This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

We have the scientist’s explanation: the alkaloids in opium consist of complex molecules nearly identical to the molecules that our brain produces to cope with pain and reward itself with pleasure, though it seems to me that this is one of those scientific explanations that only compounds the mystery it purports to solve. For what are the odds that a molecule produced by a flower out in the world would turn out to hold the precise key required to unlock the physiological mechanism governing the economy of pleasure and pain in my brain? There is something miraculous about such a correspondence between nature and mind, though it too must have an explanation. It might be the result of sheer molecular accident. But it seems more likely that it is the result of a little of that and then a whole lot of co-evolution: one theory holds that Papaver somniferum is a flower whose evolution has been directly influenced by the pleasure, and relief from pain, it happened to give a certain primate with a gift for horticulture and experiment. The flowers that gave people the most pleasure were the ones that produced the most offspring. It’s not all that different from the case of the Bourbon rose or the beefsteak tomato, two other plants whose evolution has been guided by the hand of human interest.