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This Is Your Mind on Plants Hardcover – July 6, 2021

by Michael Pollan (Author)

4.5 3,462 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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The instant New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year

“Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos.

Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?

In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?

In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of July 2021: Michael Pollan extends the fascinating, and provocative, conversation he started in How to Change Your Mind with This Is Your Mind on Plants, an invitation to think differently about drugs, in this case opium, mescaline, and one many of us are all too familiar with: caffeine. Pollan points out that society, and certainly Starbucks, takes no issue with our addiction to coffee. After all, it arguably makes us more productive. Now illicit drugs, that’s another matter, but the reasons for them being relegated to the criminal category are far more complex, and political, than is obvious. Lest readers think Pollan takes the opioid epidemic lightly, he doesn’t. But this book warns against the universal demonizing of certain psychoactive plants, given their potential as a tool to improve mental, emotional, and spiritual health. That, to me, was the most powerful message of This Is Your Mind on Plants, followed closely by the perils of partaking in caffeine after noon (just say no). —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review

Review

“Delightful . . . [This Is Your Mind On Plants] aims to collapse the distinctions between legal and illegal, medical and recreational, exotic and everyday, by appealing to the principle that unites the three: the affinities between plant biochemistry and the human mind.” —New York Review of Books

“[A] thoughtful study . . . As the U.S.’s drug policies become less punitive, [Pollan] argues, we should think more clearly about substances we’ve come to depend on.” —The New Yorker

“[A] wonderful and compelling read that will leave you thinking long after you set it down . . . Pollan is an astonishingly good writer, at times intimate and vulnerable, at times curious and expository, always compelling and credible. Reading his writing can be kind of like taking a psychedelic—a literary onomatopoeia.” —Washington Post

“Pollan is a mindful and enthusiastic psychonaut. He is also a gifted writer, who synthesizes unruly social histories and wreathes them around his own drug-taking experiences. And he articulates these experiences with great insight and eloquence.” —The New Republic

“Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating . . . This Is Your Mind On Plants has much to offer its readers, whether they are curious about the plant-based adventures of others or the science of substances at work in their own minds. With historical depth, political punch, and narrative exuberance, Pollan's book sounds a call to reimagine society's relationship with psychoactive plants.” —Boston Globe

"Pollan’s insatiable appetite to learn every possible morsel about the subject on which he is writing is a gift that has proved itself with best-seller after best-seller . . . . Anchored by a refreshing willingness to expose his own blind spots, [This Is Your Mind On Plants] is an engrossing, plant-powered blend of general history, contemporary reporting and potent self-reflection."—San Francisco Chronicle

“The author of How to Change Your Mind turns his attention to three consciousness-altering drugs—opium, mescaline and caffeine (yes, it’s a drug)—in this eye-opening exploration.” —People

“[H]ighly engaging reading . . . Pollan’s writing always has a personal aspect to it, but in his latest work he takes an even more central role in the narrative, and his book is the better for it.” —The Daily Beast

“Pollan weaves together three separately engaging stories in a pleasantly meandering style, deftly using his personal experiences with each compound as a jumping-off point for small forays into anthropology, history, politics, psychology, molecular biology, and neuroscience. Even the most distracted reader will come away with an understanding of the physical effects of the spotlighted substances as well as their cultural significance.” —Science

“The omnivorously curious Pollan pivots off his provocative How to Change Your Mind with an enthralling odyssey into a trio of mind-altering drugs found in plants: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. In this wide-ranging, deliciously written study, he asks, why does one power us up each morning while the other two are shrouded in taboo? You’ll never look at a Starbucks Pike’s Peak the same way again.” —Oprah Daily

“This Is Your Mind on Plants is an entertaining blend of memoir, history and social commentary that illustrates Pollan’s ability to be both scientific and personal. By relying on contextual history and focusing on three popular, if misunderstood, drugs, Pollan challenges common views on what mind-altering drugs are and what they can accomplish.” —BookPage (starred review)

“Pollan is a master of breaking down complex science into an engaging story and challenging long-held societal beliefs. His newest offering, which follows his examination of the science of psychedelics in 2018’s How to Change Your Mind, aims to unpack our ideas about what constitutes a ‘drug’ and, fundamentally, why we seek them.” —TIME

“Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce. . . . A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.” —Kirkus (starred review)

About the Author

Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Made the Modern World. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Of all the many things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, ﬂavor, ﬁber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, to ﬁddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Like most people, I use a couple of plants this way on a daily basis. Every morning without fail I begin my day by preparing a hot-water infusion of one of two plants that I depend on (and dependent I am) to clear the mental fog, sharpen my focus, and prepare myself for the day ahead. We don’t usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use of it as an addiction, but that is only because coffee and tea are legal and our dependence on them is socially acceptable. So, then, what exactly is a drug? And why is making tea from the leaves of Camellia sinensis uncontroversial, while doing the same thing with the seed heads of Papaver somniferum is, as I discovered to my peril, a federal crime?

All who try to construct a sturdy deﬁnition of drugs eventually run aground. Is chicken soup a drug? What about sugar? Artiﬁcial sweeteners? Chamomile tea? How about a placebo? If we deﬁne a drug simply as a substance we ingest that changes us in some way, whether in body or in mind (or both), then all those substances surely qualify. But shouldn’t we be able to distinguish foods from drugs? Faced with that very dilemma, the Food and Drug Administration punted, offering a circular deﬁnition of drugs as “articles other than food” that are recognized in the pharmacopoeia—that is, as drugs by the FDA. Not much help there.

Things become only slightly clearer when the modiﬁer “illicit” is added: an illicit drug is whatever a government decides it is. It can be no accident that these are almost exclusively the ones with the power to change consciousness. Or, perhaps I should say, with the power to change consciousness in ways that run counter to the smooth operations of society and the interests of the powers that be. As an example, coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.

But even these classiﬁcations are not as ﬁxed or as sturdy as you may think. At various times both in the Arab world and in Europe, authorities have outlawed coffee, because they regarded the people who gathered to drink it as politically threatening. As I write, psychedelics seem to be undergoing a change of identity. Since researchers have demonstrated that psilocybin can be useful in treating mental health, some psychedelics will probably soon become FDA-approved medicines: that is, recognized as more helpful than threatening to the functioning of society.

This happens to be precisely how Indigenous peoples have always regarded these substances. In many Indigenous communities, the ceremonial use of peyote, a psychedelic, reinforces social norms by bringing people together to help heal the traumas of colonialism and dispossession. The government recognizes the First Amendment right of Native Americans to ingest peyote as part of the free exercise of their religion, but under no circumstances do the rest of us enjoy that right, even if we use peyote in a similar way. So here is a case where it is the identity of the user rather than the drug that changes its legal status.

Nothing about drugs is straightforward. But it’s not quite true that our plant taboos are entirely arbitrary. As these examples suggest, societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it. That’s why in a society’s choice of psychoactive substances we can read a great deal about both its fears and its desires.

Ever since I took up gardening as a teenager and attempted to grow cannabis, I have been fascinated by our attraction to these powerful plants as well as by the equally powerful taboos and fraught feelings with which we surround them. I’ve come to appreciate that when we take these plants into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways possible.

There is scarcely a culture on earth that hasn’t discovered in its environment at least one such plant or fungus, and in most cases a whole suite of them, that alters consciousness in one of a variety of ways. Through what was surely a long and perilous trial and error, humans have identiﬁed plants that lift the burden of physical pain; render us more alert or capable of uncommon feats; make us more sociable; elicit feelings of awe or ecstasy; nourish our imagination; transcend space and time; occasion dreams and visions and mystical experiences; and bring us into the presence of our ancestors or gods. Evidently, normal everyday consciousness is not enough for us humans; we seek to vary, intensify, and sometimes transcend it, and we have identiﬁed a whole collection of molecules in nature that allow us to do that.

This Is Your Mind on Plants is a personal inquiry into three of those molecules and the remarkable plants that produce them: the morphine in the opium poppy; the caffeine in coffee and tea; and the mescaline produced by the peyote and San Pedro cacti. The second of these molecules is legal everywhere today; the ﬁrst is illegal in most places (unless it has been reﬁned by a pharmaceutical company and prescribed by a physician); and the third is illegal in the United States unless you are a member of a Native American tribe. Each represents one of the three broad categories of psychoactive compounds: the downer (opium); the upper (caffeine); and what I think of as the outer (mescaline). Or, to put it a bit more scientiﬁcally, I proﬁle here a sedative, a stimulant, and a hallucinogen.

Taken together, these three plant drugs cover much of the spectrum of the human experience of psychoactive substances, from the everyday use of caffeine, the most popular psychoactive drug on the planet; to the ceremonial use of mescaline by Indigenous peoples; to the age-old use of opiates to relieve pain. That particular chapter is set during the drug war, at a topsy-turvy moment when the government was paying more attention to a bunch of gardeners growing poppies in order to brew a mild narcotic tea than it was to a pharmaceutical company that was knowingly addicting millions of Americans to its FDA-approved opiate, OxyContin. I was one of those gardeners.

I tell each of these stories from multiple perspectives and through a variety of lenses: historical, anthropological, biochemical, botanical, and personal. In each case, I have some skin in the game—or perhaps I should say brain cells, since I don’t know how to write about how it feels, and what it means, to change consciousness without conducting some self-experimentation. Though in the case of caffeine, self-experimentation meant abstaining from it rather than partaking, which proved much harder to do.

One of these chapters consists of an essay I wrote twenty-ﬁve years ago, when the drug war was raging, and it bears the scars of that period of fear and paranoia. But the other stories have been inﬂected by the fading of that war, the end of which now appears in sight. In the 2020 election, Oregonians voted to decriminalize the possession of all drugs and speciﬁcally to legalize therapy using psilocybin. A ballot measure passed in Washington, D.C., calls for the decriminalization* of “entheogenic plants and fungi.” (“Entheogen,” from the Greek for “manifesting the god [divine] within,” is an alternative term for psychedelics, coined in 1979 by a group of religious scholars hoping to remove the counterculture taint from this class of drugs and underscore the spiritual use to which they have been put for thousands of years.) In the same election, New Jersey, along with four traditionally red states—Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota—voted to liberalize marijuana laws, bringing the number of states that have legalized some form of marijuana use to thirty-six.

My wager in writing This Is Your Mind on Plants is that the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic narratives about “your brain on drugs,” has opened a space in which we can tell some other, much more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind-altering plants and fungi with which nature has blessed us.

I use the word “blessed” in full awareness of the human tragedies that can accompany the use of drugs. Much better than we do, the Greeks understood the two-faced nature of drugs, an understanding reﬂected in the ambiguity of their term for them: pharmakon. A
pharmakon can be either a medicine or a poison; it all depends—on use, dose, intention, and set and setting.* (The word has a third meaning as well, one often relied on during the drug war: a pharma- kon is also a scapegoat, something for a group to blame its problems on.) Drug abuse is certainly real, but it is less a matter of breaking the law than of falling into an unhealthy relationship with a substance, whether licit or illicit, one in which the ally, or medicine, has become an enemy. The same opiates that killed some ﬁfty thousand Americans by overdose in 2019 also make surgery endurable and ease the passage out of this life. Surely that qualiﬁes as a blessing.

The stories I tell here put this trio of psychoactive plant chemicals into the context of our larger relationship to nature. One of the innumerable threads connecting us to the natural world is the onethat links plant chemistries to human consciousness. And since this is a relationship, we need to account for the plants’ points of view as well as our own. How amazing is it that so many kinds of plants have hit upon the precise recipes for molecules that ﬁt snugly into receptors in human brains? And that by doing so these molecules can short-circuit our experience of pain, or rouse us, or obliterate the sense of being a separate self? You have to wonder: what’s in it for the plants to devise and manufacture molecules that can pass for human neurotransmitters and affect us in such profound ways?

Most of the molecules that plants produce that change animal minds start out as tools for defense: alkaloids like morphine, caffeine, and mescaline are bitter-tasting toxins meant to discourage animals from eating the plants that make them and, should the animals persist, to poison them. But plants are cleve , and over the course of evolution they’ve learned that simply killing a pest outright is not necessarily the smartest strategy. Since a lethal pesticide would quickly select for resistant members of the pest population, rendering it ineffective, plants have evolved subtler and more devious strategies: chemicals that instead mess with the minds of animals, confusing or disorienting them or ruining their appetite—something that caffeine, mescaline, and morphine all reliably do.

