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.
