How to understand your own consciousness (w/ Michael Pollan)

0:02Chris Duffy: You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Our guest today is Michael Pollan, the acclaimed journalist and writer who changed the way that millions of people thought about plants and food with his books The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire. But in recent years, Michael has become fascinated with the way that plants can do more than just give us a delicious meal. They can also change the way we see the world, sometimes literally. Michael dove into psychedelics with his book, How to Change Your Mind. And now he's looking at the question of consciousness itself in his latest book, A World Appears.

0:33Chris Duffy: If there is anyone who could make us re-examine what it means to be human and what it means to be ourselves, it's Michael Pollan. And to show you that these are issues and ideas that Michael has been thinking about for decades, here is a clip from his 2008 TED Talk where he challenges the idea that we humans are the only conscious beings on Earth. Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness, which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness, is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world.

1:14And it's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool, but, you know, there's a comedian who said, Well, who's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? Well, consciousness. So, when you look at the plants, you realize that there are other tools, and they're just as interesting. Lima beans. You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have, while we have consciousness, tool making, language, they have biochemistry.

1:54And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond we can imagine. And their complexity, their sophistication is something to really marvel at.

2:07Chris Duffy: Okay, we are going to marvel at that and so much more right after this quick break.

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4:34Chris Duffy: On today's episode, we're talking about consciousness and our minds with Michael Pollan. Hi, I'm Michael Pollan. I'm the author of 10 books now in total, most recent being A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness. Michael, I really loved the book and I'm so interested to talk to you about it. At the risk of ruining some of the journey of the book, my first question is why should people care about understanding consciousness? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, in one sense, it'd be crazy not to think about your own mind and what's going on in it and understanding it better. We struggle with mental health problems, and they're all rooted in our consciousness.

5:16But I think it's particularly urgent today, and one of the reasons I decided to write this book, and it's off-topic for me in some ways, although it does sort of flow out of How to Change Your Mind, my book on psychedelics and psychedelic therapy, is that our consciousness is under siege today. We've got corporations trying to buy and sell our attention, you know, since social media algorithms. And we've understood that as a problem now for a couple of years. And attention, of course, is an important element of consciousness. It's where we direct our consciousness is our attention. But things have gotten a lot worse, I think, or more challenging with AI, because now you've got machines speaking to us in the first person, which when you think about it is really weird, and that we are forming bonds with them.

6:07So they're not just hacking our attention, they're now hacking some of our deepest emotional capabilities. And you've got people forming these bonds that are with machines that they feel more comfortable with than with other people. So I think that our, you know, I conceive of our consciousness as this very precious space of privacy and freedom internally, and that we need to protect it. We need to be somewhat vigilant because we're giving it away right now. And so that's why I think it's worth thinking about now. It's something many of us take for granted. It's just this kind of transparent glass through which we perceive reality.

6:49But if you smudge it a little, as happens with both psychedelics and meditation, suddenly you realize, oh, there is this realm between us and the world. And what is that about? And how can I nurture it?

7:04Chris Duffy: I had literally underlined and highlighted the phrase where you say it smudges the transparent nature of reality. The windshield, yeah. Yeah. So often people you're interviewing in the book, because you did also write a book about psychedelics, immediately launch into telling you about their own psychedelic experiences and their trips. And you say, this is a thing that kind of has started happening to me since I wrote that other book. Yeah, I've sort of become the psychedelic confessor and people see me as an opportunity to tell stories about their trips that not too many other people are interested in.

7:34Chris Duffy: Yeah, sometimes I think about your place in the popular culture as the person who is the most likely to have led to people Googling, how can I buy mushrooms? Because they don't already know. Wow. It's a funny role to have. So, you know, when I started this book, it was somewhat inspired by psychedelic experience. I'm not alone in this, that psychedelics really makes you very aware of consciousness as this amazing phenomenon. And you start wondering, why is it this way and not that way? And could I change it? And well, yeah, you can change it with psychedelics and meditation. You talk about how there's a study that finds that people who have had a psychedelic experience, they go from very unlikely to believe that plants or other creatures have consciousness like humans to very likely to believe that a plant could be conscious or have some sort of intelligence.

8:24Yeah, which is very interesting. And it's hard to evaluate the truth quotient of that. But I sometimes think that for most of history, we have been animists. All children are animists until we drum it out of them in school. And since Descartes, we thought we were the only people who had consciousness and everything else was you could do what you wanted with it. It's been licensed for destroying the planet to a remarkable extent. But psychedelics kind of puts you back in that animist frame of mind. Does that mean it's necessarily true? I think we have to evaluate the insights we have on psychedelics and then kind of cross-reference them with science and other modes of knowing.

9:06But going back to your first point about these researchers using psychedelics, I mean, I think that they are right now opening up to alternative understandings of consciousness. That we have, we started out thinking consciousness must surely be the product of this gray matter between our ears. And that that somehow generates it. And it's an emergent property of neurons arranged in a certain way. That idea has not borne fruit and probably won't. And so the people studying consciousness are a little bit at loose ends. And some of them are using psychedelics as a way to think outside the box. And I think they really are using psychedelics right now.

9:52And some of them are finding it quite productive. And there's one scientist I profile, Christoph Koch, who really had his whole metaphysics changed by an ayahuasca experience that he spoke very openly about. And he went from believing that surely there's a materialist explanation of consciousness, that it comes from within, to wondering whether consciousness might be something outside the brain and that we channel in some ways. I have to applaud him. He's like nearly 70. Most scientists don't change their minds ever. And he's changed his mind several times in the course of his career. They say that science changes one funeral at a time, but it may also be one psychedelic trip at a time instead.

10:43Chris Duffy: You talk several times in the book about your admiration for people who are able to kind of hold these ideas lightly and see new possibilities. And some of the parts that were most surprising to me are the examinations of the way that there's this historical framework for understanding the world and science, and that we are now starting to understand that perhaps some of those foundations are built on not such solid ground. So one of the contentions of the book is we may not have the right scientific tools to understand consciousness, and that we are inheritors of a scientific tradition, really inaugurated by Galileo, that basically bracketed subjective experience.

11:27he determined at a certain point that the scientific enterprise would focus on what was an objective third person. And, you know, we think of science as this third person view from nowhere, but of course it's not. It's a set of tools that are the product of human consciousness. So how do we study a phenomenon we literally can't get outside of? I mean, astronomy is similar in that we study the cosmos from inside the cosmos, and we've learned a lot. But imagine how much we could learn if we could actually step outside it. And of course, that's impossible. So there's some unique challenges to a scientific exploration of consciousness that I think we haven't worked out yet.

12:12We may get there. I mean, I'm not saying it's not going to work for all time, but we may have to change science first. It's also the reason why other ways of knowing are relevant to the study of consciousness. And that's why I don't just look at science. This book is not all about science. As it turns out, novelists and poets know an awful lot about consciousness. Maybe not how it's generated by brains, if indeed that's what it is, but they understand the stream of consciousness, how our thoughts unfold, maybe where they come from. And they've done in some ways a better job than the scientists in describing this amazing phenomenon.

12:51So I look at science and I also look at Buddhism. Buddhism has been thinking about what consciousness is for a couple thousand years. I'm regarded as a science writer, but I don't see myself as exclusively that. I've found, whether I'm writing about food or plants or the mind, that when you layer very different ways of knowing science, memoir, literature, philosophy, Buddhism, or other religious traditions. That's when you get a fulsome, rich picture of whatever you're writing about. And I do that here. I kind of circle the subject from all these different angles.

13:29Chris Duffy: Absolutely. And I think that often is what makes the science parts the most understandable is to then approach them. I mean, you have an interview with a novelist who wrote a stream of consciousness novel. You go and live in a cave with a Buddhist monk. So there's a moment where you are examining whether plants might be intelligent in some sort of a way, whether they might have some sort of level of sentience or consciousness. And you talk about a root from a corn plant solving a maze. And I found that to be just this incredible thing I'd never heard before. So can you explain to people what is happening there?

