This Is Your Mind on Plants Quotes

“Is it the quality of addictiveness that renders a substance illicit? Not in the case of tobacco, which I am free to grow in this garden. Curiously, the current campaign against tobacco dwells less on cigarettes’ addictiveness than on their threat to our health. So is it toxicity that renders a substance a public menace? Well, my garden is full of plants—datura and euphorbia, castor beans, and even the leaves of my rhubarb—that would sicken and possibly kill me if I ingested them, but the government trusts me to be careful. Is it, then, the prospect of pleasure—of “recreational use”—that puts a substance beyond the pale? Not in the case of alcohol: I can legally produce wine or hard cider or beer from my garden for my personal use (though there are regulations governing its distribution to others). So could it be a drug’s “mind-altering” properties that make it evil? Certainly not in the case of Prozac, a drug that, much like opium, mimics chemical compounds manufactured in the brain.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“This also turns out to be a pretty good summary of the drug war, which, besides doing so much to erode our liberties and fill our prisons, served to distract us from reckoning the true toll of the opiates we happened to classify as legal.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are, as well as its insistence on lumping them all together under a single meaningless rubric, has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential of these very different substances. The legal status of this or that molecule is one of the least interesting things about it. Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing—without a human brain, it is inert—so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing — without a human brain, it is inert — so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning, and lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections—all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness—the focused, linear, abstract, and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than with play. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment but for the rise of capitalism, too.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“In a famous experiment conducted by NASA in the 1990s, researchers fed a variety of psychoactive substances to spiders to see how they would affect their web-making skills. The caffeinated spider spun a strangely cubist and utterly ineffective web, with oblique angles, openings big enough to let small birds through, and completely lacking in symmetry or a center. (The web was far more fanciful than the ones spun by spiders given cannabis or LSD.)”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”*”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“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.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“My confidence in telling this story gradually returned, and after a month I could write again; you can judge how well that's going, but at least it's going.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“There's a parable here somewhere, about the difference between journalism and history. What might appear to be "the story" in the present moment may actually be a distraction from it, a shiny object preventing us from seeing the truth of what is really going on beneath the surface of our attention, what will most deeply affect people's lives in time.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“That is the problem with you whites. You always want to know everything. We just experience it.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“why our usual perception of the world is “limited to what is biologically or socially useful”; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the “measly trickle” of information required for our survival and no more.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“coffee helped disperse Europe’s alcoholic fog, fostering a heightened alertness and attention to detail, and, as employers soon discovered, dramatically improving productivity.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind On Plants: Opium―Caffeine―Mescaline

“In order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“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.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind On Plants: Opium—Caffeine—Mescaline

“Things become only slightly clearer when the modifier “illicit” is added: an illicit drug is whatever a government decides it is. It can be no accident that these are almost exclusively the ones with the power to change consciousness. Or, perhaps I should say, with the power to change consciousness in ways that run counter to the smooth operations of society and the interests of the powers that be. As an example, coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“Sometimes the best way to show your respect for something is to just leave it alone.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“does the novelty and power of this sort of radical noticing impress women as much as men? I tend to doubt it.)”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“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. Charles Czeisler, an expert on sleep and circadian rhythms at Harvard Medical School, put the matter starkly several years ago in a National Geographic article by T. R. Reid: The principal reason that caffeine is used around the world is to promote wakefulness. But the principal reason that people need that crutch is inadequate sleep. Think about that: We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“(Coffeehouses were often referred to as “penny universities.”)”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“Arab world. In 1570 there were more than six hundred of them in Constantinople alone, and they spread north and west with the Ottoman Empire. These new public spaces were hotbeds of news and gossip, as well as places to gather for performances and games. Coffeehouses were comparatively liberal institutions where the conversation often turned to politics, and at various times governmental and clerical powers-that-be attempted to close them down, but never for long or with much success. (A vat of coffee was put on trial in Mecca in 1511 for its dangerously intoxicating effects; however, its conviction, and subsequent banishment, was quickly overturned by the sultan of Cairo.) As coffee’s defenders rightly pointed out, the beverage is nowhere mentioned in the Koran. Coffee thus offered the Islamic world a suitable alternative to alcohol, which is specifically proscribed in the Koran, and it came to be known as kahve, which, loosely translated, means “wine of Araby.” This notion that coffee somehow exists in opposition to alcohol would persist in both the East and the West, and comes down to us today in the common, but erroneous, belief that black coffee is an antidote for drunkenness.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“the best way to save information for more than a handful of years is not digital technology, but acid-free paper.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“The spirit of the plant will remain in you for several days, maybe longer,' she told us, 'look for it.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants