Verändere dein Bewusstsein

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NEW NETFLIX SERIES <BR><BR>'It's not often that a life-changing book falls into one's lap ... Yet Michael Pollan's Cooked is one of them.' SundayTelegraph<BR><BR>'This is a love song to old, slow kitchen skills at their delicious best' Kathryn Huges, GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR<BR><BR>The New York Times Top Five Bestseller - Michael Pollan's uniquely enjoyable quest to understand the transformative magic of cooking<BR><BR>Michael Pollan's Cooked takes us back to basics and first principles: cooking with fire, with water, with air and with earth.<BR><BR>Meeting cooks from all over the world, who share their wisdom and stories, Pollan shows how cooking is at the heart of our culture and that when it gets down to it, it also fundamentally shapes our lives.<BR><BR>Filled with fascinating facts and curious, mouthwatering tales from cast of eccentrics, Cooked explores the deepest mysteries of how and why we cook.

Drei psychoaktive Pflanzen - Kaffee, Schlafmohn und Peyote-Kaktus -, die uns beleben, beruhigen oder unser Bewusstsein verändern, erkundet Michael Pollan in diesem spannenden Buch: ihre Kultur, ihre Wirkung und die Tabus, mit denen sie behaftet sind. Von allem, was Pflanzen den Menschen zur Verfügung stellen - Nahrung, Medizin, Duft, Geschmack, Schönheit -, ist sicher das Kurioseste, dass wir sie nutzen, um unser Bewusstsein zu verändern: es anzuregen, zu beruhigen oder den Zustand unserer mentalen Erfahrung komplett zu verändern. Pollan erkundet drei sehr verschiedene psychoaktive Pflanzen - Kaffee/Koffein, Schlafmohn/Opium und den Peyote-Kaktus/Meskalin - und macht dabei klar, wie überaus seltsam ihre jeweilige Wirkung wahrgenommen, eingeschätzt und beurteilt wird. Die besondere Kultur, die sich um jede dieser Pflanzen gebildet hat, erforscht er unter anderem, indem er sie konsumiert (oder, im Fall von Kaffee, versucht, nicht zu konsumieren). Er erzählt von der enormen Anziehungskraft, die psychoaktive Pflanzen in allen Kulturen auf Menschen hatten und haben, und von den mächtigen Tabus, die mit ihnen verbunden sind.Grandios verbindet Pollan Geschichte, Naturwissenschaft, Memoir und Reportage und stellt den Diskurs über Drogen damit in ein völlig neues Licht. Über diese Pflanzen gibt es sehr viel mehr zu sagen, als nur ihre Regulierung zu debattieren. Denn wenn wir sie in unseren Körper aufnehmen und sie unser Bewusstsein verändern lassen, sind wir zutiefst mit der Natur verbunden.

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR NEW NETFLIX SERIES, HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND<BR><BR>'It's a trip - engrossing, eye-opening, mind altering' New Statesman<BR> <BR> 'Fascinating. Pollan is the perfect guide ... curious, careful, open minded' The Guardian<BR><BR> Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate, calm, or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience. In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs - opium, caffeine and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness 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, and the equally powerful taboos.<BR><BR> In a unique blend of history, science, memoir and reportage, Pollan shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively. In doing so, he proves that there is much more to say about these plants than simply debating their regulation, 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. This ground-breaking and singular book holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds and our entanglement with the natural world.

Wie kommen wir in unserem täglichen Leben zu einem tieferen Verständnis der Natur und der besonderen Rolle unserer Spezies darin? Am besten geht man dazu einfach in die Küche, meint Michael Pollan. Und das tut er in seinem neuen, aufregenden Buch "Kochen" und vermisst das Terrain der Küche auf ungewohnte Weise.Pollan beschäftigt sich mit den vier klassischen Elementen - Feuer, Wasser, Luft und Erde -, die das, was die Natur uns liefert, in köstliches Essen und Trinken verwandeln, und geht selbst noch einmal in die Lehre: Bei einem Barbecue-Meister lernt er die Magie des Feuers kennen; ein Chez-Panisse-Koch weist ihn in die Kunst des Schmorens ein; ein Bäcker bringt ihm bei, wie Mehl und Wasser durch Luft in duftendes Brot verwandelt werden; und die 'Fermentos', eine Gruppe verrückter Genies, zu denen ein Brauer und ein Käser gehören, zeigen ihm, wie Pilze und Bakterien eine erstaunliche Alchemie zustande bringen. In all diesen Verwandlungsprozessen nehmen die Köche eine besondere Position ein: die zwischen Natur und Kultur.Mit Pollan lernen auch die Leser, wie uns das Kochen verbindet: Pflanzen und Tieren, mit der Erde und den Bauern, unserer Geschichte und Kultur und natürlich mit den Menschen, mit denen und für die wir kochen.Wenn wir die Freude am Kochen zurückgewinnen, das ist das Fazit dieses wunderbaren Buchs, öffnet sich die Tür zu einem reicheren Leben.

The Instant New York Times Bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Summer <BR><BR>"Pollan’s real genius—the word is not too strong—remains intact. That is his uncanny ability to scent the direction in which the culture is headed. He did it with food and psychedelics, and now, though A World Appears focuses on AI only intermittently, he has done it again." —Charles Finch, The Atlantic<BR><BR>From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity<BR><BR>When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.<BR><BR>When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.<BR><BR>In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.

"Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." —The New Yorker<BR><BR>One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award <BR><BR>The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A World Appears, This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, In Defense of Food and Food Rules<BR><BR>What should we have for dinner? Twenty years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and—with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his groundbreaking exploration of our food choices—demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Twenty years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform.