This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

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.