But while most of the psychoactive molecules plants have developed started out as poisons, they sometimes evolved into the opposite: attractants. Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.

Once humans discovered what caffeine and morphine and mescaline could do for them, the plants that produce the greatest amounts of these chemicals were the ones that prospered in the sunshine of our attention; we disseminated their genes around the world, vastly expanding their habitat and providing for their every need. By now our fates and the fates of these plants are complexly intertwined. What began as war has evolved into marriage.

Why do we humans go to such lengths to change our minds, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs, taboos and anxieties? These questions have occupied me since I began writing about our engagement with the natural world more than thirty years ago. When you compare this desire to the other needs we turn to nature to gratify—for food, clothing, shelter, beauty, and so on—the drive to alter consciousness wouldn’t seem to contribute nearly as much, if anything, to our success or survival. In fact, the desire to change consciousness may be seen as maladaptive, since altered states can put us at risk for accidents or make us more vulnerable to attack. Also, many of these plant chemicals are toxic; others, like morphine, are highly addictive.

But if our species’ desire to change consciousness is universal, a human given, then doing so should offer beneﬁts to make up for the risks, or natural selection would long ago have weeded out the drug takers. Take, for example, morphine’s value as a painkiller, which has made it one of the most important drugs in the pharmacopoeia going back thousands of years.

Plants that change consciousness answer to other human needs as well. We shouldn’t underestimate the value, to people trapped in monotonous lives, of a substance that can relieve boredom and entertain by sponsoring novel sensations and thoughts in the mind. Some drugs can expand the contours of a world constrained by circumstance, as I discovered during the pandemic. Drugs that enhance sociability not only gratify us but presumably result in more offspring. Stimulants like caffeine improve concentration, making us better able to learn and work, and to think in rational, linear ways. Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.

Psychedelic drugs can also beneﬁt us—and occasionally our culture—by stimulating the imagination and nourishing creativity in the individuals who take them. This is not to suggest that all the ideas that occur to the altered mind are any good; most of them aren’t. But every now and then a tripping brain will hit upon a novel idea, a solution to a problem, or a new way of looking at things that will beneﬁt the group and, possibly, change the course of history. The case can be made that the introduction of caffeine to Europe in the seventeenth century fostered a new, more rational (and sober) way of thinking that helped give rise to the age of reason and the Enlightenment.

It’s useful to think of these psychoactive molecules as mutagens, but mutagens operating in the realm of human culture rather than in biology. In the same way that exposure to a disruptive force like radiation can mutate genes, introducing variation and throwing off new traits that every so often prove adaptive for the species, psychoactive drugs, operating on the minds of individuals, occasionally contribute useful new memes to the evolution of culture—conceptual breakthroughs, fresh metaphors, novel theories. Not always, not even often, but every now and then, the encounter of a mind and a plant molecule changes things. If the human imagination has a natural history, as it must, can there be any doubt that plant chemistries have helped to inform it?

Psychedelic compounds can promote experiences of awe and mystical connection that nurture the spiritual impulse of human beings—indeed, that might have given rise to it in the ﬁrst place, according to some religious scholars.* The notion of a beyond, of a hidden dimension of reality, or of an afterlife—these, too, may be memes introduced to human culture by visions that psychoactive molecules inspired in human minds. Drugs are not the only way to occasion the sort of mystical experience at the core of many religious traditions—meditation, fasting, and solitude can achieve similar results—but they are a proven tool for making it happen. The spiritual or ceremonial plant drugs can also help knit people together, fostering a stronger sense of social connection accompanied by a diminished sense of self. We have only just begun to understand how the human involvement with psychoactive plants has shaped our history.

It probably shouldn’t surprise us that plants of such power and possibility are surrounded by equally powerful emotions, laws, rituals, and taboos. These reﬂect the understanding that changing minds can be disruptive to both individuals and societies, and that when such powerful tools are placed in the hands of fallible human beings, things can go very wrong. We have much to learn from traditional Indigenous cultures that have made long use of psychedelics like mescaline or ayahuasca: as a rule, the substances are never used casually, but always with intention, surrounded by ritual and under the watchful eye of experienced elders. These people recognize that these plants can unleash Dionysian energies that can get out of control if not managed with care.