14:07So basically, there's this scientist who calls himself a plant neurobiologist. And he's kind of trolling brain people with that, because everyone knows that plants don't have neurons. But they can act in ways that suggest they do. And he is convinced that plants are sentient. Now, I should draw a distinction between sentience and consciousness, because I think it's important. Sentience is a very fundamental, simple form of consciousness. And it connotes having senses that make you aware, make the being aware of the world and able to respond to changes in its environment in an intelligent way. And having its valence, you know, what's happening, it can tell if this is positive for the creature or negative for the creature.

14:54And many people I interviewed would argue that that goes all the way down to the simplest life forms, possibly to bacteria, possibly to plants. and it's not limited to animals. And I can see that. I think sentience may be a property of life. Consciousness is a much more elaborate form of sentience. Consciousness is how humans do sentience. Different animals do sentience in different ways. It wouldn't pay for plants to have self-consciousness like we do. They're much more interested in biochemistry because in their world, chemicals are how they deal with things, both threats and opportunities. So this scientist, Stefano Mancuso, he's at the University of Florence, and I've interviewed him several times and been to his lab, has been trying to demonstrate the sentience or intelligence of plants.

15:45And one of the many experiments he's done, and he's incredibly imaginative, has been creating a maze. It's probably a foot by a foot. And he puts some fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which is the nitrogen source for corn plants, for lots of plants, in one corner. and he plants the corn plant at the top and it's got to get to this place down in this corner. And somehow it senses the location of the ammonium nitrate, probably in some chemical way because plants have incredible receptors and transmitters for volatile chemicals. And you watch and it's time-lapse. So it proceeds more quickly than it does in life.

16:31And you watch this root like wind its way down and actually find the ammonium nitrate, the cheese, if you will, if this were mice. And he's basically saying, look, when we demonstrate that with animals, we say they're intelligent and aware. And so why aren't we saying the same thing for plants? It's so clear that somehow the bean plant knows exactly where the pole is, because even though it's going like this and making this circular motion, it's growing in the direction of the pole. And it's like casting. It's like a fisherman casting over and over again, but it knows exactly where the pole is.

17:11So how does it see the pole? We don't know. Plants have some visual facility. It may be echolocation, sort of like a bat, because we do know they make some noise every time they divide their cells in growth. And maybe that noise reflects off of the pole. And like a blind person with a cane, they can hear the return and say, oh, it's reflecting over here, so the pole must be in this direction. We don't know. But plants have something like 20 senses to our five. They're picking up a lot on their environment. I mean, I'm fascinated by plant intelligence. And I'm convinced that plant sentience is a real thing based on the research that I've read.

17:58Plants also have memory. So how do you have memory without neurons? Well, we're learning that there are these bioelectric fields that all living things have. So somehow that knowledge was stored in this bioelectric field, not in its brain. The world's a lot weirder and more wonderful than we know. That's my big takeaway.

18:18Chris Duffy: And so the thing that then flips around for me is, OK, maybe the problem with us understanding plants as having this sort of sentience or forms of intelligence is that we're just working at the wrong time scale. That if we did look at it as a time lapse, you see, oh, the root is solving the puzzle in a maze. Oh, they're growing and communicating. Well, that's the beauty of time lapse. It allows us to enter their scale of time. But it's a reminder, too, that everything in consciousness, the world as we perceive it, is the product of our particular scale, our size. We exist in a world determined by our senses.

18:59You know, the range of the electromagnetic spectrum we can hear and see. There's a whole lot of other ones, as we know, that bees are existing in another scale of vision because they can see ultraviolet, which we can't see. So if you take away human consciousness, the world looks very different. And one of the neuroscientists I interviewed, I said, so tell me, what's the world like without human consciousness? And he goes, particles and waves. That's it. And then he said another time, ontological dust. So we construct the world with our senses. I mean, it's not to say it isn't really out there, but the part of it, and it's vast, the part of it we take in is the part we can take in.

