And that pleasure is not driving this. Right. I mean, it's success. You are learning algorithms, if we're going to use that computer metaphor, that are, even though it doesn't feel good, are promoting the kind of behavior that's gonna solve problems and keep everybody happy, maintain the peace, all these kind of things. So our minds are invested in our success, not our pleasure. I mean, one of the things I talked a lot about how psychedelics inspired this book, but meditation did too. Because as soon as you stop to examine what's going on in your mind, which many people don't do, but now tens of millions of people do do, especially since the pandemic are a lot more meditators than there were, is how strange our minds are and how little volition is involved, and that we think we're calling the shots as conscious human beings, but to a remarkable extent we're not. And where that material is coming from, we can call it the unconscious, we don't really know, but it's just defamiliarized. Right. I mean, you're just estranged from your own mental processes. And this whole idea that great meditation exercise will look in your brain for who's thinking those thoughts, who's feeling those feelings, and you won't find anybody.
- [53:51]
Ezra Klein
Talk to me about a state of mind that has come up briefly in our conversation already that I think is between unconscious and goal directed, which is the wandering mind. And I think it's something we don't. I think we have come to diminish its role.
- [54:06]
Michael Pollan
Oh yeah, I think so.
- [54:08]
Ezra Klein
So what is it and what do we know about it?
- [54:09]
Michael Pollan
Well, the wandering mind is just what's happening when you're bored. That's the precondition, in a way, for a wandering mind. It's like I've got nothing to do, there's no task here. I'm just killing time. And suddenly we're off. And daydreaming or mind wandering, they're very similar things. I forget how Kalina distinguishes them, but she does. She thinks it's a really important part of life that we haven't studied because it's not productive and that all the work in psychology goes into productive areas of thought. I think that's changing now. You know, you have people studying awe and emotions that are not necessarily productive, but awe is very useful. So she just thinks this is a space of creativity and that a lot of creative thinking comes out of mind wandering and daydreaming. And, you know, it's something novelists do all the time. Right. I mean, they get pretty good at daydreaming. And she says we've lost this. You know, the space of our interiority for this kind of thinking is diminished because of our distractions, our technological distractions.
- [55:13]
Ezra Klein
I want to challenge, not that she believes this, but this idea that it's a non productive form of thought, I think it.
- [55:19]
Michael Pollan
Oh, I think it is very productive. It's just. How, how are you defining productivity?
- [55:23]
Ezra Klein
I. I would say the biggest barrier for me and productivity, true productivity, which is the ability to do better with the same amount of resources that you already have, is that I don't spend enough time with my mind wandering. And it is routine that the absolutely most creatively important times I will spend. I thought I was taking a break. Yeah, I thought I was doing something else, taking a walk. I wasn't just driving my mind further into the ground, flicking through webpages when I was already too tired to absorb information. Then all of a sudden I'll have the insight or I'll realize or I should call this person and I don't know where it comes from, but it's those moments of insight, epiphany, creative leap. A line that comes into my head
- [56:13]
Michael Pollan
that the spotlight gets in the way because of those blinders. And I think when you're daydreaming or mind wandering, the blinders are kind of opened up and you're taking it information from more places. She argues that it's just the belief that this is unproductive thought because nobody wants mind wandering workers, right? The capitalists want us to be spotlight consciousness. And the example she gave is like, right now my job is to grade blue book exams and that's what I should be doing. But my real life project is making sense of my life and having a fulfilling life. And I would be better off taking a walk or mind wandering. So there's a tension, there's a tension there between what the economy considers productive thought and what emotionally is productive thought or creativity or what the economy should
- [57:01]
Ezra Klein
consider productive thought if it were smarter. It just. You can't quantify it on the hour to hour level. One of the most interesting mind states for me is a mind state I functionally only have when I am reading something on paper without screen distractions around
- [57:21]
Michael Pollan
me,
- [57:23]
Ezra Klein
which is my mind becomes highly associational. And I'll be reading and then I'll look up and I'll have ideas. They're often not about the book at all. It's like the book itself is a scaffolding of a certain kind of attention. But I'm aware and I'm awake and so I'm noticing other things. It is by far my most creative state.
- [57:41]
Michael Pollan
Do you have a pencil or a pen in your hand? Yeah.
