Pollan’s real genius—the word is not too strong—remains intact ... Steals back for humanity some of the sensation of miraculousness that this era has largely outsourced to technology.
A captivating exploration, one that is highly personal and sensitive. Unlike with a book that simply reports the state of the consciousness field, we receive the story through the sharp mind of a writer and the questioning heart of a seeker ... Highly pleasurable to read.
Pollan has one of the most inquisitive and accommodating minds in the higher journalism of our time ... Wide-ranging ... A big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written inquiry into the essence of our being-in-the-world, of being, simply, alive.
A fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness ... Lucid and impassioned ... The later chapters, which draw on everything from Buddhist thought to modernist literature, remind us of what is obvious if only we stop to notice: that our minds are constantly in flux, remoulding, shifting, flowing.
He does it very well. You could not hope for a more judicious or readable summary of the scientific state of affairs ... Pollan can be impish ... He is reassuringly sceptical, sensitive and grounded — an old-fashioned well-read liberal humanist. Yet he does leave gaps ... My main doubt, though, is that the whole subject is just so male.
It is probably not surprising that this book does not end with many answers. The concepts and theories and science around it are all illuminating but only to a point. Still, Pollan has a knack for engaging my wonder at the sheer complexity of the world. For this experience alone, he is worth reading.
The title itself betrays one of many troubling assumptions ... Pollan assumes that his and his interlocutors’ reality is the only one, or the only important one ... Where I know the subject, I found alarming errors in Pollan’s understanding.
Rewarding thanks to Pollan’s acute intellectual curiosity, though he does rather wander off into happy land in the end ... Towards the end of his journey, Pollan is not sure what to think, and even ponders the possibility that it is consciousness and not matter which is the fundamental stuff of the universe. This desperate gambit makes the mind less of a lonely outlier in the physical world, but only by rendering the whole universe more mysterious ... Perhaps there is more enlightenment yet to come. It’s an unsatisfying anticlimax of an ending, not because Pollan fails to explain consciousness, but because he mystically withdraws into an inner landscape, leaving his readers behind.
Despite Pollan’s diligent research, a comprehensive understanding of consciousness remains elusive. Yet the fact that we can ponder consciousness and theorize about it is mind-blowing.