19:51Chris Duffy: We're going to take a short break and then we will be right back.

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23:23Chris Duffy: And we are back. We're talking with Michael Pollan about consciousness, the subject of his new book, A World Appears. And one of the very thought-provoking ideas that Michael examines in his book is the distinction that we make, often without even thinking about it really, between who we are and our bodies. So which one is the real us? What is the real us? Here's Michael reading an excerpt from his book. We speak of our bodies as something we own, which is why I am my body strikes the ear as off key. Our identification with our bodies is far from complete. The I in each of us, and that's the first person I, not eyes.

24:03The I in each of us, whatever that is, can regard the body as a discrete object. If someone loses a limb, they don't feel that their self has been diminished, only their body. And yet if someone punches me in the stomach, it is I who have been hurt. In this context, the pronoun could refer to my body, my mind, or both. So who exactly is this I who has suffered this hurt? We're drawing closer to the heart of the matter and the end of the journey, to this elusive but somehow essential and enduring sense of self. In the self, we confront a mental phenomenon beyond sentience, feeling, or thought. But the self is in some ways the crown of consciousness and in other ways its curse.

24:46Chris Duffy: I found that to be such a provocative passage in the book to think about the ways in which we understand ourselves as being our body and also not being our body. I mean, the self is a very paradoxical phenomenon. And, you know, the Buddhists would tell you it's an illusion. Yes and no. I mean, even though it's an illusion, it gets things done. It has causal power in the world. You know, the ego allows you to have your podcast and allows me to write books and you to write books. I mean, it's very important. On the other hand, it is a construct. You know, it has no address in the brain. And we're constantly reifying it.

25:27And it's very useful as a convention. But it's very hard to find it. And this is a famous exercise in meditation. But it goes back to David Hume, who's an English philosopher. And he was very interested in the self. And he decided the best way to figure it out was to go inside his mind and introspect. And when he introspected, he said he could find everything, all sorts of things, like perceptions and feelings and thoughts. But he could find no thinker of those thoughts or feeler of those feelings or perceiver of those perceptions. And indeed, if you try it, you won't find anything, which is kind of weird.

26:08At the same time, we spend an awful lot of energy trying to escape the self and transcend it. Psychedelics being one way, but, you know, experiences of nature and awe, all of which kind of shrink the self. There's a great experiment that a colleague of mine, Dacher Keltner, who studies awe, has done, where he asks people to draw a stick figure of themselves on graph paper. And then he gives them an experience of awe, which might be river rafting or a beautiful picture of Yosemite. And then he says, let's draw yourself again. And they draw themselves at like half size because their sense of self is diminished by the experience of awe.

26:50So what is that about? Why are we trying to escape this thing? And I think the reasons are that the self torments us, too. I mean, the ego is the critical voice in our head very often. It's the generator of rumination. And rumination is at the heart of a lot of mental struggle. Depression, anxiety, addiction, these are all kind of ruminative disorders where we get stuck in loops of repetitive thought. And so relief from the self feels really good. Yet many of us identify the self with or identify themselves with their ego. And one of the interesting sort of discoveries I learned about in the course of writing the book is that consciousness survives the death of the self or the dissolution of the self, temporary, obviously.

27:42And certainly I've had that during psychedelic experience. I had one particular experience I described in the book where my sense of self completely dissolved and I was just a pool of blue paint on the floor. And it was fine. It was great, in fact, because when the ego relaxes its hold on us, it's a defensive structure and it builds walls to protect us, our precious self. When those go away, there's this sensation of merging with something larger. And for some people, it's love, and it's the universe, and it's other people. For me, it was a piece of music that my psychedelic guide played. And I became that piece of music in a way that never has happened.

