Michael Pollan is the author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including This Is Your Mind On Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2020, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, which conducts research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception and emotion and their biological bases in the human brain. In 2022, he hosted the Netflix docuseries How to Change Your Mind, which based on his books. In This Is Your Mind on Plants (Penguin Books), Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs – opium, caffeine, and mescaline – and our thinking about them. Blending history, science, memoir, and participatory journalism, he examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles. Treating them as drugs, whether licit or illicit, is one of the least interesting things you can say about them, he argues, 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.
