How to understand your own consciousness (w/ Michael Pollan)

What is consciousness? Humans and animals have it, but do plants have sentience? These are the questions journalist Michael Pollan studies. Michael is the author of ten books on the relationship between food, consciousness, and psychedelics. Michael joins Chris to discuss why humans ruminate, how people should get comfortable with boredom, and whether we can really trust our own memories? Featured guest Follow Michael Pollan on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/michael.pollan and at michaelpollan.com/ https://michaelpollan.com/ Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDAudioCollective https://www.youtube.com/TEDAudioCollectiveFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Chris Duffy?

  You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Our guest today is Michael Pollan, the acclaimed journalist and writer who changed the way that millions of people thought about plants and food with his books The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire. But in recent years, Michael has become fascinated with the way that plants can do more than just give us a delicious meal. They can also change the way we see the world, sometimes literally. Michael dove into psychedelics with his book, How to Change Your Mind. And now, he's looking at the question of consciousness itself in his latest book, A World Appears. If there is anyone who can make us reexamine what it means to be human and what it means to be ourselves, it's Michael Pollan. And to show you that these are issues and ideas that Michael has been thinking about

• 0:43Chris Duffy?

  for decades, here's a clip from his 2008 TED Talk where he challenges the idea that we humans are the only conscious beings on Earth.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness, which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness, is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. And it's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool, but there's a comedian who said, "Well, who's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important?" Well, consciousness. So, when you look at the plants, you realize that they're other tools and they're just as interesting. Lima beans. You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite defending the lima bean. So, what plants have, while we have consciousness, tool-making, language, they have biochemistry. And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond we can imagine. And their complexity, their sophistication, is something to really marvel at.

• 2:08Chris Duffy?

  Okay, we are going to marvel at that and so much more, right after this quick break.

• 2:22Speaker 02

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• 2:58Chris Duffy?

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• 3:48Chris Duffy?

  On today's episode, we're talking about consciousness and our minds with Michael Pollan.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Michael Pollan. I'm the author of 10 books now, in total. Most recent being A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

• 4:01Chris Duffy?

  Michael, I really loved the book, and I'm so interested to talk to you about it. At the risk of ruining some of the journey of the book, my first question is, why should people care about understanding consciousness?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, in one sense, it'd be crazy not to think about your own mind and what's going on in it and understanding it better. We struggle with mental health problems. And And they're all rooted in our consciousness. But I think it's particularly urgent today. And one of the reasons I decided to write this book, and it's off topic for me in some ways, although it does sort of flow out of How to Change Your Mind, my book on psychedelics and psychedelic therapy, is that our consciousness is is under siege today. We've got corporations trying to buy and sell our attention, you know, since social media algorithms. And we've understood that as a as a problem now for a couple of years. And attention, of course, is an important element of consciousness.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  It's it's where we direct our consciousness is our attention. But things have gotten a lot worse, I think, or more challenging with AI, because now you've got, you know, machines speaking to us in the first person, which, when you think about it, is really weird. And that they are, we are forming bonds with them. So they're not just hacking our attention. They're now hacking some of our deepest emotional capabilities. And you've got people forming these bonds that are with machines that they feel more comfortable with than with other people. So I think that our, you know, I conceive of our consciousness

• 5:39Speaker 01

  as this very precious space of privacy and freedom internally, and that we need to protect it. We need to be somewhat vigilant because we're giving it away right now. And so that's why that's why I think it's worth thinking about now. It's it's something many of us take for granted. It's just this kind of transparent glass through which we perceive reality. But if you smudge it a little, as happens with both psychedelics and meditation, suddenly you realize, oh, there is this this realm between us and the world. And what is that about? And how can I nurture it?

• 6:18Chris Duffy?

  I had literally underlined and highlighted the phrase where you say it smudges the transparent nature of

• 6:24Speaker 01

  The windshield, yeah.

• 6:25Chris Duffy?

  Yeah. So often, people you're interviewing in the book, because you did also write a book about psychedelics,

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:30Chris Duffy?

  immediately launch into telling you about their own psychedelic experiences and their trips. And you say, this is a thing that kind of has started happening to me since I wrote that other book.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've sort of become the psychedelic confessor and, and people see me as an opportunity to tell stories about their trips that not too many other people are interested in.

• 6:48Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, I think about, sometimes I think about your place in the popular culture as the person who is the most likely to have led to people Googling, how can I buy mushrooms? Because they don't already know.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  It's a funny role to have. So, you know, when I started this book, it was somewhat inspired by psychedelic experience. I'm not alone in this, that psychedelics really makes you very aware of consciousness as a, as this amazing phenomenon. And you start wondering, why is it this way and not that way? And could I change it? And, well, yeah, you can change it with psychedelics and meditation.

• 7:21Chris Duffy?

  You talk about how there's a study that finds that people who have had a psychedelic experience, they go from very unlikely to believe that plants or other creatures have consciousness like humans, to very likely to believe that a plant could be conscious or have some sort of intelligence.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is very interesting. And it's hard to evaluate the, the truth quotient of that. But, you know, I sometimes think that for most of history, we have been animists. All children are animists until we drum it out of them in school. And, you know, since Descartes, you know, we thought we were the only people who had consciousness and everything else was, you could do what you wanted with it. It's been licensed for, you know, destroying the planet to a remarkable extent. But psychedelics kind of puts you back in that animist frame of mind. Does that mean it's necessarily true? I think we have to evaluate the insights we have on psychedelics and then kind of cross-reference them with science and other

• 8:19Speaker 01

  modes of knowing. But going back to your first point about these researchers using psychedelics. I mean, I think that they are right now opening up to alternative understandings of consciousness that we have, we started out thinking consciousness must surely be the product of this gray matter between our ears and that that somehow generates it. And it's an emergent property of neurons arranged in a certain way. That idea has not borne fruit and probably won't. And so the people studying consciousness are a little bit at loose ends. And some of them are using psychedelics as a way to think outside the box.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And I think they really are using psychedelics right now. And some of them are finding it quite productive. And there's one scientist I profiled, Christoph Koch, who really had his whole metaphysics changed by an ayahuasca experience that he, you know, he spoke very openly about. And he went from believing, you know, that surely there's a materialist explanation of consciousness that it comes from within to wondering whether consciousness might be something outside the brain and that we channel in some ways. I have to applaud him as a, you know, he's like nearly 70. Most scientists don't change their minds ever.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  And he's changed his mind several times in the course of his career. They say that science changes one funeral at a time, but it may also be one psychedelic trip at a time instead.

• 9:56Chris Duffy?

  You, you talk several times in the book about your admiration for people who are able to kind of hold these ideas lightly and, and see new possibilities. And some of the parts that were most surprising to me are the examinations of the way that there's this historical framework for understanding the world and science. And that we are now starting to understand that perhaps some of those Foundations are built on not such solid ground.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So, one of the contentions of the book is we may not have the right scientific tools to understand consciousness. And that we are inheritors of a scientific tradition, really inaugurated by Galileo, that basically bracketed subjective experience. He determined at a certain point that the scientific enterprise would focus on what was an objective third person. And, you know, we think of science as this third person view from nowhere, but of course it's not. It's a set of tools that are the product of human consciousness. So, how do we study a phenomenon we can't, we literally can't get outside of?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  I mean, astronomy is similar in that, in that we study the cosmos from inside the cosmos, and we've learned a lot, but imagine how much we could learn if we could actually step outside it. And, uh, and of course, that's impossible. So, there's some unique challenges to a scientific exploration of consciousness that I, I think we haven't worked out yet. We may get there. I mean, I'm not saying it's not going to work for all time, but we may have to change science first. It's also the reason why other ways of knowing are relevant to the study of consciousness. And that's why I don't just look at science. This book is not all about science. As it turns out, novelists and poets know an awful lot about consciousness.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Maybe not how it's generated by brains, if, if indeed that's what it is, but they understand the, uh, the stream of consciousness, how our thoughts unfold, maybe where they come from. And they've done, in some ways, a better job than the scientists in describing this amazing phenomenon. So, I look at science and I also look at Buddhism. Buddhism has been thinking about what consciousness is for, you know, a couple thousand years. You know, I'm regarded as a science writer, but I, I don't see myself as exclusively that. I've found, whether I'm writing about food, or plants, or, or the mind, that when you layered very different ways of knowing, science, memoir, literature, philosophy, Buddhism,

• 12:31Speaker 01

  or other religious traditions, that's when you get a fulsome, rich picture of whatever you're writing about. And I do that here. I kind of circle the subject from all these different angles.

• 12:41Chris Duffy?

