Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Produced by Kristin Lin

Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s the paradox of our consciousness: It is the only thing we truly know — and the only thing we have actual firsthand experience of. 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 it gets. The more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail.

I find it delightful that something so close to us can remain so mysterious. That a central question about the universe is happening inside of us, all of the time. Now, that’s not to say we haven’t tried to understand it — or that we haven’t learned a lot from those efforts.

In his new book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” the science writer Michael Pollan takes us on a tour of those efforts, of those theories, of those experiments, of those psychedelic trips and meditation retreats — and keeps finding himself in stranger and stranger territory, deeper inside the mystery.

So I wanted to have him on to talk about it.

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

Michael Pollan: Thank you. Good to be back.

I wanted to begin with an experiment that you participated in during the reporting of this book, where you wore a beeper and tried to record what was going on in your mind when that beeper went off.

What did you learn from that?

When is the beeper going to go off? [Laughs.]

There’s a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, named Russell Hurlburt, and he’s been sampling “inner experience,” as he calls it, for 50 years.

And the way he does it is he equips you with a beeper. You wear this thing in your ear; it emits a very sharp beep. You know exactly what it was and when it was; there’s no reaching for your phone or any doubt about what you’re dealing with. And then you’re supposed to write down what you were thinking at that very moment. Then you collect a day’s worth of beeps, which could be five or six.

The experiment has got various kinds of observer effect problems. You wonder: God, if the beeper went off now, what would I have to say? Oh, that would really be embarrassing.

So there is this self-consciousness, but you forget about it over the course of the day. Suddenly, you get a beep and write it down.

I was struck by how banal my beeps were. The one I described in the book is: I’m waiting in line at a bakery, and I’m deciding whether I should buy a roll or use the heel of bread I have at home to make a sandwich for lunch. This is not profound stuff.

Then he interrogates you about the beeps to try to make sense of it, to 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.

He would say: Did you speak that? Or did you hear that spoken?

I was like: I have no idea.

He asked: Was it in language or was it an image?

And I said: Well, there was sort of an image. It was very unspecific, kind of an emoji of a roll — not a real roll.

And he’d take you through it. It was an incredibly challenging process.

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 in my brain.

It’s something less than a fully formed thought. The word “thought” implies a kind of roundedness to the thing that just doesn’t exist. Many of our thoughts are these wisps of mentation.

I love that. “Gossamer traces of mentation” is how you put it in the book.

Yes. Many people think in totally unsymbolized thoughts. I don’t really understand what those would be if they’re not words and not images. But his findings, after 50 years of this, is that we think in very different ways.

He roasts you at the end of the experiment. [Laughs.] You finish this up, and he says that you are low on inner-life experience.

Very little inner life, yes. I didn’t know how to take this. I mean, we all think we have a lively inner life, but the absence of one never occurred to me.

That raises a question for me, which is: To what degree was what you were recording in this experiment different from your perception of how your mental life feels to you in a day?

And so what was the difference? And what do you make of it?

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 that I argued with him a lot. I found the whole idea of separating thoughts into these discrete chunks absolutely impossible.

When I was at 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 on this very loud plaid skirt that was kind of hideous. There was my awareness of the other people there. Did I recognize anybody there? I often bump into people I know.

My thoughts were so infected by one another. One thought was 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.

He talks about things like the unarticulated affinity between two thoughts — 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.

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?

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. I don’t know if he used this word, but he acted like and wrote like a phenomenologist, which is to say that he wrote about the lived experience of thought.

I first got acquainted with him when I was working on my book “How to Change Your Mind.” He had written “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” and there’s a fantastic chapter there on mystical experience. He had experimented with drugs to look at these outer reaches of consciousness.

He’s kind of unreadable, yet he’s a great writer at the same time. There’s something about his sentences, which are so long and intricate, that he loses a modern reader about 80 percent of the way to the period. At least me.

But the observations are just so refined, and they 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 he was 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 “qualities of experience.” He goes so far beyond qualia.

