About the Book
Brought to you by Penguin.
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.
'A World Appears is a big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written inquiry into the essence of our being-in-the-world, of being, simply, alive' the Financial Times
'Lucid and impassioned...a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of counciousness...' the Guardian
'Razor-sharp, reassuringly sceptical, sensitive and grounded...you could not hope for a more judicious or readable summary of the scientific state of affairs' the Sunday Times
© Michael Pollan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
About the Author :
Michael Pollan is an award-winning author, activist and journalist. His international best-selling books about the way we live today –including How to Change Your Mind, This Is Your Mind on Plants, In Defence of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma – combine meticulous reporting with anthropology, philosophy, culture, health and natural history. Time Magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife. Michael Pollan is an award-winning author, activist and journalist. His international best-selling books about the way we live today –including How to Change Your Mind, This Is Your Mind on Plants, In Defence of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma – combine meticulous reporting with anthropology, philosophy, culture, health and natural history. Time Magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife.
Review :
Pollan has one of the most inquisitive and accommodating minds in the higher journalism of ourtime... A World Appears is a big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written inquiry into the essence of our being-in-the-world, of being, simply, alive
Lucid, engaging, insightful and informative... refreshingly assertive and sceptical... Pollan is a superb writer
Lucid and impassioned... a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness... bridging both science and the humanities, Pollan mines neuroscientific research, philosophy, literature and his own mind, searching for different ways to think about being
Razor-sharp, reassuringly sceptical, sensitive and grounded... you could not hope for a more judicious or readable summary of the scientific state of affairs
Humane and persuasive... this combination of boldness and intellectual humility, dogged curiosity and an openness to wonder makes Pollan, a veteran science journalist, an ideal guide to the mysteries of consciousness and science's many frustrated attempts to understand it. Few writers possess the same skill for translating notoriously abstruse theories... into readily understandable prose
Fair-minded and analytical as well as marvellously lucid… touched with brilliance in the way it is so elegantly offered up for our reading pleasure
Pollan’s real genius—the word is not too strong—remains intact. That is his uncanny ability to scent the direction in which the culture is headed. He did it with food and psychedelics, and now, though A World Appears focuses on AI only intermittently, he has done it again
Highly pleasurable to read... He presents a captivating exploration, one that is highly personal and sensitive. Unlike with a book that simply reports the state of the consciousness field, we receive the story through the sharp mind of a writer and the questioning heart of a seeker . . . He confronts questions about the mind ... always with a winning combination of awe and skepticism
Like all of Pollan’s books, in his latest work, the reader goes on a voyage of discovery with him as he interviews leading scientists and looks to literature, Indigenous epistemologies, psychology and even plants themselves for answers
This book seems to be not so much theoretical as experiential, with Pollan using many different lenses (neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, psychedelic) to explore the field in a personal manner . . . Great stuff