28:25The whole space between subject and object had disappeared, and I was the piece of music. And it was an incredibly somatic, powerful feeling of music. It was wonderful. But what I brought away from the experience is, okay, that voice in my head that's telling me to assert myself or do this or do that or goading me to get more work done, it's not me. I mean, I don't have to listen to it all the time. I can treat it as one of several voices in my head. I know that sounds psychotic, but it's not. And I think getting that perspective on the ego is very healthy. And of course, people spend years in therapy doing just that, getting perspective on their ego.

29:08So yeah, the self, I didn't come to any firm conclusion, even though it is a construct of the mind, of consciousness, it still can get things done. It has a certain amount of reality, even as a conventional thing. The fact that we can't really engage with each other without gelling into something substantial that we call a self. But I explore all the challenges of it. One of my lessons in this book that I come to at the end is not knowing certain things for sure is just part of the human condition. And whether the self is real or not is one of those. But I have to say, everybody has had experience of consciousness before the self asserts itself.

29:59And that happens every morning when you wake up for that microsecond, those 500 milliseconds, before you realize, where am I and who am I? There is that brief moment of kind of basic non-self-consciousness. And that's a reminder that the mind constructs itself. It's just, it's not there.

30:22Chris Duffy: I'm curious to ask you to be a little prescriptive for a moment, because it's easy if we're talking about like physical health and we're talking with someone about, you know, exercise. And then I say, okay, well, what should people do to experience this? I think it's really interesting to think for you, like maybe let's put it in the the classic self-improvement podcast terms and say, what are three things that listeners should do or think about differently to experience some of these insights in a new way? Well, one is to dwell on that moment. And when you wake up and you realize who you are and where you are and think about it right after it happens, because you'll attend to that very brief period of not having it, of not having anything, you know, just being like sort of proto-conscious.

31:12So meditating on that moment, I think, is really important. Another thing related, and really meditation is the space we enter to think about consciousness in our minds. And I think it's valuable for that reason. And a lot of this kind of thinking, that's when I do it. There's another distinction I draw in the book, so I think there are many kinds of consciousness. The two big ones for most of us is lantern consciousness and spotlight consciousness. Spotlight consciousness is when we have narrowed our focus, we kind of put blinders on, and we're doing it right now to be able to communicate and make this podcast.

31:55It's our focus. It's what we're trained to celebrate in school. I mean, it's required in school. Indeed, we drug kids who don't have it, which is to say ADHD, you know, who can't maintain that focus. On the other side is a kind of consciousness. And here I'm citing the work of a Berkeley psychologist named Alison Gopnik, who's a colleague of mine at Berkeley, what she calls lantern consciousness. And instead of just taking in that one degree of what's possible to take in, lantern consciousness takes in all 360 degrees. It's that moment of numinous merging with the natural world that you might have during an experience of awe or during psychedelics.

32:42It's also the mode that children are in till they go to school, whereas they're not that focused. They're not very good at task-related things, But they're really good at learning about the world, even as infants, when they have nothing more than their feet and hands and taste buds. They're just taking in information like crazy. And so it's interesting to think about at different moments of the day, which mode are you in? Because we still enter into, especially in times of play, into this lantern consciousness. I think also when we read, even though that seems like a very focused thing, we're opening up our consciousness to the consciousness of someone else, a character in a book, say.

33:25And we're co-creating this character because all we have to go on are these little marks on a page. Nevertheless, we conjure something. And I think that's a very interesting form of consciousness. So those are two things. I'm trying to think what other practical implications. I guess one would be to get a little more comfortable with boredom. Our tendency to pick up our phones whenever we have that stray moment, that unstructured moment of time. You know, I mean, the classic example is when you're online at the bank or the grocery store or something. You know, we used to look around. We used to daydream, mind wander, think about what we're going to have for dinner.

34:10look at the clothing of the people in front of us take in the room we're in we used to like deploy our consciousness in all sorts of interesting ways and now we we're down to this one way which is you know scrolling on our phones and i think resisting that urge to fill that space of consciousness with some algorithm that you did not design and does not have your best interests in mind is useful. And I, you know, I'll reach for that holster just like anyone else when I'm in that moment, but I resist it. And I just like, no, let's look at these people. Let's think about the day. Let's think about the weather.

