Pollan, Michael

  • A World Appears

    £25.00

    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. This title 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.

  • This Is Your Mind on Plants

    £10.99

    Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate, calm, or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience. In this book, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs – opium, caffeine and mescaline – and throws the fundamental strangeness of our thinking about them into sharp relief.

  • Food Rules

    £4.99

    Michael Pollan offers this indispensable handbook for anyone concerned about health and food. Simple, sensible and easy to use, ‘Food Rules’ is a set of memorable adages or ‘personal policies’ for eating wisely, gathered from a wide variety of sources.

  • How to Change Your Mind

    £12.99

    When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs.