This Is Your Mind on Plants

 
　　在人類對藥物的所有依賴與需求上，最令人好奇的用途莫過於「改變意識」──觸發興奮或平靜的感覺、攪亂或完全改變我們的精神感受。若再仔細深入探索，就拿咖啡和茶為例，人們仰賴咖啡因來提振精神，但我們通常不會將咖啡和茶列為藥品，甚至毒品，也不會認為我們每日的攝取是一種藥物成癮。那麼，到底為什麼將茶葉製成茶，被社會廣為接受，但利用罌粟花的種子來製茶，卻受到法律禁止？
 
　　延續前一部從飲食寫作跨足到科學、藥物領域的作品《改變你的心智》，麥可．波倫這次將投注在迷幻藥的研究熱忱，轉往與大自然更緊密關聯的三種植物藥物──「鴉片」、「咖啡因」和「麥司卡林」上，並挖掘圍繞這些藥物而成長茁壯的文化，抽絲剝繭這些精神活性植物對人類的吸引力，分析為什麼我們耗費心力使用它們改變意識，又為什麼用法律、罪惡感來節制我們對這些藥物的渴望。
 
　　在這部融合了歷史、科學和親身經歷的報導作品中，波倫從眾多不同角度檢視並體驗這些藥物，也帶我們理解，當我們服用這些植物藥物、讓它們改變我們的心智，我們其實也是在以一種深刻的方式經驗大自然。這場深具開創性、引人注目的思索之旅，以及人們對於這個主題、對這些藥物的迷戀，倒映出人類的基本需求和渴望，以及與自然世界間緊密、複雜的連結。(文/博客來編譯)

The instant New York Times bestseller A Washington Post Notable Book One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year

＂Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.＂ --New York Times Book Review

From #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, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber--surely the most curious is our use of them 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. But we do not 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--and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?

In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively--as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.

Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Made the Modern World. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.