- [57:43]
Ezra Klein
And it is achieved more easily on airplanes than anywhere else because then you really don't have distractions. But it can happen at a coffee shop. But it won't happen if I'm looking at a screen, right? And so it's made me think about how if we wanted humans to be more productive, more creative, more. I think a lot of our received beliefs about this are really wrong. We'd want to put people more in touch with their bodies. We'd want to teach them how to find states of open association and mind wandering. You want to put yourself in the way of inspiration more often because it's not controllable in the way we wish it were.
- [58:23]
Michael Pollan
Completely agree. Kalina edited this book, the Oxford Companion to Spontaneous Thought. And there is a history of spontaneous thought that looked at how incredibly creative people, composers, novelists, how they spent their days, and they only worked like four or five hours. They spent A lot of time in unstructured wandering, walking. And we all know there's a connection between creative thinking and walking. It's much more likely to break through if you're stuck in your writing or whatever else you're doing, if you get up from the desk and take a walk instead of just, like, worrying that problem. So, yeah, we could reorganize our lives in a way, but the one thing we do know is how our phones, our social media are bringing down that viewpoint, keeping us from looking up, keeping us from making associations, because there's no time for association. You're just scrolling and something else comes in and you're getting another little hit. So we've shrunk in that space, and it is a space of creativity, and there's no reason we can't reclaim it. But we have a lot of trouble doing it because these algorithms are really sophisticated and they know how our minds work.
- [59:35]
Ezra Klein
When are you most creative?
- [59:37]
Michael Pollan
Walking? I would say I walk a lot. I walk in the Berkeley hills. And although even then I have to say, half the time, I fill my head, I have my AirPods on. I'm listening to a novel or a podcast, listening to you when I could be.
- [59:53]
Ezra Klein
Let's not be too hasty in diminishing the importance of informational input here.
- [59:59]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, no, it is important. But anyway. And I have to remember to take out the AirPods and listen to what's going on. And we haven't talked about time in nature, but. But that's. I think, a very hygienic space for consciousness is being off of all media of all kinds.
- [60:42]
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- [61:13]
Ezra Klein
In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals. And I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand.
- [61:26]
Redfin Advertiser
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- [61:30]
Ezra Klein
What the hell was Alan thinking? From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm M. Gessen, and this is the Idiot out March 26th. Wherever you get your podcasts, As the book evolves, you start widening to less and less goal oriented theories of consciousness. And one thing that is happening throughout the book that you're very attentive to is first, the number of scientists of consciousness, scientists of the mind who are now dabbling in various forms of psychedelics.
- [62:09]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, that was a surprise to me.
- [62:11]
Ezra Klein
And two, well, you've sort of part of the reason it's happening, so it shouldn't be that surprising.
- [62:15]
Michael Pollan
And there's a selection bias. People know they can talk to me about their trips.
- [62:19]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, it's a problem. It's quite a role you've created for yourself in public life. And two, the way that is upending their theories of consciousness. I mean, you have a number of scientists who come in out through the book who are saying, well, I thought this and then I had this experience. And I think it's really interesting, the felt experience of truth on something that people who up until that moment would only accept what they could prove and were reducing everything to the provable. Like they know they ingested a chemical and yet what that felt like was so they're not willing to dismiss.
- [62:56]
Michael Pollan
And so authoritative. Yeah. And you're alluding to Christophe Koch, who is a very prominent consciousness researcher. He was there at the beginning when he and Francis Crick began on this quest to understand consciousness in the late 80s, early 90s. And he's an exemplary scientist in that he's changed his mind in profound ways several times. I find that doesn't usually happen among scientists. You know the saying that science changes one funeral at a time. Not in his case. He went to Brazil and had a ayahuasca, a series of ayahuasca experiences. Now, this is the prototypical brain guy, right? He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle. He's been messing around with neurons and electrodes for years and years and years and assumed that the source of consciousness was going to be in the brain. He has this experience of mind at large. This is a term that comes from Aldous Huxley in the Doors of Perception, that consciousness outside of his brain. And I challenged him on it and I said, well, but it's a drug experience. And he would not take that as disproof or even reason for skepticism. And he used as an example a famous thought experiment, the Mary Experiment. You have this brilliant woman who is the world's expert on color, on vision, and she knows everything there is to know about cones and rods and how the whole system works. But she lives in a completely black and white world world. She steps out one day and has the experience of color. What has she learned? Right. What has been added to her stock of knowledge? And he said, I was like Mary. And I had had this vision, and nobody could convince me when I went back in the box of scientific materialism that it hadn't happened. It had happened. It was as sure as I have been of anything in my life. And now he's exploring idealism.
