Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2026

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 may not emerge from inside us at all. “I’ve entered this ‘never say never’ realm with this research,” Pollan told me. Mentioned: A World Appears by Michael Pollan “The Descriptive Experience Sampling method” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Sarah A. Akhter “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio “The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought” by Kalina Christoff and Kieran C. R. Fox Book Recommendations: The Blind Spot by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann Being You by Anil Seth Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Kim Freda. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	Oh, Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness.
0:36.5	It is the only thing we truly know,
0:39.2	the only thing we have certain actual first-hand experience of,
0:44.0	and yet we don't understand it at all.
0:47.2	We don't know what it's made of.
0:49.2	We don't know how it works.
0:50.3	We don't know why it exists,
0:51.8	and the closer we look at it,
0:53.4	the weirder consciousness gets, the more we we look at it, the weirder consciousness gets,
0:55.2	the more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail. I find that so delightful,
1:03.3	that something so close can remain so mysterious, that such a central question about the universe
1:10.6	is happening inside of us all of the time.
1:14.2	Now, that's not to say we haven't tried to understand, or that we haven't learned a lot from those
1:18.6	efforts. In his new book, A World Appears, a Journey Into Consciousness. The science writer Michael
1:24.6	Paulin takes a tour of those efforts, of those theories, of those
1:28.2	experiments, of those psychedelic trips and meditation retreats, and he keeps finding himself
1:33.9	in stranger and stranger territory deeper inside the mystery.
1:39.6	So I wanted to have him on to talk about it.
1:41.6	As always, my email, Ezra Clindshow at NYTimes.com.
1:53.8	Michael Pollan, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Good to be back.
1:57.2	So I wanted to begin with an experiment that you participated in during the reporting list
	...

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