Episode
Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness
- Podcast
- The Ezra Klein Show
- Published
- Mar 31, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5292
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show-1371595/episodes/michael-pollan-s-journey-to-the-borderlands-of-consciousness/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show-1371595/michael-pollan-s-journey-to-the-borderlands-of-consciousness.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
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 [email protected]. 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…