This Is Your Mind on Plants

By: Michael Pollan

Narrated by: Michael Pollan

Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

The instant New York Times best seller | 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 number one New York Times best-selling 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.

©2021 Michael Pollan (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“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)

Fascinating material and great narration.

Fascinating material around the cultivation and prevalent use of mind-altering plant chemicals that, now commonly taken for granted, have significantly affected the course of human development. Surprisingly great narration by the author Michael Pollan; surprising only to me in that I am used to a lower tier of production when authors narrate their own material, and Mr. Pollan’s dulcet tones and expert pacing caught me off guard. Overall great listen and I look forward to hearing more of this author!

Good book

This guy just explains everything in such a clear way and the book definitely made me think about the ways humans and plants interact with each other.

Another gem

A true Pollan piece. Loved every chapter and got through it in a couple days.

must read

there is so much here to recommend the book. there is history, anthropology, an analysis of the stupid US drug laws and a misguided war on plants, but mostly there is a spiral journey and investigation of expanding our souls and consciousness.

eye opener!

a whole different perspective than the typical American brainwashed perspective. I would recommend to anyone

Very interesting

Michael Pollan is a superb author. Incredible interesting topics and very entertaining. I learned a lot from this book.

Planet of Plants

Works well that the author is also the commentator -- a cleaver and comic listen.

Mind expanding book about mind expansion

Compelling, compulsuve,addictive reading. The intricate, surprising and obsessively detailed histories of each of the subjects are shocking and illuminating. It makes one question ones presumptions and one's own sense of self. Learned so much!

Excellent work!

Had so much fun listening to the author talk about his garden experience. Inspired me to grow 🤓

Love!

I love listening to Michael Pollan narrate his own books, it adds a whole other level you wouldn’t get by reading it yourself.. although I do have the book to read as well. Love the way he goes into so much detail about the subjects he is writing about. I’ve listened to most of his books and highly recommend them all.