  Absolutely. And I think that often is what makes the The science parts the most understandable is to then approach them. I mean, you have a you have an interview with a novelist who wrote a stream of consciousness novel.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, Lucy Elman.

• 12:55Chris Duffy?

  You go and live in a you live in a cave with a Buddhist monk. So there's a moment where you are examining whether plants might be intelligent in some sort of a way, whether they might have some sort of level of sentience or consciousness. And you talk about a root from a corn plant solving a maze. And I found that to be just this incredible thing I'd never heard before. So can you explain to people what is happening there?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  So basically, there's this scientist who calls himself a plant neurobiologist, and he's kind of trolling, you know, brain people with that because everyone knows that plants don't have neurons, but they they can act in ways that suggest they do. And he is convinced that plants are sentient. Now, I should draw a distinction between sentience and consciousness because it's I think it's important. Sentience is a very fundamental, simple form of consciousness, and it connotes having senses that make you aware, make the being aware of the world, and able to respond to changes in its environment in an intelligent way. And having its valence, you know, what's happening, you can tell if this is positive

• 14:05Speaker 01

  for the creature or negative for the creature. And many people I interviewed would argue that that goes all the way down to the simplest life forms, possibly to bacteria, possibly to plants, and it's not limited to animals. And I I can see that. I think sentience may be a property of life. Consciousness is a much more elaborate form of sentience. Consciousness is how humans do sentience. Different animals do sentience in different ways. It wouldn't pay for plants to have self-consciousness like we do. They're much more interested in biochemistry because in their world, chemicals are how they deal with things, both threats and opportunities. So this scientist, Stefano Mancuso, he's at the University of Florence, and I've interviewed

• 14:50Speaker 01

  him several times and been to his lab, has been trying to demonstrate the sentience or Or intelligence of plants. And one of the many experiments he's done, and he's incredibly imaginative, has been creating a maze. It's probably a foot by a foot. And he puts some fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which is the nitrogen source for corn plants, for lots of plants, in one corner. And he plants the corn plant at the top. And it's got to get to this place down in this corner. And somehow it senses the location of the ammonium nitrate, probably in some chemical way.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Because plants have incredible receptors and transmitters for for volatile chemicals. And you watch, and it's it's time lapse. So it it proceeds more quickly than it does in life. And you watch this root like wind its way down and and actually find the the ammonium nitrate, the cheese, if you will, if this were if this were mice. And he's basically saying, look, when we demonstrate that with animals, we say they're intelligent and aware. And so why aren't we saying the same thing for for plants? It's so clear that somehow the bean plant knows exactly where the pole is. Because even though it's going like this and making this circular motion,

• 16:15Speaker 01

  it's growing in the direction of the pole. And it's like casting. It's like a fisherman casting over and over again. But it knows exactly where the pole is. So how does it see the pole? We don't know. Plants have some visual facility. It may be echolocation, sort of like a bat. Because we do know they make some noise every time they they divide their cells in growth. And maybe that noise reflects off of the pole. And like a blind person with a cane, they can hear. The the return and say, oh, it's reflecting over here. So the pole must be in this

• 16:54Speaker 01

  direction. We don't know, but plants have something like 20 senses to our five. They're picking up a lot on their environment. I mean, I'm fascinated by plant intelligence, and I'm convinced that plant sentience is a real thing, based on the research that I've read. Plants also have memory. So how do you have memory without neurons? Well, we're learning that there are these bioelectric fields that all living things have. So somehow that knowledge was stored in this bioelectric field, not in its brain. The world's a lot weirder and more wonderful than we know.

• 17:30Chris Duffy?

  It absolutely is.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  That's my big takeaway.

• 17:32Chris Duffy?

  And so the thing that then flips around for me is, OK, maybe the problem with us understanding plants as having this sort of sentience or or forms of intelligence is that we're just working at the wrong time scale. But if we did look at it as a time lapse, you see, oh, the root is solving the puzzle in a maze. Oh, they're growing and communicating.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Well, that's the beauty of time lapse. It allows us to enter their scale of time. But it's a reminder, too, that everything in consciousness, the world as we perceive it, is the product of our particular scale, our size. We exist in a world determined by our senses. You know, the range of the electromagnetic spectrum we can hear and see, there's a whole lot of other ones, as we know, that, you know, bees are existing in another scale of of vision, because they can see ultraviolet, which we can't see. So if you take away human consciousness, the world looks very different. And one of

• 18:33Speaker 01

  the neuroscientists I interviewed, I said, so tell me, what's the world like without human consciousness? And he goes, particles and waves. That's it. And then he said another time, ontological dust. I said, ooh. So we construct the world with our senses. I mean, it's not to say it isn't really out there, but the part of it, and it's vast, the part of it we take in is the part we can take in.

• 19:04Chris Duffy?

  We're going to take a short break, and then we will be right back.

• 19:18Chris Duffy?

  This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. What connects a hidden laboratory in the Amazon, giant pandas in China's mountain forests, research relating to the ocean, and communities living alongside wildlife in India? That's what you'll hear on season six of Planet Visionaries. Stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold, brings you real stories of discovery, determination, and research and initiatives relating to environmental change.

• 20:01Chris Duffy?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:11Speaker 03

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• 21:09Chris Duffy?

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• 21:51Chris Duffy?

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• 22:10Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. We're talking with Michael Pollan about consciousness, the subject of his new book, A World Appears. And one of the very thought provoking ideas that Michael examines in his book is the distinction that we make, often without even thinking about it really, between who we are and our bodies. So which one is the real us? What is the real us? Here's Michael reading an excerpt from his book.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  We speak of our bodies as something we own, which is why "I am my body" strikes the ear as off key. Our identification with our bodies is far from complete. The "I" in each of us, and that's the first person "I," not "eyes," the "I" in each of us, whatever that is, can regard the body as a discrete object. If someone loses a limb, they don't feel that their self has been diminished, only their body. And yet, if someone punches me in the stomach, it is "I" who have been hurt. In this context, the pronoun could refer to my body, my mind, or both. So who exactly is this "I" who has suffered this hurt? We're drawing closer to the heart of the matter and the end of the journey,

• 23:16Speaker 01

  to this elusive, but somehow essential and enduring sense of self. In the self, we confront a mental phenomenon beyond sentient feeling or thought. The self is in some ways the crown of consciousness and in other ways, its curse.

• 23:33Chris Duffy?

  I found that to be such a provocative passage in the book, to think about the ways in which we understand ourselves as being our body and also not being our body.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  I mean, the self is a very paradoxical phenomenon. And, you know, the Buddhists will tell you it's an illusion. Yes and no. I mean, even though it's an illusion, it gets things done. It has causal power in the world, you know? The ego allows you to have your podcast and allows me to write books and you to write books. I mean, it's very important. On the other hand, it is a construct, you know? It has no address in the brain and we're constantly reifying it. And it's very useful as a convention, but it's very hard to find it. And this is a famous exercise in meditation, but it goes back to David Hume, you know, who's an English philosopher. And he was very interested in the self.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  And he decided the best way to figure it out was to go inside his mind and introspect. And when he introspected, he said he could find everything, all sorts of things, like perceptions and feelings and thoughts. But he could find no thinker of those thoughts or feeler of those feelings or perceiver of those perceptions. And indeed, if you try it, you won't find anything, which is kind of weird. At the same time, we spend an awful lot of energy trying to escape the self and transcend it, psychedelics being one way, but, you know, experiences of nature and awe, all of which kind of shrink the self. There's a great experiment that a colleague of mine, Dacher Keltner,

