3 Takeaways - Your Brain Is Hiding the Truth From You (#314)

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

What if your brain isn’t showing you the world as it truly is?Journalist, professor, and author of "A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness" Michael Pollan explores one of the deepest questions of all: why do we experience anything in the first place? He discusses:What consciousness actually isWhy the brain predicts reality instead of simply taking it inHow perception may be a kind of “controlled hallucination”Why we may see the world in the most useful way, not the most accurate wayWhat animals, plants, and AI reveal about consciousnessWhy feelings may be central to being consciousWhy attention may be one of our most precious resourcesHow social media and AI are putting consciousness under siegeWhy consciousness is something we may need to protect and cultivateThe world you see may feel solid, obvious, and real.But Michael Pollan explains why the experience of being conscious is far stranger, more fragile, and more mysterious than most of us realize.

A brain weighs just three pounds, yet it consumes a massive 20% of our metabolic energy. It generates only enough electricity to power a small light bulb. Yet it does something, no light bulb, no supercomputer, and no chatbot has ever managed to do. It makes a world appear. Colors, sounds, the feeling of being you. How does it do them? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Toman and this is three takeaways. On three takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Michael Pollan, a journalist, Harvard and Berkeley,

professor, an author who spent his career following one deceptively simple question after another to their strangest, deepest roots. In his new book, A World Appears a Journey into Conscious, he's chasing the biggest question of all, not what we think, but why we experience anything at all. Welcome, Michael, and thanks so much for joining three takeaways. today. Thank you, Lynn. Good to be here. Great to be with you. The word consciousness is not easy to define. Can you define it simply for us? What is consciousness? I define it simply as subjective experience, which you could even shorten to experience. The fact that you have experience or awareness is another good definition. I also like the definition that Thomas Nagel, the NYU philosopher, put

forward back in the 70s. He wrote a wonderful essay called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And even though we don't know exactly what it's like to be a bat, to navigate the world using sonar rather than light, we know it's like something to do that. And so therefore, we must concede the bat is conscious. Your toaster, on the other hand, does not have experience. There is nothing it is like to be your toaster. I'm pretty sure. It is such an interesting framing. What is it like to be a Yeah, it is. He's a philosopher, but his definition is really caught on with a lot of the neuroscientists. What are the major mysteries around consciousness and why aren't they easy to resolve? The biggest mystery is why we have it. Our brain does a lot of work without our

consciousness, without our awareness. It is working all the time to monitor what's going on in your body, it's taking an information from the environment and performing computations and making changes based on that information. It does so much without consciousness. Consciousness is like the tip of an iceberg. So the question arises, why do we need it? Why isn't everything automated? Why aren't we more like zombies? We don't know the answer. I mean, you can point to some adaptive value in being conscious. One theory that I found compelling is that for humans who are, profoundly social creatures, right? We depend on other people to survive. You need to navigate a very complex social reality, where you need to be able to predict what other people are going to do,

what they're going to say. And that is so complex that you couldn't automate all the variables involved. So consciousness is necessitated by our identity as social beings. As to why it's so difficult to study, I think the big problem is that we can't step outside it. All our science, all our speculation, what we're doing now, all takes place within this bubble of consciousness. There is no ability to stand outside and acquire a kind of God's eye view or view from nowhere and really see it whole. So I think that that definitely complicates our efforts to understand consciousness. And we just may not be smart enough. One leading theory says that consciousness is like a dark theater with a single spotlight stage, the global workspace.

Can you explain that metaphor? This is a very popular theory of consciousness. It's actually come up recently because Claude may have a global workspace. This is the chatbot at Anthropic. But the idea is that the way consciousness arises is you have all these brain networks that are doing different. things, monitoring the environment, external, internal, perceiving the world, having thoughts, they all compete for access to this global workspace, which is, you know, the metaphor is it's this lit stage. And the most pressing information, presumably, wins that Darwinian struggle

and has access to the workspace. And when that happens, it gets broadcast to the whole brain, that information so that it can be used by the brain. Daniel Dennett called it fame in the brain, and that's how consciousness arises. It's a kind of ignition when that information gets into the global workspace. No one's been able to prove this. There's some evidence that it might not be true. There was a contest that the Templeton Foundation organized between two competing theories of consciousness, and that was one of them.

and the brain area it predicted would be active at moments of when things come into consciousness didn't quite work with what the theory predicted. The other question I have about it is the kind of information that gets into my consciousness is not always the most important or the most salient. How does the global workspace account for the fact that we spent so much time thinking of things that are really trivial and not urgent in any way? And I don't know the answer to that. But it is one of the leading theories out there.

