Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege'

Michael Pollan: “Psychedelics have a way of smudging the windshield of experience” Cayce Clifford/Guardian/eyevine Author Michael Pollan has tackled plants, food and psychedelics in bestselling books including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind . Now, he has taken on the thorny problem of consciousness. In his latest book A World Appears: A journey into consciousness , Pollan charts the work of scientists and philosophers, weaving in literary perspectives along the way. He spoke to New Scientist about the value of writing a book where you know less at the end than before you started. Olivia Goldhill: Let’s start with a deceptively tricky question: how do you define consciousness? Michael Pollan: The simplest way is to define it as subjective experience. We have subjective experience; toasters do not. You could even take off the “subjective” because having experience implies being aware that you’re having experience. Another definition I like comes from philosopher Thomas Nagel , who wrote a famous 1974 essay, “What is it like to be a bat?”. Bats are very different than we are, but nevertheless we can imagine it’s like something to be them. That’s a question to ask of any species or individual: if it’s like something to be you, then you’re conscious. The cortex is the newest, most evolutionarily recent part of the brain and, for a long time, it was assumed that consciousness must be in the cortex. But I was sold on the idea that consciousness begins with feelings, not thoughts. I was persuaded by the work done by Antonio DaMasio and Mark Solms and Anil Seth that consciousness begins with feelings, like hunger or itchiness, and therefore begins in the upper brainstem. That has huge implications. It tells us that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. You need a body that, like ours, is vulnerable and has feelings that have survival value. The best new popular science books of 2026 Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood You write about how much we don’t know about consciousness, and how science has struggled to make progress. Do we need a whole new form of science? We’ve organised the physical sciences in such a way that they limit themselves to objective, third-person, quantifiable things, and consciousness is a first-person, qualitative thing. This goes back to Galileo – he suggested a division where we leave subjective, qualitative things to the church. It’s not as if Galileo didn’t believe in subjective or qualitative things. He did. He just said it’s too risky, we don’t want to piss off the church any more than we already have. This kind of science has come down to us, and there’s reason to doubt whether those tools are adequate. You also have to study consciousness from inside consciousness. A book that had a big influence on me, The Blind Spot , points out that science itself is a manifestation of human con