Four insights into consciousness from Michael Pollan’s “A World Appears.”

Dear Friends,

Right now, without pausing to think, I can tell you the name of the song playing softly in the back of my head.  

It’s “Zombie,” by the Cranberries, possibly because I just wrote a version of the phrase, “What’s in your head?”

I can do this any time. That is, there’s always a song playing in the back of my head. The only exceptions are when I’m actively listening to music—when my internal track picks up the external one—or when I’m concentrating hard enough that everything else goes quiet.

On some level, I have always known this about myself. The music has been there as long as I can remember. But I hadn’t really given it much thought until I picked up Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

A World Appears reminded me that we humans are wondrous beings—conscious creatures embedded in living bodies, experiencing inner lives that no one else can fully imagine, and navigating our shared world in distinct and different ways. Not everyone, it turns out, has a soundtrack playing in their head 24×7 or even an interior monologue running all the time. Some people think very differently, with entirely different symbols or even no symbols at all.

Pollan’s book is a sustained act of wonder about consciousness. It’s also a rigorous, wide-ranging exploration of what this mysterious stuff (or, really, non-stuff) is, who has it, and why this question matters more than most of us ever stop to ask.

Here are four insights from A World Appears that are worth raising into your own consciousness.

Sometimes Lanterns Are Better than Spotlights

Pollan points to a range of evidence suggesting there are two distinct modes of awareness: spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness.

Spotlight consciousness focuses. It zeros in on a problem, tries to pin it down and tease out its essence. It’s the mode of consciousness that writes strategic plans, deciphers data, and produces most of what we conventionally call “work.”

Lantern consciousness diffuses, emanates, wanders around and discovers connections. It wonders instead of analyzing, feels instead of factualizing. It’s how small children often take in the world—holistically, indiscriminately, fantastically. Have “teatime” with a toddler, and you will witness it firsthand. It also surfaces in meditation, on long walks, and during early morning moments when sleep has mostly subsided but the smartphone is still on the nightstand.

Pollan suggests that modern Western culture has over-indexed on spotlight consciousness at the expense of lantern consciousness. Too often, we treat diffuse awareness as unproductive, something to schedule out of our days and replace with more focus, more “productivity.” But lantern consciousness is where creativity cavorts. It’s the wonderful—think, “wonder-filled”—mode that inspired Einstein to claim that “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”   

Every time we focus, we ignore what’s in the background. That’s always a tradeoff, and it’s not always a good one.

Consciousness Isn’t Just Ours

Consciousness scholars and scientists keep pushing the boundaries of who—and what—counts as a “conscious” creature. Once upon a time, Descartes declared that animals couldn’t possibly be conscious, since they lack human minds. But few thinkers believe that anymore. Many animals have strong claims not just to sentience but to self-awareness. And some plants demonstrate what looks a lot like intelligent and responsive behavior.

Some thinkers argue that consciousness is a property of the universe akin to matter or energy rather than a function of brains. Aldous Huxley thought consciousness was all around us, a sort of wavelength we tune into (or don’t) rather than a capability internal to us.

If something sets humans apart, Pollan suggests, it isn’t that we’re conscious. It’s that we’re conscious of being conscious. We’re thus capable of “second-order attention,” the ability to attend to what we’re attending to. We can think about thinking and (almost) catch ourselves in the act—as I am doing here, dear reader, thinking about and sharing another’s thinking about thinking.

My Consciousness May Be Fundamentally Different from Yours

The fact that I think in words will surprise exactly no one who knows me. I’ve always had a running “interior monologue.” Sometimes it even turns into an interior dialogue. My inner voice asks me questions: “Why are we doing this, Steve?” It also bosses me around. “Think!” it says. That’s in addition to the stories it’s always telling me—about what’s happening around me, about what other people must think, about what the dog would be saying if only he had a voice, and so on.

I’ve long been aware of arguments about the different types of intelligence, and I’ve long realized that some people think “more visually” or “more numerically” than I do. But Pollan’s book brought home just how different our mental worlds might be.

While I think primarily in words, some people think primarily in images. Others think in spatial arrangements, abstract patterns, or something closer to pure emotion than language. The inner landscape of human cognition is far more varied than most of us assume.

During my decades as a writer, editor, and marketing pro, I’ve preached the gospel of knowing your audience countless times. Who are they? What do they need? What keeps them up at night? Pollan’s book adds something deeper: We need to account not only for what our audience knows or believes but for how their minds work.

What I’ve trained in my spotlight could remain untouched by someone else’s lantern. The mental framework I’m reasoning with might exist in a different mode from the one my audience uses. This isn’t cause for despair: We succeed in building shared understanding across cognitive differences all the time. It is cause, however, for paying careful, curious attention to one another, for asking both “what do you think?” and “how do you think it?”

It’s also an implicit reminder of our remarkable capacity for second-order attention. Our ability to imagine other minds, to ask who is singing (or painting or feeling) in someone else’s head, is one of our greatest gifts. It’s central to what makes us human. And it needs to be defended and cultivated.

Consciousness Is Under Pressure

Like everyone paying attention to attention, Pollan is worried about what’s going on in our heads these days. Information overload doesn’t destroy consciousness, but it does tend to consume all the bandwidth we have, depriving us of the powers we need to explore, create, and continue to build deep human connections.

The modern attention economy seems specifically designed to capture and colonize what’s left of lantern consciousness, even as it drains our capacity for second-order awareness. The result is that we’re fighting for our own minds in ways our ancestors never had to, and the implications for how we live, work, and raise children are profound.

Consciousness is not a commodity. It’s the one and only channel we have to connect fully with each other. It’s also our aperture for understanding ourselves in relation to the wider world. It’s extraordinarily precious (non) stuff.

Earlier tonight, I walked outside with my dogs and listened to a chorus of bullfrogs singing at our local pond. Looking up at the stars, I found the Big Dipper, which pointed me to Polaris, as it has done since I was a boy scout.

I remembered, for some reason, that Polaris—the North Star—is 447 light-years away. That means the light reaching my eyes tonight, while I walked my Spinoni and listened to the bullfrogs, left Polaris when William Shakespeare was alive.

It’s a safe bet that he saw the same star, standing somewhere near Stratford in the 1580s.

The light he saw was centuries older still, and he couldn’t have imagined me the way that I can imagine him. Yet here in my consciousness, we are all connected. Me and Will Shakespeare. The Spinoni and the bullfrogs. The Cranberries song that’s been playing in my head since I started writing this piece. And now you, too, dear reader.

Are these connections “real,” or are they only in my imagination? Either way, are they not a stunning wonder? Either I’m channeling cosmic forces, or I’m a force that creates and connects across time and space.

So far as we can tell, no other creature—not the dogs or the frogs or the stars or any AI—can perform this particular feat. Nothing else can hear the bullfrogs, see the stars, and imagine William Shakespeare staring up in 16th-century Stratford.

As humans, we can do this. We know we can do this. We can tell each other about it and listen and feel and look at the world anew.

“A world appears,” indeed. Every one of us should treasure our capacity to witness it, no matter if it comes from within or without.

Best,
Steve

Buy the book here or at your local bookstore.