Michael Pollan, the writer who reshaped how readers think about food in The Omnivore's Dilemma and about psychedelics in How to Change Your Mind, turns his attention to consciousness itself—what it is, who or what possesses it, and why subjective experience exists at all. His starting point is the one thing scientists, philosophers, and artists agree on: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact of inner experience remains, he argues, one of nature's deepest mysteries, and unusually hard to study because we can gain no distance on it—like fish, Pollan writes, trying to perceive the sea. To map this "unmapped continent," he gathers radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and psychedelic—and asks what each can teach. He traces how neuroscientists, beginning in the early 1990s, tried to explain how three pounds of gray matter could generate a point of view, and then ventures to the field's stranger frontier, where researchers entertain less materialist theories that no longer assume the brain is the sole source of mind. He meets "plant neurobiologists" hunting for the first flicker of awareness in vegetation, engineers trying to build feeling into artificial intelligence, and novelists and psychologists attempting to capture the felt texture of the stream of consciousness. Written with Pollan's characteristic curiosity and clarity, and drawing on his own experiences, the book is both a survey of a contested scientific question and a personal meditation on awareness as the ground of everything we know. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears asks how we might make fuller use of the gift of consciousness.