So I had a headful of James when I was doing this experiment, and it seemed to keep doing violence to that. I recognized my thinking more in James than in Hurlburt’s questions.

One thing I love about James is his precision in describing how imprecise the stuff of the mind is.

And “mind-stuff” is a phrase of his.

I want to quote you quoting him here, because I love this. You write:

The objects of our thoughts can never be completely disentangled from what James variously calls their “auras,” “halos,” “accentuations,” “associations,” “suffusions,” “feelings of tendency,” “premonitions,” “psychic overtones” and — perhaps my favorite — “fringe of unarticulated affinities.”

The objects of our thoughts can never be completely disentangled from what James variously calls their “auras,” “halos,” “accentuations,” “associations,” “suffusions,” “feelings of tendency,” “premonitions,” “psychic overtones” and — perhaps my favorite — “fringe of unarticulated affinities.”

The fringe! It’s so beautiful.

But talk to me a bit about that. I do a meditation often where you note what is going on in your attention. You note your thoughts, and, even, within thoughts: 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.

Tell me a little bit about the borderlands of mental experience.

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 it’s in the nature of reductive science to simplify things in order to better understand them. It would be very weird to start from a Jamesian view of the stream of consciousness and try to understand that scientifically.

I feel like one of the central questions of your book, and one reason I like the topic of consciousness so much, is that it is the only thing we have actual experience of. It is the most familiar thing to us, and yet it’s quite unfamiliar and — this is one of the great lessons of meditation or psychedelics — more unfamiliar, the more you attend to it.

Yes. That is what is really interesting. The more I thought about consciousness, the more elusive the phenomenon became.

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.

As you’re on the verge of sleep or sleepiness, they just pop into your mind. Where did they come from? And this idea of thoughts thinking themselves is bizarre to most people.

I just think the poets and novelists are further along than the scientists — as they often are. That’s one of the reasons I turned toward literature, later in the book, for a more subtle understanding of the thought process.

Well, let’s stay with the scientist 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 protohuman — nonhuman.

You have a great chapter on plants. Maybe a place to start with the plants is: You had taught me something I didn’t know, which is that you can anesthetize a plant.

Isn’t that mind-blowing? [Chuckles.]

Can you talk a bit about that experiment and what it seems to imply?

There’s a group of scientists — botanists — and they call themselves plant neurobiologists, which is a very tendentious thing to say, because there are no neurons involved in plants. They’re trolling more conventional botanists, I think.

I appreciate when people troll each other in ways that laymen don’t even understand. I was like: That seems fine. [Laughs.]

No, it’s fighting words in the field.

OK. 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. They’ve also done experiments to try to determine if they’re conscious — or I would use the word “sentient,” which is more reasonable. Although they will use the word “conscious.”

Do you want to share the difference in your mind between those two words?

In my mind, “sentience” is a more basic form of consciousness. It’s what perhaps all living things have. It’s the ability to sense your environment and recognize the valence — is that a positive or negative thing happening? — and then respond appropriately.

Bacteria can do this. They have chemotaxis. They can recognize molecules that are food and molecules that are poison, and act appropriately. So it’s a very basic form.

“Consciousness” is how humans do sentience. 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 bonobos have imagination, which is kind of mind-blowing.

How do we learn that?

Experiments. They got a bonobo, as I recall, to play a kind of tea-party game, as you would play with a kid. And they’re pouring an empty pitcher into cups, 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 no, other animals can, too.

So anesthetized plants.

Yes. One of the experiments these guys did was to take anesthetics that work on humans, including a really bizarre one called xenon gas. I say it’s bizarre because xenon 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.

If you take a carnivorous plant, or a sensitive plant, like Mimosa pudica — a tropical plant that collapses its leaves if you touch it — and you give it xenon, or any number of other anesthetics that work on us, they won’t react. There will 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 ——

At least two states of being.

At least two states, right. Two that we’ve identified: lights on, lights off. That, to some, implies consciousness.

There’s the famous definition of Thomas Nagel’s, 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.

