What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael Pollan

Michael, you write about food, plants, psychedelics, and now consciousness, but you make huge subjects concrete. Let’s start with the hard one: can we define consciousness without getting ourselves into trouble?

It’s the one fact I know with absolute certainty, yet it’s terribly hard to pin down. “Subjective experience” is a useful start. As Thomas Nagel put it, if there is something it is like to be a creature, there is consciousness there. Humans add emotion and self-reflection, but our version isn’t the universal standard.

I separate sentience from the elaborate human form. Sentience is basic awareness of environmental change and whether it helps or harms. Plants and perhaps single-celled life may have something like that: survival in a shifting world requires more than a fixed genetic script.

But response alone leaves me wanting more. A plant turns toward light, but does it sense that it is responding? If my tea is too hot, I know what happened and why I’m changing course. That feels different from reflex.

Plants do far more than the old picture allowed. Roots solve routes to fertilizer; plants respond defensively to caterpillars chewing; they detect water, gravity, pH, and nutrient gradients. Anesthetics stop a Venus flytrap from closing. I’m not ready to call plants conscious, but we’ve underestimated their sentient life.

I’m struck by self versus non-self. Neurons avoid their own branches while filling available space, and tree roots seem to do something similar. Recognizing what belongs to you, then reaching for what you need, may be a deep building block.

Plants distinguish kin from strangers, and they don’t race upward when their own leaves shade them. Still, consciousness need not be organized around a self. Just after waking—especially in a hotel room—you’re aware before you’ve rebuilt who and where you are. Buddhists have been onto that for a while.

On psilocybin, my garden seemed aware of me, looking back with benevolence. I didn’t take that as proof. An insight can be judged pragmatically—does it help?—or treated as a hypothesis for other methods. That experience sent me toward plant-intelligence science. Plants and people are entangled: corn, cannabis, coffee, and tea spread because their chemistry made us cultivate them. Evolution keeps what reproduces. My cat Frank got so blitzed on catnip he’d forget where the plant was. Pretty elegant defense.

The microbiome gives me the same existential itch. What if our grand projects, social contact, even the urge to mix with each other, partly serve microbes moving through us? Our lofty human story may have other passengers.

They were here long before us, and we are collective creatures. But we’re not mere vehicles. We recruit bacteria to produce compounds we need, including GABA, serotonin-related metabolites, and short-chain fatty acids. They influence us; we house and shape them. It’s a two-way street.

Human consciousness seems unusual because we imagine distant futures, including ones we won’t inhabit. Social life may have driven that elaboration: other people are too unpredictable for automatic rules, so we imagine another mind. Yet biology shows problem-solving beyond genes and neurons. Novel challenges can draw capacities from living systems that no instruction explicitly specifies.

I’m persuaded that consciousness may begin less with cortical thought than bodily feeling. The brain’s first job is keeping the body alive; hunger, warmth, itch, and pain arise from that task. The cortex helps us find dinner or book the restaurant. If feeling is primary, consciousness may extend far beyond a cortex-centered account.

Culture gives body signals labels of wildly different precision. We made words—shaped exhalations—which is incredible. But daily life sits between agony and ecstasy, where we barely know what the body is telling us. I wonder whether it integrates hours of signals before we can name the result.

The mind-body split looks less defensible all the time. In one experiment, people given ginger judged morally revolting scenarios less harshly, apparently because their stomachs were calmer. Disgust is visceral and moral. We’re more integrated than our tidy categories allow.

What about collective consciousness without old “one love” vagueness? We’re self-interested creatures, and psychedelics may loosen self-boundaries, but they’re not magic social policy.

Exactly. High-dose psychedelics can dissolve the ego, but also inflate it. I became blue paint, then somehow became a Bach cello piece rather than listening to it. The useful aftermath wasn’t losing my ego forever; it was recognizing it as one voice among others, especially when it gets defensive or aggressive. Meditation and awe can offer versions of that. We need selves to finish books, but the self can trap us.

I’m more open to possibilities once dismissed: perhaps brains receive consciousness rather than generate it; perhaps reality contains forms of mind we can’t detect; perhaps consciousness is several phenomena we’ve bundled together. That’s not certainty. It’s humility, because brain-complexity stories haven’t solved the mystery.

AI may force sharper questions. It can look agent-like, but intelligence and experience aren’t interchangeable. A brain isn’t merely hardware running software: experience physically reshapes it, memories spread across systems, and neurons are chemical, electrical, living things.

If consciousness depends on feelings, a vulnerable mortal body may matter. A computer can imitate thought-like output, but simulating feeling could be another category. Building a conscious machine—or failing decisively—might teach us something. For now, the brain-as-computer metaphor deserves more suspicion.

My route into this began in a garden. As a kid, I buried watermelon seeds, forgot them, found a watermelon months later, then dropped it while running to show my mother. Gardening is active negotiation with nature. Plants have interests, and if you meet them, they may meet yours. It’s more marriage than domination.

That’s why I want hope in a story. Industrial beef runs on oil; grass-fed systems begin with sunlight caught by grass. People need a direction they can act on, not just horrors. We still need policy: cheap corn helps make ultra-processed food cheap while we spend heavily treating the damage.

Psychedelic medicine needs the same realism. MDMA and psilocybin may near approval, and ibogaine has political momentum. There’s promise for addiction, depression, trauma, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, alongside real risks. These aren’t for everyone; public education matters. Caffeine taught me context is everything, too. It’s addictive, but for many its benefits outweigh costs. Drugs aren’t simply good or bad: relationship, setting, dose, and person matter.

I’m glad you dropped those watermelon seeds, and that you keep bringing lofty questions back to gardens, food, bodies, and actual choices. We’ll have you back for the microbiome book—preferably with excellent coffee nearby.