• 25:12Speaker 01

  who studies awe, has done where he asks people to draw a stick figure of themselves on graph paper. And then he gives them an experience of awe, which might be river rafting or a beautiful picture of Yosemite. And then he says, let's draw yourself again. And they draw themselves at like half size because their sense of self is diminished by the experience of awe. So. What is that about? Why are we trying to escape this thing? And I think the reasons are that the self torments us too. I mean, the ego is the critical voice in our head very often. It's the generator of rumination. And rumination is at the heart of a lot of mental struggle. Depression, anxiety, addiction.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  These are all kind of ruminative disorders where we get stuck in loops of repetitive thought. And so relief from the self feels really good. Yet, many of us identify the self with, or identify themselves with their ego. And one of the interesting sort of discoveries I learned about in the course of writing the book is that consciousness survives the death of the self or the dissolution of the self. Temporary, obviously. But, and certainly I've had that during psychedelic experience. I had one particular experience I described in the book where my sense of self completely dissolved and I was just a pool of blue paint on the floor. And it was fine.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  It was great, in fact, because when the ego relaxes its hold on us, it's a defensive structure and it builds walls to protect us, our precious self. When those go away, there's this sensation emerging with something larger. And for me, and for some people, it's love and it's the universe and it's other people. For me, it was a piece of music that my psychedelic guide played. And I became that piece of music in a way I never has happened. The whole space between subject and object had disappeared and I was the piece of music. And it was incredibly somatic, powerful feeling of music. It was wonderful.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  But, you know, what I brought away is, brought away from the experience is, okay, that voice in my head that's, you know, telling me to assert myself or do this or do that, or goading me to get more work done, it's not me. I mean, I don't have to listen to it all the time. I can, I can treat it as one of several voices in my head. I know that sounds psychotic, but it's not. And I think getting that perspective on the ego is very healthy. And of course, people spend years in therapy doing just that, getting perspective on their ego. So, yeah, the self, I didn't come to any firm conclusion, even though it is a construct of the mind, of consciousness.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  It still can get things done. It hasn't, it has a certain amount of reality, even as a conventional thing. The fact that we can't really engage with each other without gelling into something substantial that we call a self. But I explore all the challenges of it. You know, one of the, one of my lessons in this book that I come to at the end is not knowing certain things for sure is just part of the human condition. And whether the self is real or not is one of those. But I have to say, everybody has had experience of the self before, of consciousness before the self asserts itself.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  And that happens every morning when you wake up for that microsecond, those 500 milliseconds before you realize, where am I and who am I? There is that, that, that brief moment of kind of basic non-self consciousness. And that's a reminder that the mind constructs itself. It's just, it's not there.

• 29:08Chris Duffy?

  I'm curious to ask you to be a little prescriptive for a moment because it's easy if we're talking about like, physical health and we're talking with someone about, you know, exercise. And then I say, okay, well, what should people do to experience this?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:22Chris Duffy?

  I think it's really interesting to think for you, like, maybe let's put it in the classic self-improvement podcast terms and say, what are three things that listeners should do or think about differently to experience some of these insights in a new way?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Well, one is to dwell on that moment. And when you wake up and you realize who you are and where you are and think about it right after it happens, because you'll, you'll attend to that, that very brief period of not having it, of not having anything, you know, just being like sort of proto-conscious. So. Meditating on that moment, I think, is really important. Another thing related, and really meditation is the space we enter to think about consciousness in our minds. And I think it's valuable for that reason. And a lot of this kind of thinking, that's when I do it. There's another distinction I draw in the book.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  So I think there are many kinds of consciousness. The two big ones for most of us is lantern consciousness and spotlight consciousness. Yes. Spotlight consciousness is when we have narrowed our focus, we kind of put blinders on and we're doing it right now to be able to communicate and make this podcast. It's our focus. It's what we're trained to celebrate in school. I mean, it's required in school. Indeed, we drug kids who don't have it, which is to say ADHD, you know, who can't maintain that focus. On the other side is a kind of consciousness. And here I'm citing the work of a Berkeley psychologist named Alison Gopnik, who's a

• 31:04Speaker 01

  colleague of mine at Berkeley, what she calls lantern consciousness. And instead of just taking in that one degree of what's possible to take in, lantern consciousness takes in all 360 degrees. It's that moment of numinous merging with the natural world that you might have during an experience of awe or during psychedelics. It's also the mode that children are in till they go to school. Whereas they're not that focused, they're not very good at task-related things, but they're really good at learning about the world, even as infants, when they have nothing more than their feet and hands and taste buds. They're just taking in information like crazy.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And so it's interesting to think about at different moments of the day, which mode are you in? Because we still enter into, especially in times of play, into this lantern consciousness. I think also when we read, even though that seems like a very focused thing, we're opening up Our consciousness to the consciousness of someone else, a character in a book, say. And we're co-creating this character. Because all we have to go on are these little marks on a page. Nevertheless, we conjure something. And I think that's a, that's a very interesting form of consciousness. So those are two things. I'm trying to think what other practical implications.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I guess one would be to get a little more comfortable with boredom. Our tendency to pick up our phones whenever we have that stray moment, that unstructured moment of time. You know, I mean, the classic example is when you're online at the bank or the grocery store or something. You know, we used to look around. We used to daydream, mind wander, think about what we're going to have for dinner. Look at the clothing of the people in front of us, take in the room we're in. We used to like deploy our consciousness in all sorts of interesting ways. And now we're down to this one way, which is, you know, scrolling on our phones.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  And I think resisting that urge to fill that space of consciousness with some algorithm that you did not design and does not have your best interests in mind is useful. And I, you know, I'll reach for my, that holster, just like anyone else when I'm in that moment, but I resist it. And, and I, I just like, no, let's, let's look at these people. Let's think about the day. Let's think about the weather. You know, I think we're less conscious than we could be. And we, there's a, there's a poem I quote toward the end of the book from Jory Graham, who says, you know, "Only we, the humans, can afford to be anything less than fully present to the world."

