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

I came out of this experience of studying consciousness and looking at all the theories of consciousness. I don't want to give it away, but we have no idea about consciousness really how it's how how brain matter generates consciousness, if indeed that's how it happens. And there are people who doubt that's how it happens. It could be that the brain channels consciousness, right? I mean that if you conceive of consciousness as like electromagnetic waves Um, brains are like radio receivers or TV receivers. You wouldn't you wouldn't look in the TV set for the woman who gave you the weather report. You know, she's not there. She's somewhere else. So I don't know that that's true, but coming out of this experience of studying this, I don't dismiss an idea like that.

You have to keep an open mind because our presumption. that, you know, consciousness is an emergent property of bl brain complexity. That idea doesn't have much traction. Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast. We discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Michael Pollan. author of landmark books including How to Change Your Mind, which is about psychedelics, The Botany of Desire, which is about how humans and plants co-evolved and collaborated to thrive, and the omnivore's dilemma. Which is an incredible book about food and nutrition. And most recently, the book A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (122 minutes, 22,413 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.