- [64:51]
Ezra Klein
What is idealism?
- [64:53]
Michael Pollan
Idealism is the philosophy that consciousness is a universal field and that consciousness precedes matter. We automatically assume that matter is primary. Everything can be reduced to matter and energy, and they can be reduced to each other. Idealism is. No, no, no. You got to start with consciousness. Matter comes second. The argument for it is there's nothing you know with more certainty than consciousness. It's the thing you know directly. Everything else you know is inferred, you see, through consciousness. So why is it that we privilege the thing we infer rather than the thing we know? Why do we privilege matter as the ultimate source of everything? I was like, now maybe a smarter person than me knows there's a logical fallacy there. I don't know. I don't see where it is.
- [65:39]
Ezra Klein
So the idealism theory is related to this idea. You bring it up in the book. I think you're the first person who. Who I'd ever heard about this from. This idea that the mind may be sort of like an antenna.
- [65:50]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. Or a radio receiver.
- [65:51]
Ezra Klein
Or a radio receiver. It's not generating the consciousness. It is receiving some kind of signal and then interpreting it.
- [65:58]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [65:58]
Ezra Klein
And in the same way that if
- [65:59]
Michael Pollan
you break a tv, it's not gonna work.
- [66:01]
Ezra Klein
It's not gonna work. But that doesn't mean the waves that it was absorbing are gone.
- [66:05]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. And you shouldn't look in the TV set for the weatherman. Right. I mean, you know, and that's kind of what we're doing, but it's channeling this information from the universe. And that. That's why the brain is involved in a critical way. And if you damage the brain, you damage consciousness or anesthetize the brain or whatever, but it's involved in a different way. And the evidence kind of works the same either way. Whether you say the brain generates consciousness or channels consciousness, it's hard to make a case that one is better than the other. You know, the term scientists use is that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, which sounds really scientific, but if you press, it's just abracadabra. It doesn't really explain anything.
- [66:53]
Ezra Klein
What is the difference between idealism and panpsychism.
- [66:57]
Michael Pollan
Panpsychism is the idea that every little bit, every particle has a quantum of consciousness, of psyche. And that in the same way, 200 years ago, we added electromagnetism to the stock of what reality consists of. Material reality, reality consists of. We should add psyche. It's another thing. So in a way, it's a new materialism, or it's materialism with something added to it. It's a big price to pay for your theory that you're adding something completely new to the stock of reality. But, you know, it solves the problem of where consciousness comes from. Comes from everywhere. It's just. It was already here. So these ideas are. You know, they. I mean, when I first learned about them, I thought, these are crazy.
- [67:38]
Ezra Klein
But.
- [67:38]
Michael Pollan
But then you realize that materialism has kind of hit a wall with consciousness studies and that there is this gap that we can't seem to cross from a very good theory like workspace theory to, well, wait a minute, when you say you're broadcasting to the whole brain, who's receiving that broadcast, you know, and then you have other people saying, well, consciousness is just an illusion, but an illusion is a conscious experience. So what about the subject? And that's where everybody starts waving their hands.
- [68:10]
Ezra Klein
What level of plausibility do you assign to that?
- [68:15]
Michael Pollan
To what?
- [68:17]
Ezra Klein
I guess either, but I think I'm thinking of the more novel brain is radio receiver.
- [68:25]
Michael Pollan
I have to say, I don't know. It's weird to spend five years on a book and come to an answer like that. But as I said at one point, this is a book where you may know less at the end than you do at the beginning, but you'll know a lot of other things.
- [68:43]
Ezra Klein
It's a very fun tour. I told you at the beginning of this I'd give you my theory of the book. Towards the end of our conversation, when we sat down around how to change your mind, your book on psychedelics, I told you that I thought that was a book about the mind posing as a book about psychedelics. And I kind of think this is a book about psychedelics posing as a book about the mind because, and not to do violence to it, both were actually about their subject. But it is striking to me how often in this book it's not just Koch. There is the scientist who is building, I think, a robot trying to make consciousness, and then does, I think, 5 Meo DMT and realizes everything is love. There's your mushrooms. There's a lot of people who Note offhandedly that they are. There seems to be something here that it has caused a larger ontological shock then I think a stylized description of, well, you ingested a chemical. Of course you had a chemical experience, would naturally.