But the blunt instrument of a drug war has kept us from reckoning with these ambiguities and the important questions about our nature that they raise. The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are, as well as its insistence on lumping them all together under a single meaningless rubric, has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential of these very different substances. The legal status of this or that molecule is one of the least interesting things about it. Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing—without a human brain, it is inert—so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen. The premise of this book is that these three relationships hold up mirrors to our deepest human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; First Edition (July 6, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593296907
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593296905
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.37 x 0.96 x 9.53 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #269,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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- #453 in Ecology (Books)
- #29,339 in Self-Help (Books)

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Michael Pollan

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Michael Pollan is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

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Customers find the book easy to read with a good quality of prose. They find the subject matter interesting and thought-provoking. The humor and caffeine content are praised as funny and entertaining. Readers describe the book as sturdy, well-sourced, and hard to put down. However, some feel there is too much filler and self-indulgence in the narrative. Opinions differ on the storytelling quality, with some finding it solid and enlightening while others consider it rambling.

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49 customers mention "Readability"46 positive3 negative

Customers find the book readable and interesting. They appreciate the good quality of the prose and the author's writing style. The subject matter is interesting and the book provides an entertaining review of how plants affect our minds.

"...Its entertaining and the account is informative though the conclusions are unclear as to whether coffee is detrimental to sleep to a degree that it..." Read more

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"...Good read….interesting and warm." Read more

"I am a fan of Michael Pollan anyway. This new book is also fantastic, as are so many of his. Very informative and enlightening." Read more

48 customers mention "Informative"46 positive2 negative

Customers find the book informative and interesting. They appreciate the well-researched content and thought-provoking writing style. The book introduces new concepts and information, with Pollan's personal experience and interviews with leading experts.

"...the use of opium through human history is quite vast and it has soothing attributes, though obviously heroin and oxycodone are clear examples of the..." Read more

"Loved the historical detail and shift between social, personal and government perspectives...." Read more

"...This new book is also fantastic, as are so many of his. Very informative and enlightening." Read more

"...It was not only interesting research, but amusing to read of his caffeine withdrawal, despair, and maniacal reaction to his first cup again...." Read more

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Customers enjoy the caffeine content. They find the experiment humorous, especially the withdrawal and maniacal reactions.

"...It was not only interesting research, but amusing to read of his caffeine withdrawal, despair, and maniacal reaction to his first cup again...." Read more

"This was a well written book. It covers the effects of caffeine, peyote, and heroin. The caffein selection was a separate audiobook release...." Read more

"...The first section about opium dragged on, the caffeine part was actually quite interesting, and of course the last part regarding mescaline seemed..." Read more

"...The chapter on caffeine was interesting but not profound for me. The last chapter was not interesting for me...." Read more

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Customers find the book humorous and entertaining. They describe it as well-written, though less informative than the author's previous works.

"...It is easy to read and entertaining though less informative than his previous books...." Read more

"...two sections of the book, on Opium and Caffeine, are informative and humorous. It was the third section on Mescaline that disappointed." Read more

"So beautifully written! Funny, self deprecating, seriously informative. I’m tempted to buy 12 copies and pass them out to friends and family!" Read more

"Informative and fun throughout. I was hooked from the first page up until the end. I would recommend this book to anyone that can read." Read more

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Customers find the book in good condition and not damaged. They say it's well-written, sourced, and thought-provoking.

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"I loved this book. Hard to put down. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in plants or self awareness" Read more

"Fascinating, Educational and Easy..." Read more

9 customers mention "Narrative quality"6 positive3 negative

Customers have different views on the narrative quality. Some find the storytelling solid and enlightening, with well-described experiences. Others describe it as a rambling, self-indulgent narrative focused on details that don't always add to the message.