34:53You know, I think we're less conscious than we could be. And there's a poem I quote toward the end of the book from Jory Graham, who says, you know, only we, the humans, can afford to be anything less than fully present to the world. If you think about animals who drifted the way we did or looked at their phones the way we did, they'd be dead meat. So we have this luxury that we can lay aside consciousness. We can afford distraction because we've made the world safe for us by killing a lot of the predators, by the way. Yet being present to the world is just the greatest gift we have. and we're squandering it.

35:32So that's a third exercise, I think, is let yourself enter that space of, I don't know what's going to happen in the next few minutes or what I'm going to think about and see what comes up. The mind is full of surprises. I mean, one of the lessons of meditation is you can't control it. And that every 10 seconds or so, something is going to erupt and And you don't know why. And you haven't chosen to think about that. But there it is. So that seems just as entertaining as to.

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37:24Chris Duffy: I used to think spreadsheets were just part of it. Ugh. But real-time cash flow? Wow. Invoices that chase themselves? Even better. Books that automate? That's a big one. And I can keep track from my phone while I get the job done. No spreadsheet in sight. What a life. Do right by yourself and your business and search XERO for your free trial. Conditions apply. You have the vision for your business. You have the plan. And you just got handed a huge opportunity. But is your business connectivity reliable enough to make a move? Spectrum Business delivers fast, reliable internet, phone, TV, and mobile services, so you're always connected when it matters most.

38:04Chris Duffy: Get connectivity packages built for your business, with savings that keep your budget in check. And with fast, reliable internet, and 100 % U.S.-based customer support, you'll stay connected and ready to bring your vision to life. Learn more at spectrum.com slash business. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. Twitter. I love that you brought up the lantern consciousness. I was really fascinated by the way that Dr. Gopnik talks about kids as having that. I mean, personally, for me right now, at home, I have a two-year-old and a six-month-old. Oh, okay. So you're getting a lot of lantern consciousness in your house.

38:43Chris Duffy: Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that I find most fascinating is that often I will kind of plan in experience. and I will come at it from my adult version of what would be interesting. And I took my son to this big holiday party. There was a big Christmas tree and there were people in costumes and he immediately, it was outdoors, and he immediately was fascinated by and latched onto the fact that there was a pipe, like a hose pipe that was turned off. And all he wanted to look at was the pipe. Like he just kept saying pipe, pipe, pipe. And I at first was like, no, no, look over here.

39:18Chris Duffy: There's a giant tree. There's people wearing costumes. But then eventually I said, I am focused on what is supposed to be seen. And he is focused on what he is actually seeing. And it was one of those moments for me of like this big revelation of, for me, that was invisible. I literally did not even notice that there was this hose bib outside. But for him, it was a source of wonder and amazement. Yes. Because it was new to him. I mean, and you've been taught through, you know, that this is the experience you paid for. this is the one organized by your culture. And he is at another point. And maybe he was overwhelmed by that too.

39:54I mean, there's a phenomenon too where kids can't take in everything their parents have organized for them to take in. So they find something in their world, their realm, their scale of space and time that they're really comfortable with. But he experienced this power of the ordinary, this numinousness, as Alison calls it at one point. She also, by the way, says that little kids that age are tripping all the time. Yes. This was her insight when she used LSD for the first time. She says, oh my God, this is how they're taking in the world, which is to say things that might seem trivial are profound and that everything is fascinating.

40:37And so we get a taste of that mode of being. Cannabis does that too, by the way. Things that are ordinary suddenly are amazing. And so we have to we have to work to get back to that kind of consciousness. But we have some tools to do it.