- [69:37]
Michael Pollan
It's a totally unsatisfying explanation. Yeah. Well, I think that the interest in psychedelics is partly an interest in taking back our consciousness and exploring it. Because one of the things that happens the day you do a psychedelic is not a day you're looking at your phone. It's a day that you've put a fence around. If you're doing it right, and not just walking around the streets of Manhattan, you know, tripping, but you're doing it with some intention, and you reclaim your mind for a period of time and you explore it. And, you know, this idea of expanding consciousness. There's a line in Aldous Huxley that I've always really liked. He believed in this transmission theory of consciousness, which he got from Henri Bergson, who really was the person who first put that forward, was that in normal times, our brains admit only the trickle of consciousness we need to get through the day to be productive, to do what we need to do. But there's so much more. And what he said psychedelics did is open what he called the reducing valve so that more consciousness got in. What was that consciousness? To him, it was the mind at large. But I find it's also sensory information, bodily information. I mean, sometimes trips are incredibly somatic, and they're all about the body, and other times they're about visual material. But it's ours. It's mine. Right. Although some people go to a divine place about it. And so I think it's. I'm just out there starting to talk about consciousness, and I'm like, I'm curious that people are so interested in consciousness. Like, I didn't expect this when I started on this book. Really. Yeah, No, I didn't. And it seemed like a very academic topic. And I think two things have changed that. One is the fact that I think we feel our consciousnesses are just full of bullshit right now. And there's so much stuff we don't want to be thinking about that we're thinking about. And you take phones away from kids and they're actually grateful even once they get over the shock of living without a phone for a day or while they're in school. Because our consciousness is under pressure from everyday life, capitalism, and the need to succeed financially. We happen to have a president who intrudes on our consciousness for a lot More of the day than any of us have had experience before with previous presidents. So I think there's some desire to get back to some more sovereignty around our consciousness. And psychedelics are part of that too. And there is also AI that that is, you know, I say in the book, we're entering a Copernican moment, a possible redefinition of what it means to be human. On the one hand, we have all these animals and even plants that turn out to be conscious, what we used to think was our special thing. And on the other side, we have these machines that are going to be smarter than we are. And some people think they'll be conscious, but whether they can or not, we're going to think they're conscious and act on that basis, which raises all sorts of problems. So who are we exactly, if we're not the smartest, most conscious being? And are we more like the animals who can feel and die and suffer, or are we more like the thinking machines who speak our language?
- [73:01]
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. I wonder how different the experience of being conscious of in advanced modernity with a smartphone and a task list.
- [73:27]
Redfin Advertiser
And
- [73:29]
Ezra Klein
we are really training ourselves to narrow down, to be successful in the economy we have structured in much of the Western, though not only Western world at this point. We have altered what it means to be human. And I wonder how much we've made the experience of consciousness increasingly unsatisfying by like you 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 the difference 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,
- [74:07]
Michael Pollan
you can feel the shrinking of the
- [74:10]
Ezra Klein
shrinking and the tightening of the chest
- [74:11]
Michael Pollan
and the, the posture, the posture screens. Yeah,
- [74:20]
Ezra Klein
we have narrowed how it feels to be a human being.
- [74:22]
Michael Pollan
We have, but it's not too late, you know, I mean, tell me about
- [74:25]
Ezra Klein
your consciousness sovereignty ideas as you're moving
- [74:28]
Michael Pollan
in here into consciousness hygiene. 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. Good that these are people who ruminate a lot. And I'm prone to that too, 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, 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. You know, we spend so much time thinking the thoughts of other people and enduring the rants of other people and the obsessions of other people. Meditation is, I think, a really interesting way to kind of put a fence around your consciousness. You know, you put down your phone, you still have a pad. Cause 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, you know, 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.
- [75:59]
Ezra Klein
Sure you do, Michael.
- [76:01]
Michael Pollan
We believe you for sure.
- [76:03]
Ezra Klein
You're not just a zombie here. 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. I remember I was in a period of meditation a couple 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. And 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 nothing of our president, who I think has.
- [77:01]
Michael Pollan
Cannot sit in a room alone with himself.
- [77:02]
Ezra Klein
Cannot sit in a room alone with himself. I think his need for constant distraction and ego reinforcement actually speaks to some complicated relationship he has with his own consciousness. It is sometimes actually quite hard to be there by yourself and when you make space for it. And I mean, people who go on meditative retreat often have very difficult times. It can be, and I think usually is very profound and. But you are often going through struggle. One of the great lies about Meditation is that it's peaceful. In fact, it's often much more agitating. Yeah, it's much more peaceful to distract yourself. Or peaceful may not be the word I'm looking for there. But we distract ourselves away from internal agitation.