"...one gets a sense of its feasibility and difficulty but the experience is described well and definitely sounds like something worthy of trying...." Read more

"...This book feels more narrative (i.e. less dense) than his previous book on psychedelics, and is a fairly quick and accessible read. Highly recommend!" Read more

"...Slower and focused on details that didn't always add to the message I think he wanted to convey...." Read more

"...and informed by the author’s intense research and enlightening storytelling skills. My gratitude for all the newly opened doors is boundless" Read more

4 customers mention "Filler"0 positive4 negative

Customers find the book has too much filler and feels self-indulgent. They describe it as boring, recycled material, and a waste of time.

"...NOPE. This book is all drugs. A psychedelic, a stimulant, and a pain killer...." Read more

"...This book felt like filler, like he had to keep writing, but made it seem like he was saying a lot...." Read more

"lots of filler in this one...waste of time IMO" Read more

"...boring. Recycled material. Self-indulgent. Skip it." Read more

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A. Menon
Somewhat of an extension piece to How to Change Your Mind
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2023
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Michael Pollan takes a further journey into the affects of substances on one's body and mind in This is Your Mind on Plants. The author's writing has morphed from food culture to natural drug culture to some extent and this book is a look at three more substances of interest, Opium, Caffeine and Mescaline. One of those is a bit of an odd man out but the overall book does each topic some justice. Each topic is an essay on a personal experience/experiment with the subject and is a look at both cultivation and preparation as well as the effects it has on the body and mind. Overall a quick and interesting read on both the culture of enforcement and how it has changed in the country in the last 20 years as well as a scientific perspective on the substances being discussed.

One remarkable thing about the book is that it illustrates the intrinsic accessibility of opium and mescaline to the motivated horticulturist. In particular the trade of seeds is significant and the use of the plants is broad enough that the ability to extract mind altering components from plants is rarely their large demand base. The poppy is a gardener's favorite for its beautiful flowers and trade in poppy seeds is not a criminal offence. The author describes the fine line between cultivation and preparation and how the law is both clear and ambiguous as to how it should be interpreted. One thing that comes out is that enforcement is a matter of the political climate rather than consistent application. The author goes through his journey on preparing poppy's his discussion of some cases where a subject became the target of law enforcement to their extreme regret and how the author put himself at risk by even approaching the subject as a journalist. Overall the use of opium through human history is quite vast and it has soothing attributes, though obviously heroin and oxycodone are clear examples of the extreme danger that comes from opiate addiction. The storytelling is solid and the common sense approach the author brings is refreshing. The author moves on to caffeine which is a bit out of place with the other two topics but the author approaches the topic scientifically and historically by giving a historical account and doing a study on himself where he deprives himself of coffee after decades of dependence. Its entertaining and the account is informative though the conclusions are unclear as to whether coffee is detrimental to sleep to a degree that it is long term damaging relative to the benefits one gets from its alertness properties. The author also tackles mescaline and in particular looks into the culture of peyote and its ceremonial use in native American culture. The account is interesting and the challenges he was faced with in witnessing peyote being used in ceremonial terms is a reminder of how hippie culture can clash with the cultural desires of the original users. The preparation and complexity to preparing peyote is discussed so one gets a sense of its feasibility and difficulty but the experience is described well and definitely sounds like something worthy of trying.

Overall this is in line with the style of how to change your mind where the author takes a subject which is a bit taboo (certainly less so these days) and does a study of it for a middle aged audience perspective. He does another good job and with it brings in the culture of enforcement and its changes over the last 20 years with his personal story of opium as a prime example. It is easy to read and entertaining though less informative than his previous books. Its enjoyable and the author does a good job, though i think further mileage out of examining how your mind is altered by substances is probably limited.

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Spirit Reader
Fascinating!
Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2024
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Great book!

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gk
Interesting read!
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2024
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Loved the historical detail and shift between social, personal and government perspectives. It read like a conversation/struggle with himself along the way that in turn made the information feel almost confidential. Good read….interesting and warm.

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Sunflower 51
Excellent, well-written, informative
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2024
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I am a fan of Michael Pollan anyway. This new book is also fantastic, as are so many of his. Very informative and enlightening.

