Michael Pollan takes readers to the most intimate frontier in science: the mystery of our own awareness. Drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, Indigenous epistemology, and his own experiences with meditation and psychedelics, Pollan asks the question that has eluded centuries of inquiry—what exactly is consciousness, who has it, and why does anything feel like something at all?
He visits plant neurobiologists searching for the first flicker of awareness in plants, wrestles with claims that artificial intelligence may be approaching consciousness, and returns again and again to what scientists call “the hard problem”—the stubborn fact that nobody can explain how subjective experience arises from matter.
Along the way, he encounters a field in genuine turmoil, where materialist assumptions are giving way to stranger, more open-ended possibilities. For readers drawn to the expanding circle of awareness, Pollan is the ideal guide—a journalist and seeker who approaches the science not as an expert but as someone genuinely astonished, asking the questions most of us are afraid to ask out loud.
Why it matters: Pollan guides readers through a field in genuine turmoil, where materialist assumptions are giving way to stranger, more open-ended possibilities about who and what possesses awareness. By exploring consciousness in plants, questioning AI sentience, and confronting the hard problem that nobody can explain how subjective experience arises from matter, he expands the circle of who counts as conscious—with profound implications for how we relate to the living world.
