A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
4.3 | 137 ratings
Price: 23.09
Last update: 03-20-2026
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Press
- Publication date : February 24, 2026
- Language : English
- Print length : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 198488199X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1984881991
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.51 x 1.06 x 9.56 inches
- Best Sellers Rank:#80 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Scientist Biographies
- Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- Consciousness & Thought Philosophy
- Customer Reviews:5.05.0 out of 5 stars(1)
Top reviews from the United States
- RighthalfPollan might just have written his most important book yetI had a mystical experience with psychedelics over Thanksgiving 2020. It felt similar to a deep meditation state that I had experienced in my 10-day Vipassana retreat in 2018. This surprised me no end and I became obsessed with figuring out how the two could be similar. That’s when I discovered Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind”. The book gave me some hints, one thing led to another, and as a fellow Berkeley resident, I got involved with a breadth of work by the center for psychedelic sciences that he co-founded at the university.
After that question was well answered, I was taken by a second question. What was more fundamental, intelligence or consciousness. I had the good fortune of meeting Michael Pollan while unpacking this question, and he pointed me to a bunch of resources he had referenced for his new book on consciousness. After reading nearly a dozen of those books and deepening my meditation practices, I was feeling a sense of clarity, yet a profound loss of words to express it. This is the time I had the privilege of reading an early copy of “A World Appears” last fall.
The book put it all together beautifully. How all of life is sentient, including plants and single-celled organisms, and why that is so. How sentience evolved into feelings along with the brainstem and the nervous system. How thought and the thought of an individual self evolved with the nervous system. And all of this is simply one strand of evolution at whose edge humanity sits. And all of this is seen simply from one lens, that of Western science.
Given the existential significance of the topic at hand, each nugget of clarity in this book explodes into new dimensions of insights. This brings up those many more questions to reflect on. The biggest contribution of this book might be the framework it offers to science-leaning readers curious about deeper questions of life that both science and spirituality have fallen short of answering.
I loved how the book is structured, and the rich set of references that the author has included in the work. Pollan’s unmistakable style of inquiry, humor, self-deprecation, and investigative journalism shine through like all his other works. I am so excited for this book to hit the shelves. He might just have written his most important book yet.