This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Reading about poppies that winter, I wondered if it was possible to untangle the flower’s physical beauty from the knowledge of its narcotic properties. It seemed to me that even the lady garden writers who (presumably) would never think of sampling opium had been subconsciously influenced by its mood-altering potential; Louise Beebe Wilder tells us that poppies set her “heart vibrating with their waywardness.” Merely to gaze at a poppy was to feel dreamy, to judge by the many American Impressionist paintings of the flower, or from the experience of Dorothy and company, who you’ll recall were interrupted on their journey through Oz when they passed out in a field of scarlet poppies. If ever there was an innocent angle from which to gaze at the opium poppy, our culture seems long ago to have forgotten where it is.

The friend who had once smoked opium smiled wistfully as he recalled the long-ago afternoon: “The dreams! The dreams!” was all he would say. When I pressed him for a more detailed account, he referred me to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian poet, who’d likened the effect to having one’s soul rubbed down with silk.

It’s worth noting that during the period of anti-alcohol hysteria that led to Prohibition, certain forms of opium were as legal and almost as widely available in this country as alcohol is today. It is said that members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would relax at the end of a day spent crusading against alcohol with their cherished “women’s tonics,” preparations whose active ingredient was laudanum—opium. Such was the order of things less than a century ago.

Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life—its invisible yet pervasive power—without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “Caffeine Withdrawal” included in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or the DSM-5 for short), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn’t begun to understand his own relationship to caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same. The idea here is that you can’t possibly describe the vehicle you’re driving without first stopping, getting out, and taking a good look at the thing from the outside. This is probably the case with all psychoactive drugs, but is especially true of caffeine, since the particular quality of consciousness it sponsors in the regular user feels not so much altered or distorted as normal and transparent. Indeed, for most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90 percent of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda). Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. It’s so p...

How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can’t concentrate? That’s pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time. It’s a miracle anyone ever manages this mental feat, or at least it seems that way on day three of caffeine withdrawal.

April 10, a Wednesday morning, arrived. According to the researchers I’d interviewed, the process of withdrawal had actually begun overnight, while I was sleeping, during the “trough” in the graph of caffeine’s diurnal effects. The day’s first cup of tea or coffee acquires most of its power—its joy!—not so much from its euphoric and stimulating properties than from the fact that it is suppressing the emerging symptoms of withdrawal. This is part of the insidiousness of caffeine. Its mode of action, or “pharmacodynamics,” mesh so perfectly with the rhythms of the human body, so that the morning cup of coffee arrives just in time to head off the looming mental distress set in motion by yesterday’s cup of coffee. Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates. How brilliant!

I’ve been talking here about a chemical—caffeine—but of course we’re really talking about a plant, or in this case two plants: Coffea and Camellia sinensis, aka tea, which, over the course of their evolution, figured out how to produce a chemical that happens to addict most of the human species.* This is an astounding accomplishment, and while that was not the plants’ intent in concocting this molecule—there is no intent in evolution, just lots of blind chance that occasionally yields an adaptation so good that it is extravagantly rewarded—once that molecule found its way into the human brain, the destinies of those plant species and this animal species changed in momentous ways.

It’s hard to imagine that the sort of political, cultural, and intellectual ferment that bubbled up in the coffeehouses of both France and England would ever have developed in a tavern. If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.

Wine and beer did not go away, yet the European mind had been pried loose from alcohol’s grip, freeing it for the new kinds of thinking that caffeine helped to foster. You can argue what came first, but the kind of magical thinking that alcohol sponsored in the medieval mind began in the seventeenth century to yield to a new spirit of rationalism and, a bit later, Enlightenment thinking.

Perhaps not surprisingly it was Balzac who wrote one of the all-time best descriptions of how it feels to be overcaffeinated, a state that he said produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience; one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered, about nothing. One assumes that everyone else is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. It is one thing to live in a shared culture of caffeine, in which everyone’s mind is running at more or less the same accelerated pace. But it’s quite another to find yourself so sped up mentally that other people appear to you like motionless figures on a train platform, as you blur by them in caffeinated clouds of impatience.

But what is unique about caffeine is the targeted way in which it interferes with one of the most important of all biological functions: sleep. Walker, in his 2017 book Why We Sleep, argues that the consumption of caffeine—the most widely used psychoactive stimulant in the world—“represents one of the longest and largest unsupervised drug studies ever conducted on the human race.” We now know the results of that study and, if Walker is to be believed, they are alarming.

Here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes. Which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.

The sleep issue suggests an answer to the conundrum of how caffeine could be a source of human energy. It only looks that way, because caffeine is simply hiding, or postponing, our exhaustion by blocking the action of adenosine. As the liver removes the caffeine from circulation, the dam holding back all that pent-up, still-mounting adenosine will break, and when the rebounding chemical floods the brain you will crash, feeling even more tired than you did before that first cup of coffee.

So here was another moral cost of caffeine: in order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.

Perched somewhat crookedly on the steep slope of one of these caffeine mountains, my main thought was, You really have to give this plant a lot of credit. In less than a thousand years it has managed to get itself from its evolutionary birthplace in Ethiopia all the way here to the mountains of South America and beyond, using our species as its vector. Consider all we’ve done on this plant’s behalf: allotted it more than 27 million acres of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth. This astounding success is owing to one of the cleverest evolutionary strategies ever chanced upon by a plant: the trick of producing a psychoactive compound that happens to fire the minds of one especially clever primate, inspiring that animal to heroic feats of industriousness, many of which ultimately redound to the benefit of the plant itself. For coffee and tea have not only benefited by gratifying human desire, as have so many other plants, but these two have also assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilization in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism, and dominated by a species that by now can barely get out of bed without their help.

Calabrese found that many Navajos share Sandor Iron Rope’s belief that peyote is an omniscient spirit, capable of seeing through people and somehow “knowing” them better than they know themselves; it has the power to bare one’s faults and force a person to confront them. Peyote functions in the lives of Church members much like a superego; he suggests that the plant has a gaze. Children are socialized in this belief, taught that “the Peyote Spirit knows his or her activities even in the absence of parents.” Conceiving of a plant as an omniscient spirit might seem fanciful, but how different is that, really, from a psychological construct like the superego—an inner voice that recalls us to the moral and ethical strictures of our society? What I found striking in Calabrese’s account is that we have in peyote a “drug” that, instead of undermining social norms, actually reinforces them.

There are a few different ways tobacco is used in Indigenous ceremonies, but usually as a means of purging evil or destructive energies. In Taloma’s version, the recipient stands before her and closes one nostril while she offers a brief prayer that ends with the words “body, mind, and spirit.” On the word “spirit,” you inhale deeply while Taloma, using a syringe, shoots tobacco juice deep into your sinus cavity. A wave of fire races across the top of your skull from front to back and then travels down your spine. It is a bracing sensation. Taloma encourages you to stomp your feet, shake out your arms, move your hips, vocalize with abandon, and let go of whatever emotions you are holding. After the firestorm subsides, your mind feels freshly scrubbed and, at least for a while, cleared and wonderfully calm.