A World Appears

A Journey Into Consciousness

By: Michael Pollan

Narrated by: Michael Pollan

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

'A World Appears is a big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written inquiry into the essence of our being-in-the-world, of being, simply, alive' the Financial Times

'Lucid and impassioned...a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of counciousness...' the Guardian

'Razor-sharp, reassuringly sceptical, sensitive and grounded...you could not hope for a more judicious or readable summary of the scientific state of affairs' the Sunday Times

© Michael Pollan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critic reviews

Pollan has one of the most inquisitive and accommodating minds in the higher journalism of ourtime... A World Appears is a big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written inquiry into the essence of our being-in-the-world, of being, simply, alive (John Banville)

Lucid, engaging, insightful and informative... refreshingly assertive and sceptical... Pollan is a superb writer (Tim Crane)

Lucid and impassioned... a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness... bridging both science and the humanities, Pollan mines neuroscientific research, philosophy, literature and his own mind, searching for different ways to think about being (Edward Posnett)

Razor-sharp, reassuringly sceptical, sensitive and grounded... you could not hope for a more judicious or readable summary of the scientific state of affairs (James McConnachie)

Humane and persuasive... this combination of boldness and intellectual humility, dogged curiosity and an openness to wonder makes Pollan, a veteran science journalist, an ideal guide to the mysteries of consciousness and science's many frustrated attempts to understand it. Few writers possess the same skill for translating notoriously abstruse theories... into readily understandable prose (Sophie McBain)

Well-written, richly researched and a pleasure to read

A rewarding tour, thanks to Pollan's acute intellectual curiosity (Anthony Gottlieb)

Pollan is so honest, so interested and so clever (Melanie McDonagh)

A fascinating and fluent guide to what’s on our minds. Grab a copy (Dominic Green)