• 33:55Speaker 01

  If you think about animals who drifted the way we did, or looked at their phones the way we did, they'd be dead meat. So, so we have this luxury that we can lay aside consciousness. We can afford distraction because we've made the world safe for us by killing a lot of the predators, by the way. Yet being present to the world is just the greatest gift we have and we're squandering it. So that's, that's a third exercise, I think, is let yourself.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Enter that space of, I don't know what's going to happen in the next few minutes, or what I'm going to think about, and see what comes up. The mind is, is full of surprises. I mean, one of the lessons of meditation is you can't control it. And that every 10 seconds or so, something is going to erupt and you don't know why. And you haven't chosen to think about that. But there it is. So that seems just as entertaining as.

• 34:50Chris Duffy?

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• 35:35Speaker 02

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• 36:07Speaker 04

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• 36:39Speaker 01

  Twitter.

• 36:41Chris Duffy?

  I love that you brought up the lantern consciousness. I was really fascinated by the way that Dr. Gopnik talks about kids as having that. I mean, personally, for me right now, at home, I have a two-year-old and a six-month-old. So.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So you're in the, you're right, you're getting a lot of lantern consciousness in your house.

• 36:56Chris Duffy?

  Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that I find most fascinating is that often I will kind of plan and experience, and I will come at it from my adult version of what would be interesting. And I, like, I took my son to this big holiday party. There was a big Christmas tree and there were people in costumes. And he immediately, it was outdoors, and he immediately was fascinated by and latched on to the fact that there was a pipe, like a hosepipe that was turned off. And all he wanted to look at was the pipe. Like, he just kept saying, "Pipe, pipe, pipe." And I, at first, was like, "No, no, look over here. There's, there's a giant tree. There's people wearing costumes." But then eventually, I said, "I am focused on what is supposed to be seen."

• 37:40Chris Duffy?

  And he is focused on what he is actually seeing.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:43Chris Duffy?

  And it was one of those moments for me of like, this big revelation of, for me, that was invisible. I literally did not even notice that there was this hose bib outside.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  For him, it was a source of wonder and amazement.

• 37:55Chris Duffy?

  Yes.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Because it was new to him. I mean, and you've been taught through, you know, that this is, this is the experience you paid for, this is the one organized by your culture.

• 38:04Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  And he is at another point. And, and maybe he was overwhelmed by that, too. I mean, there's a phenomenon, too, where kids can't take in everything their parents have organized for them to take in. So they find something in their world, their realm, their, their, their scale of space and time, that they're really comfortable with. But he, he experienced this power of the ordinary, this numinousness, as Allison calls it at one point. She also, by the way, says that little kids that age are tripping all the time.

• 38:35Chris Duffy?

  Yes.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  This was her insight when she used LSD for the first time. She says, oh, my God, this is how this is how they're taking in the world, which is to say, things that might seem trivial are profound and that everything is fascinating. And, you know, and we so we get a taste of that mode of being. Cannabis does that, too, by the way. Things are, you know, things that are ordinary suddenly are amazing. And so we have to, we have to work to get back to that kind of consciousness. But we have some tools to do it.

• 39:07Chris Duffy?

  We've also talked, you know, several times in this interview about the way that psychedelics or that drug experiences can change your perception of consciousness. But I think it's also worth noting that we can drop out of the self to a certain extent by having a group experience like being in a theater.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Dance.

• 39:27Chris Duffy?

  Or laughter, or a group sports team. You kind of lose the sense of yourself as an individual and you're part of the group of the sport. So there's all these other

• 39:35Speaker 01

  And a Trump rally, by the way. I mean, it's not all, it's not always pretty. But yes, there is what's sometimes called collective effervescence, where we subordinate the self to the rhythm and energy of the group. And, and we like doing that. This happens in church, too, you know, or synagogue. So we have, we have these different ways of moderating or modulating the selfness that we're feeling at any given time.