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KkaiTech
Underscoring the question, “Why do these plants exist?”
Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2024
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Accounts of experiences from Pollan, Stamets, Morris, traditional practitioners, researchers and numerous others help us to understand what the effects of these organisms are when administered in various physical, emotional and spiritual contexts. But in my mind, each also provides a piece of the answer to the question, “Why do these plants exist at all?”
My knowledge of the psychedelic experience is limited. But I also know that the molecules responsible for these experiences fit very specific receptors in the brain. So why do these organisms, which have been around longer than humans, contain the very specific compounds that allow users to experience the world in such an expanded way? Were they waiting for us to find them and figure out how to use them correctly?
Michael Pollan provides important pieces to the possible answers to that question.

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Jan. Peregrine
Not His Best
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2021
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've really enjoyed all of Michael Pollan's nonfiction books that research botany, food, our brains, and how they influence each other. The first I read was The Botany of Desire, which was quite amusing in a fascinating way, but his latest book, This is Your Mind on Plants, reads like a rehash of that former book. I actually became impatient and skipped half of the first section and some of the third.

His last book, How to Change Your Mind, was fascinating too, but I was hoping for something different with this new book. It felt like more of the same.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with digging into a topic for the innards, but I don't quite share Pollan's fanaticism with the mysteries of mostly inaccessible plants. Here he has three sections, for poppies that make opium, coffee and tea beans, and peyote cacti that has mescaline.

I began the section on his illegal growing of poppies in his 1990s' garden, shared via a 20 some year old essay he'd found and fully restored, with some amusement. Then it just dragged and I saw no reason to keep reading. I'm sure the entire experience with the DEA was amusing to him, though. The same thing with the last section where he desperately sought a psychedelic experience during the stress of the pandemic and California fires.

He was told by a Native American friend that the best way to respect something out of your culture is to leave it alone. He found another teacher who had a little Native American in her.

I'm not saying that nothing good came out of his healing ceremony with peyote, but he wasn't much affected by it and only his wife felt a breakthrough in a spiritual burden she carried. For him it was little more than doing something cool, in my opinion.

The most compelling of the sections was the middle one about caffeinated plants. Some flowers even draw more bees by adding caffeine to their nectar. This was great stuff. He abstained from coffee and green tea for three months to be able to write about caffeine's \effects on our brains. It was not only interesting research, but amusing to read of his caffeine withdrawal, despair, and maniacal reaction to his first cup again.

To put it briefly, he convinced me to try coffee again and make it an acquired taste s I can get my friggin' editing done...

It'll all be amusing to a new Pollan reader, no doubt and some fans. Middle section was great, though.

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152 people found this helpful

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Lala
Great resource
Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2024
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If you are into plants and the connection to your health this book is great.

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Cow Bay Boy
Very informative.
Reviewed in Canada on November 20, 2022
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A good read.

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CentroOesteGOMT
Michael Pollan não decepcionou
Reviewed in Brazil on March 25, 2022
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Como nos livros anteriores, Pollan descreve em detalhes de forma dinâmica baseado também na sua própria experiência. Ele experimenta pessoalmente as atividades descritas nos seus livros, de uma forma ou de outra, exercendo seu jornalismo excepcional enquanto relata do ponto de vista pessoal.

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William Gomez
Menos de lo esperado.
Reviewed in Mexico on August 30, 2021
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Primero, el físico me importa, y creí que la pasta dura era tal cual en la imagen, pero no, es solo una cubierta que tiene pocos días y ya se estropeó, y sin ella el libro, al menos físicamente no me agradó. En cuánto al contenido creo que el título es engañoso. Habla de opio, cafeína y mescalina, pero por el título, esperaba más.

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Aryan r.
Exclusive-elusive-entertaining
Reviewed in India on July 15, 2024
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Exclusive knowledge explained by Michael Pollan, includes many references for easy understanding but requires a bit of time to get hold of, and of course it extends one knowledge and perspective, challenges social dogma with knowledgeable arguments.

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George11
Clickbait Title & Blurb
Reviewed in Italy on December 4, 2022
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The Book is more like a "light" diary of someone who primarily talks not about his personal experience but of the experience someone else had with the substances. The title "This Is Your Mind On Plants" the word "Mind" ruins it all, since someone would expect to see something relevant on how the brain processes these substances and than translates the chemicals into a bodily experience. Instead, we cay say that the story is about: My struggle against the raw bureaucratic laws etc.

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