Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege' A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. Michael Pollan: "Psychedelics have a way of smudging the windshield of experience" Author Michael Pollan has tackled plants, food and psychedelics in bestselling books including The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind . Now, he has taken on the thorny problem of consciousness. In his latest book, Pollan charts the work of scientists and philosophers, weaving in literary perspectives along the way. He spoke to New Scientist about the value of writing a book where you know less at the end than before you started.

Your inner monologue may be less constant than you think--more like a fridge light that turns on when you look. Thinking doesn't always involve words. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When I first started researching this story, I assumed I was writing about other people: those fascinating outliers who reportedly lack an internal monologue--the experience of actively speaking words in your mind as a sort of private narration of your life. Then I got on a Zoom call with Dr. Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has spent 50 years studying inner experience, and somewhere in the first ten minutes, I started to wonder: What if I'm talking about myself?

A cybersecurity blueprint for the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 must address ethical behavior of users and developers as well as ways to secure the technology itself. The Future Life Institutes standards for AI practitioners point in this direction.