Let me hold you on that. Because as I understand the Thomas Nagel essay, it’s that it is like something to the organism.

So you could imagine a situation in which it is not like anything for the plant to be awake. You give an example related to this in the book, where you say: When you plug in a toaster, you toast with it. But when you unplug it, we don’t think it is like something different for the toaster to be turned off.

I don’t think it’s like anything to be a toaster.

So the fact that something has a response to stimuli doesn’t necessarily imply it has a subjective experience.

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 kinds of qualities like those we give to a thermostat are really just us giving those qualities to the thermostat. The thermostat doesn’t care on its own whether its 70 degrees or 65 degrees. So I don’t think it’s proof of consciousness, but it’s really spooky and interesting.

The researcher in question is Stefano Mancuso. He’s an Italian researcher at the University of Florence. He has also shown how plants sleep.

There are characteristics that mark a creature’s ability to sleep, which we thought only belonged to higher mammals — though birds sleep, too. But we didn’t think really simple creatures slept. But it turns out even insects sleep.

Giulio Tononi is the scientist who came up with these criteria for sleep. Plants meet, I think, all of them, which is interesting. And some take that as evidence of consciousness.

Do you think you’re causing plants pain by pruning them?

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 mowed grass the scream of suffering? And that will make you crazy.

You say it will make you crazy, but people know we’re causing pain to cows and pigs and chickens and just don’t think about it.

Exactly. It doesn’t bother them.

So it turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on an industrial scale.

Yes. Although there’s all this worry about this in Silicon Valley, that our tender hearts should go out to these machines that might be conscious, and we owe moral consideration to the machines.

Here’s my suspicion about that. Because I do think it is possible that we are going to make sentient machines — machines that have some experience of what it is like to be a machine.

I think that you will find there’s a lot of concern about that until the moment it turns out to be against someone’s interest.

They also love the conversation about the far future, or near far future, whether it’s boomer or doomer view. Because it’s a great way not to deal with what’s right in front of us.

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.

And that is, in part, helping to justify vivisections of live animals in that era.

Yes. Dogs and rabbits.

I have two dogs. I’ve been around some rabbits. The idea that you would believe those animals are not feeling pain, raises a pretty profound question for me 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.

Yes, that and the power of an idea.

Descartes developed this idea that humans had this monopoly on consciousness: “I think, therefore I am.”

In other words, the thing I know is that I’m a conscious being, and nobody else has it. No other creature has it.

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.

It is hard to believe. But it’s true, and it tells you something about the power of an idea to overcome our feelings, our instincts.

And we do this all the time. He was so wrong about this that it’s not funny. But we see things through an ideological lens, and it shapes what we actually see and hear.

It changed the sound of those screams to him into meaninglessness.

So you do get into this question of: Are we causing mass suffering to plants?

I talked to Stefano Mancuso and some other researchers about this. One believes that yes, we are causing pain to plants. But his take was: Hey, that’s just life. If we don’t eat plants, we’re down to salt, basically, if you give up on animals and plants.

Mancuso doesn’t think so. He thinks pain would not be adaptive to a creature that can’t run away. And the big fact about plants, of course, is they’re sessile — they’re stuck in place, they’re rooted.

That dictates everything about them. And it’s the reason the language in which they work is biochemical. They produce chemicals to protect themselves, to intoxicate, to attract, all different kinds of things. So he says: They’re aware that they’re being eaten. They often don’t mind. The grasses actually benefit from being eaten. And then, of course, there are all the fruits and nuts that they’re happy to give away to mammals.

I don’t know where I come out on that. I don’t think my plants, when I prune them — I mean, they like being pruned. They respond with more growth and new leaves, so I’m not too worried about that.

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

Well, it’s a short-term or long-term thing, right? Perhaps when you cut them with the secateurs, that bothers them, but they respond in a really constructive way.

There’s also another more complex way plants are operating in this book. Some of this book is motivated by experiences you’ve had with psychedelic mushrooms.

Right, which are not exactly plants, but OK.

You’ll get letters. I’m just........

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