From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

This Is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan

Start date: January 1, 2022

Finish date: January 31, 2022

Discussion: Book Club 2022

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 25 topics — 446 comments total

Book Club 2022

November 2022 - Rise of the Mammals
By Betsy , co-mod · 15 posts · 98 views

last updated May 05, 2024 12:39AM

December 2022 - Immense World
By Betsy , co-mod · 29 posts · 123 views

last updated Jan 28, 2023 09:23PM

showing 1 of 1 topics view all »

What Members Thought

May 28, 2022 David Rubenstein rated it liked it

Shelves: memoirs, audiobook

This is a fun book about Pollan's investigations into the world of psychoactive plant-derived substances. He talks with people who grows or harvests different types of plants--opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Under what conditions are they legal to grow, legal to harvest, and legal to ingest? It is complicated. It seems to depend on where you live, and your purpose, and even your religion.

Pollan reaches back into fome of his old writings, that at the time may have gotten himself or others into l ...more

8 likes · Like · see review

May 30, 2022 bup rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, science, 2022

I picked up this book without reading the blurb, just happy that a Pollan book about plants was available on CD so I'd have decent audiobook material to listen to on my iPod classic*. Based on the title I was expecting a much broader overview of what different plants do for brain function and health and mood altering.

It's a book about 3 specific consciousness-altering chemicals that are plant-derived: opium, caffeine and mescaline. That's it.

OK, so I adjusted my expectations as much as I could. I picked up this book without reading the blurb, just happy that a Pollan book about plants was available on CD so I'd have decent audiobook material to listen to on my iPod classic*. Based on the title I was expecting a much broader overview of what different plants do for brain function and health and mood altering.

It's a book about 3 specific consciousness-altering chemicals that are plant-derived: opium, caffeine and mescaline. That's it.

OK, so I adjusted my expectations as much as I could. But toward the end of the opium section, he posed a question with an unstated but implied answer - "what reasoning do we as a society follow in deciding what plants we're going to make illegal for consumption?" And, while I can be persuaded that some plants that are illegal to smoke/eat/make-into-tea should not be illegal, his reductive reasoning really turned me off. It's been bugging me since, and it was in the first third of the book, and I still haven't let go of it. It affected my willingness to take in what he had to say for the whole rest of the book.

He says society's reasoning can't be because some plants are addictive, because tobacco and caffeine are addictive but legal. It can't be because some plants are severely detrimental to health, because lots of poisonous plants are legal to cultivate. He has another couple of EXCLUSIVE OR reasons for why some reason or other can't be the SINGLE CRITERION for making a plant illegal to cultivate and/or consume.

You see where I'm going. His implication is society's reasons for making some plants illegal to cultivate, or to use for consumption, are nonsense, because he looks at each reasonable reason in isolation and without acknowledging it could be a combination of reasons that cause acts involving plants to be illegal.

By the same reasoning, you could argue that there is no cause for fire. It can't be fires are cause by fuel, because I have wood all around me and it's not burning. Fires can't be caused by oxygen, because there's enough oxygen in all the air around me for fire. Fires can't be caused by heat, because I can microwave a bowl of water to boiling and beyond but there's no fire. Fire can't be caused by sparks, because I can strike a flint against metal over a sink all day long and not get a fire.

Maybe we don't make some poisonous plants illegal because nobody would bother to eat a rhododendron. Maybe we don't make caffeine illegal because overall it provides a benefit, even if it is addictive.

Nevertheless, I learned a bunch, especially about caffeine and the shorter-than-I-realized history of coffee and tea in Europe and the New World.

*What's the matter with CD's anyway, or iPods? I don't want another app on my phone so I can listen to audiobooks. I can already listen to audiobooks. iPods solved the need better than phones do. And I don't like the library yanking back the audio book after 3 weeks on that app on my phone, regardless of whether I've finished the book. It depends how much driving I've been doing lately. ...more

Like · see review

Nov 24, 2023 laurena rated it it was amazing

I love Michael Pollan and his writing. Having gotten started with his '90's book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World in my teens, it's so delightful to come back a couple decades later and see him continuing to bring his lenses of research, history, personal anecdote, thoughtful reflection on human values, all together to the topic of how humans and plants relate. In some ways similarly to Botany, Pollan again uses individual plants as case studies for how humans bring whole wo ...more

Like · see review

Oct 25, 2021 Nydia “Cookie” rated it liked it

Shelves: bookmarks-suggestions

Opium, caffeine, and mescaline- so much to say about all of them. Interesting facts and then some stories that seemed a bit more like extolling the virtues of the drugs and justifying involvement with them. Ok, yes I drink caffeine and that chapter resonated. But the rest Michael? Did you really want to admit all of that?

Like · see review