- [77:45]
Michael Pollan
We spend a lot of time anesthetizing ourselves, and there's a kind of boredom that I think is generative that we don't experience anymore because we have all these. These amazing ways to fill that space. But that space was productive in its unproductive way, and we've given that up. So that's a space of consciousness, too, that we could easily reclaim. I think psychedelics are one way to take control of your consciousness. I mean, that's probably not the right verb because there's so much that's uncontrolled, but it's all you. And I think that's one of the reasons that there's so much interest in it right now. You're blocking out a lot during a psychedelic experience as you go inside. So those are the kind of things, you know, I think we need to think in terms of hygiene for this great gift we have. And, well, what does hygiene mean here?
- [78:35]
Ezra Klein
Hygiene towards what?
- [78:37]
Michael Pollan
Keep it from being polluted, keep it clean, keep your consciousness from, you know, letting others dictate its contents, basically. Take a moment.
- [78:46]
Ezra Klein
Is that a question of consciousness or of attention?
- [78:48]
Michael Pollan
Well, they're very closely related. I think attention is a subset of consciousness, so attention is part of it. Attachment is another part of it, though. Attachment? Yeah, emotional attachments. That's a big part of consciousness, too. And that's now having won our attention. Now the companies are now going for our attachments with chatbots.
- [79:08]
Ezra Klein
I've just met people who are increasingly working on attentional liberation movements. The Friends of Attention being a good example of this. They just came out with a new book, and I've met people creating schools on this. And there is, in an interesting way, burbling around a kind of sense that 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.
- [79:48]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, absolutely.
- [79:49]
Ezra Klein
As a collective resource, I think, is a underplayed frame for this attention as a collective capacity that is being exhausted by people like Trump. By certain ways the media and algorithmic media works. 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, oh, it's
- [80:13]
Michael Pollan
going to be easier to manipulate, definitely. It's going to be angry, it's going to be angrier. I mean, 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. You know, how do you think independently when you're scrolling? You don't. You know, you react, but you're not setting the agenda. You're letting an algorithm set the agenda. 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 on 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 Dreamtime time.
- [81:07]
Ezra Klein
Yeah. This is Reed Hastings, years ago, who said our primary competitor is sleep. It was one of the more dystopic things I've heard a CEO say.
- [81:14]
Michael Pollan
I know, it really is. And you know, 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.
- [81:24]
Ezra Klein
I particularly loved the Coda, the final chapter. You go spend time with Joan Halifax, a great Zen teacher. And she has a line in there that coming as it does at the end of this very heady book, she says that she has divested herself from all meaning. And you go to talk to her and she basically sends you to a cave and puts off talking to you. Tell me a bit about that experience and also what you took from that extremely Zen form of teaching that you.
- [81:57]
Michael Pollan
Well, exactly.
- [81:58]
Ezra Klein
That you were gifted.
- [82:00]
Michael Pollan
I mean, it was kind of an experiential co Ann. Right. I mean, like, I'm not gonna. I should have known she's Zen teacher, that she would be allergic to concepts and interpretation. And everything I wanted to do, it was like, duh, you know, So I had met her once or twice before. I had a lot of admiration for her. We'd been on a panel together. Cause she had a lot of experience with psychedelics. She was married to Stan Grof and administered huge doses of LSD to the dying back in the 70s. And I thought I would go it's
- [82:30]
Ezra Klein
such a wild project.
