Michael Pollan

This Is Your Mind on Plants

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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants — and the equally powerful taboos
Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: people around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. We don't usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So then what is a “drug?” And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In THIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTS, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs — opium, caffeine, and mescaline…
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295 printed pages
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  • Olga Gshared an impression2 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot

Quotes

  • Mira Okailyhas quoted2 years ago
    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.
  • Mira Okailyhas quoted2 years ago
    Drug abuse is certainly real, but it is less a matter of breaking the law than of falling into an unhealthy relationship with a substance, whether licit or illicit,
  • Mira Okailyhas quoted2 years ago
    Evidently, normal everyday consciousness is not enough for us humans; we seek to vary, intensify, and sometimes transcend it, and we have identified a whole collection of molecules in nature that allow us to do that.

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