The science and nature writer Michael Pollan’s latest book, “A World Appears,” tackles one of humanity’s most enduring and intimate mysteries: consciousness. How does a tangle of neurons give rise to the feeling of being a self? If we aren’t conscious of most of what the brain does, then why are we conscious of any of it? When in evolution did consciousness arise, and why? Pollan investigates the answers to these questions by combining insights from a broad range of fields, including neuroscience, philosophy, literature, and the study of psychedelics. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss some of the books that helped to feed his inquiry. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
Ducks, Newburyport
by Lucy Ellmann
One of the things I noticed when I started working on my book is that scientists don’t often focus on the contents of consciousness. I think they just assume that it’s completely beyond them. But I thought, Well, I’m not limited by the kinds of things scientists are limited by, so I decided that I wanted to talk to an author who had worked in this mode—and the author I interviewed was Ellmann.
“Ducks, Newburyport” is a thousand pages long, and is essentially made up of just one sentence. Ellmann goes deep into the internal monologue of a middle-class, middle-aged woman from Ohio who has a baking business and four kids. You stay in her head the entire time, learning more about her thought process than you ever thought possible. Sometimes you have to infer what she’s doing—making pancakes for her kids, scrolling on her phone—and sometimes you start to psychoanalyze her, because you see the way that she deals with her own thoughts.
It sounds impossible to read, but in fact it’s incredibly readable and great fun. I don’t even think you have to read it beginning to end. You can just jump in at any point—it’s like getting into a warm bath of consciousness. I asked Ellmann if she did research into neuroscience or anything like that in preparation for writing the book, and she said, You know, I’ve got a consciousness right here. I’m using mine as the model. I don’t need any scientists.
The Candy House
by Jennifer Egan
This novel takes place in a world where there is a technology that allows people to upload the contents of their consciousness to a collective repository. You can upload everything—not just your thoughts but your emotions, your fantasies, your unconscious. Once you do that, you get access to everyone else’s consciousnesses, too, but there’s a big tradeoff, because you give up your privacy. And yet many people do it. It’s like social media taken to an extreme.
One of the things that’s interesting to me about the novel is that this technology actually isn’t that central to the story. I’m making it sound like science fiction, but it’s not—this feature is introduced into a very normal, realistic fictional world. The more I thought about it, though, I realized that a version of the technology is actually available to all novelists, all the time. It’s their stock-in-trade—entering into the consciousness of characters, moving freely between one and the next like a camera on a dolly. I think Egan is saying not just something about our willingness to perform our lives and our minds for everybody else but also something about fiction. What if the perspective of the novelist, with regard to other people’s consciousnesses, was available to all of us?
The Blind Spot
by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson
I read this book early on in my research, and it really blew my mind. The authors—an astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher—argue that the blind spot of Western science is its failure to fully reckon with the role of lived experience in science. We think of science as somehow obtaining a special degree of objectivity—the so-called view from nowhere. The authors argue that this is a myth, because there is no stepping outside of consciousness. They also argue that, unless we come to grips with the role of lived experience, there’s no way we’ll be able to get very far investigating things like consciousness. It’s like cosmology—you’re trying to understand the universe from within the universe. There’s no way for you to step outside of it.