40:53Chris Duffy: We've also talked several times in this interview about the way that psychedelics or that drug experiences can change your perception of consciousness. But I think it's also worth noting that we can drop out of the self to a certain extent by having a group experience like being in a theater. Oh, yeah. Dance or laughter or a group sports team. you kind of lose the sense of yourself as an individual and you're part of the group of the sport. So there's all these other ways of getting at it. And a Trump rally, by the way. I mean, it's not always pretty. But yes, there is what's sometimes called collective effervescence, where we subordinate the self to the rhythm and energy of the group.

41:33And we like doing that. This happens in church too, or synagogue. So we have these different ways of moderating or modulating the selfness that we're feeling at any given time.

41:47Chris Duffy: You talk about how at a certain point we develop episodic or autobiographical memory and how that really changes the way that we experience the world and what we think of as consciousness. More and more, the science is showing that, in fact, every time we remember something, we are recreating it and we are changing it and shifting it. And I've had this in things that I thought there's no way I could possibly remember in anything other than a factual thing. So without getting too into it, like my my dad, I grew up in New York City. My dad worked in the Twin Towers. So he was there outside on 9-11.

42:21Chris Duffy: And you would think for sure it's such a dramatic event that there's no way I could ever miss a detail of telling the story of that morning and where my dad was and how I found out about it. But recently, I realized that the story that I've been telling when I heard my dad tell his version of the story and he's the one who was actually there, that there were all these ways that our stories did not match up. And we both were sure that that had to be the facts. And yet they can't both be the facts. Yeah. So there is something called mnemonic improvisation that was coined by Michael Levin, the Tufts University biologist I mentioned earlier.

42:58And he suggests that a job of consciousness is to help us use our memories to construct the self and the priorities that we have today. And that memories are not fixed, that they're a pool of information that we can shape in different ways. And we do. And that every time we pull out of memory and we put it back, it changes somewhat and it reflects our needs. And he has a wonderful example of how caterpillars turn into butterflies. You can teach a caterpillar to, say, associate a food with the color red. Now, caterpillar food is leaves, right? They crawl along the edge of leaves eating them. They live in this kind of 2D world.

43:48And then you have that caterpillar metamorphose into a butterfly. When that happens, virtually all its cells are destroyed or repurposed to build the brain and the body of butterfly, which lives in a 3D world, doesn't eat leaves, eats nectar, and has a body designed for flying and looking for nectar and flowers. Yet the butterfly, with its completely repurposed, reconfigured brain, still associates the color red with something good, and not leaves, but its own food source. So it has taken that memory, red equal leaves, and reconfigured it to mean red equals nectar. So he thinks that's going on all the time with us.

44:38And it's one of the really interesting ways in which we're not like computers, right? If our computers messed with memory, and every time you opened a file, it was rewritten, we would throw them out. but for us, it's very useful. And I give a couple examples of memories in my own life that I realized I have repurposed to build my sense of who I am now.

45:06Chris Duffy: That idea that we're constantly repurposing and rebuilding our memories and ourselves, that is such a beautiful one. And I really also love that framing you just used of my sense of who I am now. Yeah. I can tell you, Michael, for sure, that I am going to take the memory of this conversation and I will be repurposing it many times over the years as I transform into a beautiful butterfly. Thank you so much for being on the show. I cannot recommend A World Appears More Highly. It is such a fascinating book. I hope that everyone who is listening will check it out and read it. Thank you for being here.

45:35Chris Duffy: I really appreciate you taking the time. My pleasure. That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Michael Pollan. His new book is called A World Appears. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my new nonfiction book is called Humor Me, How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy, and it is out now. You can find out more about my book, my live show dates, and all my other projects at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team more intelligent than the smartest plant roots. On the TED side, we've got the brilliant hive mind of Daniela Valarezzo, Ban Ban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tanzika Sung Manivong, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph Debrine.

46:14Chris Duffy: This episode was fact-checked by Mateus Salas, who finds truth inside his conscious experience of the world. On the PRX side, they are the powerful psychedelic mushrooms of audio. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please send this episode to anyone who you are pretty sure exists outside of your own brain. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care.

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