Basic Sciences

Internationally acclaimed, bestselling neuroscientist Dr Hannah Critchlow harnesses cutting-edge science to show how we can lean into human strengths to flourish in the face of future global challenges.

‘A vital book for understanding how our brains can adapt and thrive in an age of innovation.’ – Joseph Jebelli, author of The Brain at Rest

How do we nurture our own and our children’s brains so we have the resilience to thrive during the coming wave of technological, and societal change? How do we keep up in the face of AI?

Neuroscientist Dr Hannah Critchlow takes readers on an empowering journey through the fascinating landscape of the latest neuroscience research and deep into their own intelligence. It is human skills ― curiosity, compassion, communication, courage and creativity ― that will provide the answer to the challenges ahead. We should lean into our collaborative skills, our ability to intuit and to think long-term, to adapt and to focus. Dr Critchlow explores how we build collective wisdom, and how we best fuel our brains.

In a book filled with stories of pioneering research and case studies, and with advice and brain exercises, she shows us how to navigate the coming decades with informed confidence.

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From the best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind, a pioneering search for consciousness in the brain and beyond

A World Appears is the story of the quest to solve the greatest mystery in nature: consciousness. How does it feel to be you with your own personal feelings, thoughts and experiences? Every one of us is intimately familiar with consciousness, but no one knows how – or why – it came to be that three pounds of grey matter can generate a subjective point of view.

The early 1990s marked the birth of a new science of consciousness, based on the assumption that the phenomenon could be explained in terms of brain activity, but that effort is faltering, and wilder ideas, such as panpsychism, are now getting a hearing. Indeed, there is now reason to doubt that ‘objective science’ as we have known it since Galileo has the right tools to plumb first-person experience. A World Appears takes Michael Pollan from the laboratories where scientists are searching for the neural correlates of consciousness to encounters with philosophers and novelists and Buddhist monks, whom he finds have just as much to teach us about consciousness, if not more.

A story that begins in a brain lab in Seattle ends, of all places, in a cave in the mountains of New Mexico, where the author discovers that explaining consciousness may be less urgent than learning to practice it in our everyday lives.

Michael Pollan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

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