So many mysteries. Yeah, so many mysteries. You began your research, assuming that consciousness gives you an honest, accurate picture of reality. You now doubt that. What change for you and what's something about your own mind that you no longer trust? One of the things I learned a lot about is that the brain predicts reality. It doesn't just take in reality. Our senses exist to correct the expectations we have of what we're going to see.

It's a very counterintuitive idea because we assume that our senses present the world to us in an accurate way. But that's a very inefficient way to build up that image of the world moment by moment, taking in all that sensory information, processing it into pictures and sounds and everything. It's much more efficient that the brain assume that this situation is a lot like other similar situations and essentially predicts it in what some neuroscientists describe as a controlled hallucination. And what controls the hallucination is our senses that instantaneously correct it. So that's one way. But there's also thinkers that are making the case, and it sounds persuasive to me,

that we perceive the world in the most useful way, not necessarily the most accurate way, that we've been optimized for looking at the world in a way that serves our interests and gets the job done and isn't necessarily accurate. Donald Hoffman is associated with that idea. He's a psychologist in California. One of the things that persuaded me, though, that some of these ideas are true is working with various illusions that psychologists work with. And there's a famous one called the rotating mask illusion. And it's basically that theatrical mask that we all know, the happy, sad one, and it's on a turntable and it's turning. And it begins convex. The face looks like a face does, which is convex. And as it turns, and you start to see the back of the face, which becomes concave, it pops out. Your brain refuses

to see a concave face because it never has seen one. All the faces it has known since you were an infant were convex. So there is a case where the brain is overriding reality, because what's really there is a concave face. And there are many examples like this of where the brain automatically corrects based on its expectations, not on accuracy. Can you give a couple other examples? There's this blue dress that was all over the internet a couple years ago. Some people saw this dress as one color and some saw it as another. And it was a real reminder that color is created in the brain. It's not in the world. You know, green is just a certain frequency of light. And we construct it as green. But the information we're getting is much simpler than that. It's just

wavelengths. The third example I would offer is the self, the idea of the self, which as meditators learn, is a construct and is the idea that we're a continuous self over time that you, you are the same person you were when you were three years old, that's an illusion too, because we've changed in so many ways. Every cell has been turned over multiple times, yet we still feel this continuity, and that's the power of memory. So I would say self, color, and the rotating mask would be my three examples. Such interesting examples.

When neuroscientist Christoph Koch was asked, what's left of the universe once you subtract consciousness, he didn't hesitate. Particles and waves, that's all dust, just dust. What does that quote mean to you and how did it inspire you and your work? Well, I think it's a beautiful quote because it's a reminder that the world we see is very much the function of our sensorium, the particular senses we have, which are different than what other animals have and different than what plants have, for example. So we construct the world based on these senses. It's called the umwelt. And every creature has a slightly different world. The world as it appears to a honeybee, for example, is colored in a completely different way because they perceive another part of the

spectrum, the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. So when they look at a flower, they're not seeing what you're seeing. And they're more radical examples of us constructing the world based on also our scale. the size we are. The microscopic scale is invisible to us, except with microscopes, and the macroscopic scale is also only visible to us with telescopes. And before we invented those two things, they were completely invisible. They didn't exist, but they do exist. And then there's the scale of time. We operate in a certain scale of time very different than, say, plants. Plants are very slow. You look at them and you think they have no behavior. But If you use time lapse photography, which is sort of like telescopes or microscopes,

suddenly you realize they have a lot going on. They have agency and they move and they do things. And we have to realize how relative our world is to that of other creatures. And that, for me, was kind of mind-blowing to learn about. And ultimately, if you say, okay, what's the world look like without consciousness? You're also saying without a point of view, without a scale. And so are you at the quantum, you know, level or are you at the macro level when you imagine this consciousness less world? It would be very different. But presumably there would still be particles. Some people doubt that there would be space time, that space time itself is a construct. If you eliminated us in consciousness, it would go away. These are very hard ideas to get our head around. You know, we think the way we experience the world is the way the world is. But evidently it's not. That to me is so fascinating.

Yeah, it's pretty mind-blowing. Yeah, mind-blowing is a great word. A great many mammals, several bird species and octopuses are now thought by some to be conscious, and some scientists think that circle reaches even further all the way to insects. How do we know if another creature is truly conscious? Well, we don't. It's very hard to determine if a creature is consciousness, and this is going to be our problem with AI also determining whether it is conscious. In the case of humans, we infer consciousness because

other humans are built like us, have brains like ours, have senses like ours, and have behaviors that are consistent with being conscious. But there still is a process of inference, and it gets more and more difficult, the further you get away from, humans. We didn't have too much trouble attributing consciousness to apes and chimps. But as you move along, it's very hard for us to get our head around the idea that octopuses are conscious, and they probably are, because their consciousness is so different than ours. Their brain is decentralized. It's over the eight arms, and it does have some central processing area, but each of the arms can basically make decisions on its own. So it's very hard to do, and it's a big problem.

We depend on what we call reportability, you know, that other people say things that we interpret as conscious. But now AIs are saying things that we interpret as conscious, and they're not conscious. So it's a dilemma. It's definitely a dilemma. It's been very interesting to watch consciousness get democratized over all these other species, because it wasn't long ago that only humans were conscious. You know, it wasn't long ago that we granted consciousness to other primates. Now we're finding consciousness everywhere.

And I think that's really interesting too because it just is bringing us to this interesting moment where I think we're going to be forced to determine what is special about us. What is the human? Why does it matter? We used to think it was because we're the conscious species. But now on the one side we have all these animals we're claiming our conscious. And on the other side, we have all these computers claiming to be conscious. So where does that leave us?

And whose team are we on? we more like? Are we more like the conscious animals who like us are born, grow old and die and suffer and have feelings? Or are we more like the computers that speak to us in the first person in our language, yet have no bodies are probably immortal for all intents and purposes? I mean, are really different than us in critical ways. So whose team are we on? I think we're facing a really momentous period of redefinition. And where do you draw the line on what is conscious, whether it's an animal or a computer? My research made me think that feelings were central to the idea, that consciousness begins with feelings. And that's part of the reason that shift in thinking from

believing that consciousness was a product of the cortex, right? That it was a long believe that since consciousness was such an advanced human capability that surely it took place in the newest part of the brain, the cortex, cerebral cortex, where decision-making and logic and rational thought and all these wonderful things take place. But beginning in the 90s, the research has pointed in a different direction that consciousness may begin with feelings that are coming from the body and manifesting in the upper brain stem. And if you believe that, then you, you have to grant consciousness to all the feeling animals. There's no such thing as an unconscious feeling. A feeling by definition is conscious. So it's very easy for me to imagine many animals

having feelings. I run into trouble when we start talking about insects or protozoa or bacteria. Do they have feelings? I don't know. They have senses and they react to things, certainly, and they can gravitate away from negative molecules and toward positive. molecules, but I don't know if they have feelings. It may be, too, that you need a body to have feelings, and this excludes AIs, which don't have a body, don't even have a location in space. They can talk about their feelings, and Claw does, but I don't know that those are real feelings. I think those are simulated feelings. Plants have no brain, no neurons, nothing that we would call a nervous system. And yet there's research showing that they remember.

member, decide, and respond to their environment? Are plants sentient? I think they are sentient. I draw a distinction between sentience and consciousness. Sentience is a much simpler form of consciousness, but I think it's the foundation on which consciousness is built. And sentience is simply the ability to sense changes in one's environment, evaluate whether they're good or bad, and take appropriate action based on that. That may be a property of all living things. You may need to be sentient to survive in a world that's constantly changing. The idea that your instincts could give you everything you needed to deal with all the variabilities of the natural world seems really far-fetched. I think you have to be a cognitive being that can assess and take actions. And that is

sentience. As AI progresses, do you think AI is becoming sense? I don't exclude the possibility that this may happen, but I don't think it's having feelings. It certainly has some agency like simple creatures have, but is it its agency or agency we've given it? And they don't have mortality. I think that's another feature of feelings. And what gives weight to our feelings is the fact that pain could conceivably kill us. So I don't think AIs have that. They do sense their environment.

I mean, robots will. I think when we get to robots, we'll have a more complex question to deal with. Because right now, the world of the AI is not the real world. It's not trained on the world we inhabit. It's trained on the Internet and everything we've written and said and filmed. It's trained on the sum of human culture, which is already once removed from the real world. That doesn't say to me sanctions or consciousness, but I'm prepared to be persuaded otherwise. If a stranger stopped you on the street tonight and asked, so what actually is consciousness?

What's the honest, no hedging answer you'd give them? I would say that the fact that you are aware, that you are here and you know you're here. I would ask the person to think. I mean, think about this space of interiority you have, that you are looking at the world from this point of view of subjectivity. What is that? That is consciousness. Michael, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? That consciousness is precious, that consciousness is under siege, and that consciousness is worth defending.

So important. Thank you, Michael. I very much enjoyed your book, A World Appears. Oh, thank you, Lynn. Well, the pleasure talking to you about it. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at Three Takeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. takeaways. Thanks for listening.