This Is Your Mind on Plants (Unabridged) This Is Your Mind on Plants (Unabridged)

This Is Your Mind on Plants (Unabridged‪)‬

    • 4.0 • 363 Ratings
    • $14.99

    • $14.99

Publisher Description

The instant New York Times bestseller | 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 #1 New York Times bestselling 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.

GENRE
Nonfiction
NARRATOR
MP
Michael Pollan
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
07:37
hr min
RELEASED
2021
July 6
PUBLISHER
Penguin Audio
SIZE
469.7
MB

Customer Reviews

Confounding Variable ,

Fascinating

Definitely recommend listening to this audiobook !

Hdhzjs ,

This is your mind on plants

Rambling and frustrating listen. 3 hrs too long save you $

ginobili96 ,

Seriously great audiobook

Super interesting book. Pollan’s personality shines in the narration and complements his book perfectly.

Listeners Also Bought

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Unabridged) How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Unabridged)
2018
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (Unabridged) Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (Unabridged)
2020
The Immortality Key The Immortality Key
2020
Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (Unabridged) Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (Unabridged)
2021
A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life (Unabridged) A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life (Unabridged)
2021
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Unabridged) Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Unabridged)
2020