This Is Your Mind On Plants

Resumen del libro

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR NEW NETFLIX SERIES, HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND'It's a trip - engrossing, eye-opening, mind altering' New Statesman 'Fascinating. Pollan is the perfect guide ... curious, careful, open minded' The Guardian 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 Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs - opium, caffeine and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness 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, and the equally powerful taboos. In a unique blend of history, science, memoir and reportage, Pollan shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively.

In doing so, he proves that there is much more to say about these plants than simply debating their regulation, 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. This ground-breaking and singular book holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds and our entanglement with the natural world.

Biografía del autor

Michael Pollan es periodista y escritor. Colaborador habitual en The New York Times Magazine, ha recibido numerosos premios periodísticos y sus artículos han sido incluidos en diferentes antologías como Best American Science Writing (2004) o Best American Essays (1990 y 2003). Además, imparte clases sobre periodismo científico y medioambiental en la Universidad de Berkeley. En su faceta como escritor ha tenido un gran éxito en Estados Unidos con sus libros The Omnivore" s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (que fue considerado uno de los diez mejores libros publicados en 2006 por The New York Times y The Washington Post), The Botany of Desire: A Plant" s-Eye View of the World (2001), A Place of My Own (1997) y Second Nature (1991).