A World Appears summary

Most attempts to understand consciousness begin and end with humans. But if consciousness is, like everything else in nature, a product of evolution, it follows that other beings may have it too, or something like it. 

Take plants, organisms so different from us that it seems hard to believe they might be conscious. Plants are ancient, brainless, and largely immobile – and they’re also highly intelligent. For example, Mimosa pudica, commonly known as the “sensitive plant,” is so named because it instantly folds its leaves to protect itself after being touched. It can be taught to ignore a stressor – like its pot being dropped – and remember this learning for over twenty-eight days. Meanwhile, a fruit fly only remembers something it’s learned for a measly twenty-four hours. 

As psychologist Alison Gopnik points out, much of what we know about consciousness comes from people who experience it in a very particular way – specifically, brainy types who can sit for a long time engaged in rational, abstract thought. She calls this perspective “professor consciousness.” As a result, most theories of consciousness – certainly none of the leading ones – don’t leave much space for emotion. Yet there is no conscious experience that is not colored by feeling in some way. 

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, the author of Descartes’ Error, is often credited with refocusing the field’s attention on the role of feelings. Feelings, since Descartes, have been held as inferior to thought. But Damasio’s research proved that people with brain lesions that rendered them incapable of experiencing emotion generally made poorer decisions and made them more slowly. 

Pollan had always assumed his thoughts came to him primarily in words. That assumption was upended when he participated in an experiment called Descriptive Experience Sampling, developed by psychologist Russell Hurlburt. 

The setup was simple: Pollan wore a beeper that went off at random intervals throughout the day. At each beep, he recorded whatever was in his head at that exact moment. 

In A Treatise on Human Nature, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume wrote that when he went searching for what he called “myself,” all he found was “some particular perception or other.” What he was implicitly asking was: Who am I? To what am I actually referring when I refer to “myself?”

Try a little experiment right now. Close your eyes and search the space of your awareness. Notice how a thought will spontaneously emerge –⁠ a word, an image, a feeling. Now search for its source. Did you think the thought? Or is the thought, in some sense, thinking itself? Can you find your “self” anywhere?

As he reached the end of his research, Pollan came to realize that, disappointingly, there were no ultimate answers to his questions about consciousness. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been using the wrong kind of mind to investigate the topic. He’d focused a lot on theories, zooming deep into particular ways of thinking. But there was one last approach he needed to try.

To do that, he paid a visit to Joan Halifax, the abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. When Pollan told her about his book, she deemed him “hopelessly stuck in his head.” Rather than granting him a week of interviews, she sent him to “the refuge” –⁠ a twelve-by-fifteen-foot cave dug into a hillside. It had no windows and only a single bed, a woodstove, and a meditation cushion. Her belief was that Pollan’s questions were best approached experientially – theories were of little use.