Like a lot of people (Anglophones mostly, it seems), I’ve been dabbling with the possibility that my brain might be Neurodivergent. More than dabbling, really. But I can’t settle the matter once and for all. I worry about coming to a conclusion that might be more convenient than accurate, an explanation that might be just an excuse.

So the refreshing thing about reading Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness was that it left me in no doubt whatsoever that my mind is neurodivergent — divergent, at least, from Michael Pollan’s. My neuros diverge from his neuros.

To start simple, he prefers to wear blue (the universal color of regular guys?), and he considers Why is there something rather than nothing to be one of “the three biggest mysteries of the universe.” I cannot wear blue without feeling that I am passing for normal, and one the riddles of my universe is what kind of answer Pollan’s question can expect to have. My mind’s eye conjures Mr Clean, arms folded in self-satisfaction, saying something pat but not enduringly plausible.

It would be wrong to say that I disagree with Michael Pollan. I don’t get that far. I’m simply not tuned to his radio station.

Happily for him, it’s a very popular, very entertaining radio station. The entertainment in A World Appears comes down to this: while searching for a definition of “consciousness,” Pollan seeks to locate its natural  occurrences. This seems to me to be rather like panning for gold without knowing what gold looks like. I realize that the polynomial approach to solving problems has become a staple of book-length journalism; shifting back and forth between unknowns supplies an excitement that is otherwise lacking, as in, say, the question whether the tips of plant roots are intelligent, or the assertion that what we see when we open our eyes is not what’s there to be seen but what our minds tell us to expect. (For my part, I agree that plants are sentient, and also that we tend not to see things that we’re not expecting in a view that is otherwise familiar.) Pollan is particularly adept as a wandering scholar, seeking enlightenment from various sages. Blue notwithstanding, I see him in a saffron windbreaker.

Two divergences more serious than the color of clothing were our very different experiences, first, with psychedelics and, second, in waking up in the morning. About the latter, Pollan writes of a brief period, lasting only milliseconds perhaps but palpably strange, during which his self regularly re-assembles itself after sleep. I have experienced the shock and the relief of discovering that some dreadful event was “only a dream,” but I am always me, and I continue, for the most part, being me even as I study the window blinds for signs of daylight. I seem to be leaving the world of my dream as if gliding from another place into my bedroom. I would say that I become a more concentrated version of myself when I’m asleep.

As for mind-expanding drugs, as they used to be called, my experience, in reckless youth, was starkly unenlightening. On somewhere between twelve and fifteen occasions during a socially miserable senior year at Notre Dame, I ingested LSD with the hope of getting beyond the limits of my own awareness. There was more than a tinge of self-destruction to this quest. The quality of the drugs was poor, laced with unpleasant amounts of speed, but like a gambler I went back for more and yet more, hoping beyond hope that this time it would be different. Instead of expansion, contraction was my invariable lot. I was never more locked in in my life. I was stuck at the bottom of a well of scrambled self-consciousness. I could not even enjoy music. It was a veritable hell of tedium, a place in which enlightenment was unimaginable.

I recognized many books ago that Michael Pollan is not someone I would call simpatico, and that his reports offer me almost as much irritation as information. This is nobody’s fault. If I made an exception for A World Appears, it was because, given its subject, it’s what the French would call incontournable, at least for someone who’s thinking as much about consciousness as I am. And I did pick up two nuggets that tended to confirm aspects of my own hunches. A scientist called Mark Solms has proposed that “consciousness is felt uncertainty” — that’s one. And it appears that mortality underlies Antonio Damasio’s ideas about consciousness. These connections, however glancing, were well worth the bother.

The end of A World Appears is not surprising: we find Pollan at Upaya Zen Center, a retreat near Santa Fe. Correction: we find him in a cave in the Sangre di Cristo Mountains, where the Center maintains a satellite. It is all but impossible to squelch the suspicion that he has been sequestered there by the Center’s director, far from visitors who are not reporters, but it is equally difficult to suppose that Pollan feels lonely. In a journey of just over two hundred pages, he has shown us experts and natural wonders, but not once a friend whose company he enjoys without an ulterior motive. No worries.

My time in the cave had shown me another way to look at consciousness: less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice, a way to once again be altogether here, present to life and to this vault of stars. That, I guess, is the prize won on this quest, in place of the definitive theory or clinching argument I had once, naively, hoped to bring back from it. Consciousness is a miracle, truly, and remains the deepest of mysteries, yes, but it is also so very simple it can be fit into a sentence. I open my and a world appears.

I’m tempted to say that he has locked himself out.