A World Appears
A Journey Into Consciousness
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 24 Feb 2026
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
From the best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind, a pioneering search for consciousness in the brain and beyond
A World Appears is the story of the quest to solve the greatest mystery in nature: consciousness. How does it feel to be you with your own personal feelings, thoughts and experiences? Every one of us is intimately familiar with consciousness, but no one knows how – or why – it came to be that three pounds of grey matter can generate a subjective point of view.
The early 1990s marked the birth of a new science of consciousness, based on the assumption that the phenomenon could be explained in terms of brain activity, but that effort is faltering, and wilder ideas, such as panpsychism, are now getting a hearing. Indeed, there is now reason to doubt that ‘objective science’ as we have known it since Galileo has the right tools to plumb first-person experience. A World Appears takes Michael Pollan from the laboratories where scientists are searching for the neural correlates of consciousness to encounters with philosophers and novelists and Buddhist monks, whom he finds have just as much to teach us about consciousness, if not more.
A story that begins in a brain lab in Seattle ends, of all places, in a cave in the mountains of New Mexico, where the author discovers that explaining consciousness may be less urgent than learning to practice it in our everyday lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Pollan (This Is Your Mind on Plants) delivers an enlightening exploration of what is and isn't known about consciousness. Noting that scientists have yet to arrive at a sturdy explanation of why "a world appears when you open your eyes," Pollan takes readers through leading theories, shedding light on sentience, feeling, thought, and selfness. He questions whether a brain is a prerequisite for consciousness and describes how a growing cadre of plant neurobiologists have found plants to be "highly intelligent beings, able to read their environment and solve novel problems." He probes the role of emotions in consciousness and interviews neurologist Antonio Damasio, who makes the case that "feelings are the body's way of getting the mind's attention in order to keep us alive." Turning to the contents of consciousness—thoughts—he cites studies that suggest thinking looks different for everyone; people can have an inner monologue or picture visual images, while a few "live in a world of pure perception" with few traces of an inner experience at all. Elsewhere, he explores how the brain stitches memories together to form a sense of self and how chemicals from caffeine to LSD alter that experience. Pollan's inquisitiveness makes him an accessible and entertaining guide through the "labyrinth" of consciousness. Readers will be captivated by this tour of the inner workings of the mind.
