Announcing my new book, A World Appears

September 16, 2025

Dear friends and readers,

I’m thrilled to announce that my new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, will be published February 24, 2026 and is available for preorder now at Amazon (here), Barnes & Noble (here), Bookshop (here), and Books-A-Million (here). Check out the cover:

Why consciousness? For me, it was my experiences both in meditation and on psychedelics that put the question in front of me and fired my curiosity. Both these altered states have a way of smudging the usually transparent windowpane of consciousness, making you realize there is this screen of subjectivity between you and the world. Why? Suddenly this mystery became all I could think about.

I began reporting on the book six years ago, and the journey took me places I never expected to go—not only deep into the modern science of the mind but also into philosophy, literature and religion. I quickly discovered there’s a very good reason philosophers call consciousness “the hard problem.” While I won’t claim to have solved it—it may be unsolvable—along the way, I not only learned a great deal—about how we perceive, feel and think—but had some of my fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality overturned.

Here's a bit more on the book from my publisher:

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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves.

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I’m very proud of A World Appears and hope you get to read or listen to it. Please let me know your thoughts when you do. You can always email me at inquiries@michaelpollan.com.

Cheers,