• 40:01Chris Duffy?

  You talk about how, at a certain point, we develop episodic or autobiographical memory, and how that that really changes the way that we experience the world and what we think of as consciousness. More and more, the science is showing that, in fact, every time we remember something, we are recreating it and we are changing it and shifting it. And I've had this in things that I thought there's no way I could possibly remember in anything other than a factual thing. So without getting too into it, like my, my dad, I grew up in New York City. My dad worked in the Twin Towers. So he was there. Outside on nine eleven and you would think for sure such a dramatic event that there's no way I could ever miss a detail of telling the story of that morning and where

• 40:44Chris Duffy?

  my dad was and how I found out about it. But recently, I realized that the story that I've been telling, when I heard my dad tell his version of the story, and he's the one who was actually there, that there were all these ways that our stories did not match up. And we both were sure that that had to be the facts. And yet, they can't both be the facts.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there is something called mnemonic improvisation. That was coined by Michael Levin, the Tufts University biologist I mentioned earlier. And he suggests that a job of consciousness is to help us use our memories to construct the self and the priorities that we have today. And that memories are not fixed, that they're a pool of information that we can shape in different ways. And we do. And that every time we pull out of memory and we put it back, it changes somewhat. And it reflects our needs. And he has a wonderful example

• 41:43Speaker 01

  of how caterpillars turn into butterflies. You can, you can teach a caterpillar to say, associate a food with the color red. Now, caterpillar food is leaves, right? They crawl along the edge of leaves, eating them. They live in this kind of 2D world. And then you have that caterpillar metamorphose into a butterfly. When that happens, virtually all its cells are destroyed or repurposed to build the, the brain and the body of butterfly, which lives in a 3D world, doesn't eat leaves, eats nectar, and, you know, has a body designed for flying and looking for nectar and flowers.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yet the butterfly with its completely repurposed, reconfigured brain still associates the color red with something good and not leaves, but its own food source. So it has taken that memory, red equal leaves, and reconfigured it to mean red equals nectar. So he thinks that's going on all the time with us. And it's one of the really interesting ways in which we're not like computers. Right? If our computers messed with memory and every time you opened a file, it was rewritten, we would throw them out. But for us, it's very useful.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  And I give a couple of examples of memories in my own life that I realize I have repurposed to build my sense of who I am now.

• 43:20Chris Duffy?

  That idea that we're constantly repurposing and rebuilding our memories and ourselves, that is such a beautiful one. And I really also love that framing you just used of my sense of who I am now.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:31Chris Duffy?

  I can tell you, Michael, for sure that I am going to take the memory of this conversation and I will be repurposing it many times over the years as I transform into a beautiful butterfly. Thank you so much for being on the show. I cannot recommend A World Appears more highly. It is such a fascinating book. I hope that everyone who is listening will check it out and read it. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 43:54Chris Duffy?

  That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Michael Pollan. His new book is called A World Appears. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my new nonfiction book is called Humor Me, How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy. And it is out now. You can find out more about my book, my live show dates, and all my other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team more intelligent than the smartest plant roots. On the TED side, we've got the brilliant hive mind of Daniela Balarezzo, Ben Ben Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansaka Sung Manivong, Antonia Lei, and Joseph DeBryan. This episode was fact-checked by Mateus Salas, who finds truth inside his conscious experience of the world. On the PRX side, they are the powerful psychedelic mushrooms of audio.

• 44:37Chris Duffy?

  Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please send this episode to anyone who you are pretty sure exists outside of your own brain. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care.

• 44:57Chris Duffy?

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• 45:36Chris Duffy?

  Repeat users defined as more than one Pay Later purchase in the past year. This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court.

• 46:19Chris Duffy?

  And that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human and your gift will be matched five times.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  You have a tiny computer in your pocket, putting a world of information at your fingertips. But it's hard to decipher what information is worth consuming when getting lost in the scroll. I'm Elise Hu, and on my podcast, TED Talks Daily, you can count on hearing ideas from experts that feed your brain, not slop that rots it. Neuroscientists, technologists, world-renowned artists, and more unveil complex ideas to help you make sense of the world. From breakthrough mental health research, to advice on navigating tricky relationships, to the latest AI innovation. It's a trusted place to get your daily curiosity fix. Listen to TED Talks Daily with new episodes every day, wherever you get your podcasts.