- [82:31]
Michael Pollan
I know, it really is. Although many people have been helped by this. I mean, it's one of the better applications of psychedelics I think is helping people with terminal cancer. But anyway, I was working on the self chapter at the time and you know, there's this Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion which I've struggled with in various ways. I understand sort of how it's true, but yet self seems to be still working in my life. And I wanted to talk to her about that. And she had described her, her retreat center, which is called upaia, it's in Santa Fe as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. I was like, oh, that sounds interesting, I should go get deconstructed. So that's why I went and I got there and I spent a couple days with the adepts and the monks. But then she said, I think we should go up to the retreat. And she said, we'll go up there and you'll stay in the cave. And I'm like, the cave? That's like not my kind of thing, I'm not a camper. And she said, don't worry, it's a five star cave. So we get there and then after this 25 mile dirt road and then there's another half mile hike out to the cave. And there's no electricity and there's no running water. And somebody's dug into this hillside, these caves, and with a glass door on one side overlooking this meadow. And there I was for the next three or four days. And she kept ducking my interviews. And at one point she said, I've divested of meaning. I was like, oh shit, this is not good for the journalist conducting interviews. But like a meditation retreat that you were describing, it is almost a psychedelic experience when you're alone with yourself and the borders of self attenuate, they become kind of more porous. You realize the extent to which our identity as selves is a social identity and it's reinforced by everybody we talk to. Cause they're treating us like a self, so we must be a self. But if you're absolutely alone in the middle of nowhere and you have no access to media, it softens. And then I was meditating for hours at a time. And it was very interesting because life became like a meditation. In fact, I had more profound meditations doing chores, you know, chopping wood and sweeping out my little cave than I did when I was sitting on the platform. And it shifted my thinking about consciousness in this way. I had gotten caught in this frame, very Western, very male, of problem solution, hard problem of consciousness solution. And I had trained my attention, I had narrowed, right. I had a focus on that question for five years of really struggling to understand this. And I suddenly realized, well, there is the problem of attention, but there's also the fact of it. And the fact of it is so marvelous and so astonishing and mysterious, and why aren't I paying more attention to that? Why aren't I being more present? One night I woke up in the middle of the night to go out to pee. And there is. It's a new moon, and there's no light pollution at all. And the stars, this vault of stars is more numerous and more gorgeous than it's ever been. But it's not out there. It's reaching all the way down to me here that we occupy the. The same space, the same intergalactic blanket. And it was such a. All my kind of learned ways of looking at the starry sky. You know, we all have these predictions, right? The brain is a prediction machine. All the concepts and the frames just went away. And it was just kind of like me. Stars, space. And, you know, this is not such an unusual experience, but it shifted my thinking from solving a problem to. To being within it.
- [86:29]
Ezra Klein
You talked earlier about the way this book has a quality of. You read it and maybe you know less, but it adds wonder.
- [86:39]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [86:41]
Ezra Klein
And it made me think as I was going through different theories, you know, integrated information processing or whatever it's called, and how sad I'd be if any of them are true. If you could prove to me that global workspace theory was the truth of consciousness, if you could prove to me consciousness evolved and all the things I think are a byproduct of an evolutionary process for reducing uncertainty, I would hate it.
- [87:14]
Michael Pollan
Well, you know, it's funny. This is a lesson I learned not just from Joan, but from my wife, who's an artist, Joan. And she was lecturing me about not knowing has its own power. And of course, it is Zen idea to cultivate the don't know mind. And she's right. It does have a power. And that not knowing opens you in a way that knowing closes you down. And that we're very frustrated with not knowing, but it is the state. It is our existential predicament about many, many things. And getting comfortable with it. I mean, it was a long way to go for me to get comfortable with it, but getting comfortable with it, y. More awe, more wonder in the face of mystery.
- [87:56]
Ezra Klein
I think that's a place to end. Always. Our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
- [88:00]
Michael Pollan
Three books for you. 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. And so for science, you know, red is a certain frequency and red to them is an illusion because it's constructed in the brain. But they're pointing out that humans who experience red is a fact of nature, like any other fact of nature, and you gotta deal with it. So how does science deal with lived experience? It's a fantastic book. Another book that was really influential as I was working on the stream of consciousness is Stream of consciousness novel by Lucy Elman called Ducks Newburyport. It's a thousand pages, one sentence, and that sounds really daunting and like, I'm not gonna 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, has a home baking business and, and it's everything going on in her head, including scrolling on her phone. But you have to infer that because there's nothing to orient you. But anyway, it's great fun and really funny and brilliant book. Lastly, there was a book about consciousness. 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, he's one of the great explainers of consciousness and mental phenomenon in general. His TED talk about reality 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.
- [90:02]
Ezra Klein
Michael Pollan. Thank you very much.
- [90:04]
Michael Pollan
Thank you.
- [90:16]
Ezra Klein
This episode of the israel clancho is produced by kristin lin. Fact checking by kim frida. Our senior audio engineer is jeff geld, with additional mixing by isaac jones and aman sahota. Our executive producer is claire gordon. The show's production team also includes annie galvin, marie cast marina king jack mccordick, roland hu, emma kelbeck and jan kobel. Original music by aman sahota and pat mccusker. Audience strategy by christina seymilwski and shannon busta. The director of new york times opinion audio is annie rose strasser.
- [91:01]
Redfin Advertiser
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