It strikes me as strange that we humans are on the cusp of creating a thinking, feeling entity (AI), which might succeed us as guardians of the planet, while at the same time we have no idea what’s going on between our ears.

My curiosity about this odd state of affairs led me to read A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, in which Michael Pollan delves into contemporary theories on the elusive topic of consciousness. Research in this field faces an intriguing dilemma: how can we analyze the concept of consciousness when our only tool for doing so is our own (subjective) consciousness?

The title comes from a quote by British neuroscientist Anil Seth – “I open my eyes and a world appears” – a sensation we all experience each morning as we wake up. Yet the world that appears is different for each of us; think about it when you wake tomorrow. Nobody else puzzles over that odd dream still echoing in your head; nobody else sees exactly the same surroundings that you wake in; and nobody else has a plan for the new day quite like yours.

Pollan sets out to break down the common analogy between the human mind and computers. We may ‘process information’ in the same way as computers, but we also think and feel independently, and our subjective experience is unique. He also challenges the long-standing notion that humans are the only sentient beings in the universe, which gives us license to exploit nature without limits. Partly through his experience with magic mushrooms, he has a adopted a world view, familiar for animists and Buddhists, that we should respect nature in all its forms.

After summarizing neuroscientific theories concerning consciousness, none of which can answer the simple question of how it arises, Pollan looks to philosophers and writers for insight into how consciousness works. His references include the philosopher William James and the stream-of-consciousness writers James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, whose quirky characters strike many readers as familiar due to their erratic flow of consciousness.

Ever eager to experiment on himself, Pollan hooks himself up to a beeper with the simple task of recording what he is experiencing at the unpredicted time of the beep. Rather than shedding light on what his consciousness contained, he found that in many instances the experience was inexpressible in words.

In the last chapter, which takes on the thorny subject of selfhood, he points out that Western civilization reveres concepts like self-importance and self-confidence, while Eastern modes of thought like Buddhism see the self as an illusion, and urge us to transcend the concept of self. Such is the goal of meditators who try not to reflect on the past or fantasize about the future, immersing themselves in the eternal now.

Pollan begins his book with a bold wager – that by the end of the book, readers will be more conscious than they were before starting it. And while his ruminations throw up more questions than answers, I for one concede that the author has achieved his goal.

When I set out on my Great Latin American Adventure in 1978, teaching English in Caracas, Venezuela, one of the first books I read was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. At the time I didn’t understand Spanish so I read the novel in English, but I was still swept away by the magic realism that had me smiling, even laughing out loud, at some of the turns of events in this epic story of seven generations of a Colombian family, stretching from the 1820s to the 1920s.

I thought I would teach English for a couple of years, save pots of money, then head off down the Andes and back up the east coast of South America, but it didn’t turn out that way. After nearly four years in crazy Caracas, visiting Colombia, Brazil and several Caribbean islands, I changed my plan and took off for the USA to study an MA in English (Emphasis: Creative Writing) at San Francisco State University. So I never got to see Ecuador or Argentina, but I did learn enough to eventually become a writer.

I’ll never be as good a writer as Garcia Marquez, but recently I’ve been re-living his creation of the Buendia family by watching the Netflix series of Cien Años de Soledad, which I highly recommend. Having had little contact with the Spanish language for decades, it’s been a treat to listen to the original Colombian soundtrack (though I’ll admit to opening English subtitles at times) and to admire some stellar performances.



To give an idea of the magnitude of this undertaking, the casting team considered over 10,000 candidates for the 25 main roles. Only 30% of those chosen were professional actors, and around 20,000 extras were employed for such jaw-dropping scenes as the railway station massacre (“More than three thousand of them”).



During his lifetime, Garcia Marquez did not grant rights to make a feature film of the book, as two hours would be insufficient for the grand scale of this epic. However, with the two series running at over 16 hours (some episodes well over an hour), all shot in Colombia with Colombian actors, and including four different versions of the fictional town Macondo to portray changes over a century, the result is a resounding success, frequently drawing the viewer in to the kind of magical scenes dreamed up by the author. Now all I need is the next few days to fly by so that I can watch the final episode on 26 August 2026.

Who would imagine that a traffic island, surrounded by highways and slip roads, flyovers and underpasses, not to mention the constant roar of vehicles, could be a great place to unwind?

Yet that’s where I go whenever I see a chance to get away from my computer and worries about the state of the world. I hop in my car and go and meet my mate Hinsh at the traffic island to do a few laps of a walking and running track that’s bordered by trees and a small lake.

As we amble along, we chat about everything under the sun—the football World Cup, the weather, international disasters, gossip about friends and tips for stories that might sell (Hinsh is a writer too). Somehow the shady setting and splish-splash of fountains in the lake helps to soothe my mind, and when I head home after an hour or so I feel recharged, ready for another session of writing travel tales or dreaming up pitches for editors.



There’s a simple explanation for this odd state of affairs. Firstly, though I love living in Chiang Mai, the city has almost no public parks, so small spaces like our traffic island attract locals eager for a taste of nature. Secondly, Hinsh and I live in different districts of the city, and the Chiang Mai 700-Year Park is a convenient spot to meet up. 

The irony of this public space is that it’s not accessible to pedestrians, who could never cross the multiple lanes of fast-flowing traffic that hold the island in their grip. But once parked on the island, the snarl of engines seems to fade away and the combination of fluttering leaves, whispering breeze and ripples in the lake make the place a refreshing retreat.