Michael Pollan and Christof Koch Explore Consciousness at Berkeley

Michael Pollan and neuroscientist Christof Koch held a public conversation at UC Berkeley on 13 October 2026, examining consciousness, psychedelics, and altered states in an event that has since been featured on the Berkeley Talks podcast, as reported by UC Berkeley News.

According to Cal Performances, the evening ran from 7:30 to 9:00 pm and was co-presented by Cal Performances and UC Berkeley's Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

As noted by 48hills.org, the discussion was moderated by Shayla Love and covered the speakers' respective books, consciousness science, and the latest findings in psychedelics research.

Pollan's 2018 work How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence established him as the foremost popular chronicler of the psychedelic research revival, and Publishers Weekly described it at the time as a "nuanced and sophisticated exploration" that asked "big questions about meaning-making and spiritual experience."

His new 2026 book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, builds directly on that framework, according to UC Berkeley News.

As The Guardian explains, the new book broadens the inquiry to ask what consciousness is, who has it, and why — including probing edge cases such as plant sentience alongside the better-known territory of psychedelic experience.

The Guardian notes that A World Appears "neatly marries both strands of Pollan's work: plant life and inner life," suggesting the book is as much a continuation of his earlier food and nature writing as it is a sequel to his psychedelics reporting.

The choice of Christof Koch as Pollan's interlocutor is a significant one: as Pollan himself noted in a Substack post ahead of the event, Koch is "one of the leading neuroscientists working on the problem of consciousness" and features as a central character in the new book.

According to Archyde, the Berkeley event brought both figures together to examine "the intersections of human consciousness" and the enduring difficulty of measuring subjective experience objectively — the so-called hard problem that sits at the heart of both psychedelics research and neuroscience.

As Memesita reports, the wide-ranging discussion examined how psychedelics alter human perception and what that tells us about the nature of experience more broadly.

The Berkeley appearance is not an isolated engagement: a Sydney Morning Herald interview reveals Pollan will also appear at the Sydney Opera House on 4 November and Melbourne's Wheeler Centre on 5 November, suggesting an active international promotional push for A World Appears.

That same interview saw Pollan speak candidly about ego death, psychedelics, and fifty years of marriage — indicating that the personal dimension which made How to Change Your Mind so compelling remains central to his public presence around the new work.

Rolling Stone notes that in A World Appears, Pollan draws on research showing that a psychedelic experience "dramatically increases the likelihood that a person will attribute consciousness to other entities" — a finding that threads neatly through both his nature writing and his ongoing engagement with the science of mind.

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness is Pollan's most direct attempt yet to synthesise the plant world and the inner world into a single, unified argument about the nature of experience. The Berkeley Talks episode featuring his conversation with Christof Koch is available now via the UC Berkeley News podcast.