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"From the #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, fragrance, flavor, fiber--surely the most curious is our use of them is 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. We don't 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, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. 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 such fraught feelings? A unique blend of history, science, 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's 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 written more than 25 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"--
Of all the things humans rely on plants for-- sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber-- surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs-- opium, caffeine, and mescaline-- and explores the cultures that have grown up around these drugs. He examines the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. The result is a unique blend of history, science, memoir-- and participatory journalism. -- adapted from jacket.… (meer)
Stiekem is Pollan is een held voor mij; ik vind hem zo moedig. Na Verruim je geest is hij er weer met een boek over planten en hoe die een invloed kunnen hebben op ons. In dit geval (wederom) op onze geest. Hij doet niet enkel jarenlang diepgravend onderzoek hij test deze planten ook zelf; in dit geval opium (papaverthee), cafeïne (aangezien hij, zoals de meeste mensen, aan koffie verslaafd was kickte hij eerst af) en mescaline (Wachuma). Zelf drink ik geen koffie maar als u dat wel doet: lees dan zeker dit boek, u zal versteld staan van wat u ontdekt.
Naast een memoir verslag van zijn ervaringen heeft hij ook veel aandacht voor de geschiedenis en het ontstaan van het gebruik van deze middelen én de wetenschappelijke informatie (als die al bestaat). Hij schuwt de mindere kanten ook niet: uitbuiting, slavernij, culturele toe-eigening, verslaving,… Pollan is een soort van Louis Theroux: hij dompelt zich helemaal onder in zijn onderzoekswereld, kan geweldig goed mensen ontwapenen en interviewen én hij charmeert en boeit zijn kijkers; in dit geval lezers.
Plant en psyche is het resultaat van meer dan 25 jaar onderzoek, ik ben benieuwd wat deze schatkist aan informatie nog meer zal opleveren. Wat Michael Pollan schrijft is belangrijk, zet mensen en overheden aan het denken en kan misschien wel de wereld ten goede veranderen. Laten we het hopen. ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Of all the many 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, to fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience.
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Nothing about drugs is straightforward. But it's not quite true that our plant taboos are entirely arbitrary... societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society's rule and ban the ones that seem to undemine it. (p. 3)
Evidently, normal everyday consciousness is not enough for us humans; we seek to vary, intensify, and sometimes transcend it, and we have identified a whole collections of molecules in nature that allow us to do that. (p. 4)
But what is true of the opium poppy is true for all the medicines that plants have given us: they are both allies and poisons at once, which means it's up to us to devise a healthy relationship with them. (p.20)
What ha never occured to me when I began this experiement is that, by giving up caffeine I would be undermining my ability to tell the story of caffeine, a knot I wasn't at all sure how to untie. (p. 93)
Coffeehouses became uniquely democratic public spaces, in England they were the only such spaces where men of different classes could mix. (p. 106)
The sleep issue suggests an answer to the conundrum of how caffeine could be a source of human energy. It only looks that way because caffeine is simply hiding, or postponing, our exhaustion by blocking the action of adenosine. (p. 137)
In the West our understanding of drugs is organized around ideas of hedonism, the wish for escape, and the desire to dull our senses. (p. 212)
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
After packing up her altar, returning the sacred objects to their woven bags and wooden boxes, Taloma handed Judith the Wachuma glossom, faded now but still gorgeous.
"From the #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, fragrance, flavor, fiber--surely the most curious is our use of them is 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. We don't 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, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. 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 such fraught feelings? A unique blend of history, science, 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's 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 written more than 25 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"--
Of all the things humans rely on plants for-- sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber-- surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs-- opium, caffeine, and mescaline-- and explores the cultures that have grown up around these drugs. He examines the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. The result is a unique blend of history, science, memoir-- and participatory journalism. -- adapted from jacket.
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Stiekem is Pollan is een held voor mij; ik vind hem zo moedig. Na Verruim je geest is hij er weer met een boek over planten en hoe die een invloed kunnen hebben op ons. In dit geval (wederom) op onze geest. Hij doet niet enkel jarenlang diepgravend onderzoek hij test deze planten ook zelf; in dit geval opium (papaverthee), cafeïne (aangezien hij, zoals de meeste mensen, aan koffie verslaafd was kickte hij eerst af) en mescaline (Wachuma). Zelf drink ik geen koffie maar als u dat wel doet: lees dan zeker dit boek, u zal versteld staan van wat u ontdekt.
Naast een memoir verslag van zijn ervaringen heeft hij ook veel aandacht voor de geschiedenis en het ontstaan van het gebruik van deze middelen én de wetenschappelijke informatie (als die al bestaat). Hij schuwt de mindere kanten ook niet: uitbuiting, slavernij, culturele toe-eigening, verslaving,… Pollan is een soort van Louis Theroux: hij dompelt zich helemaal onder in zijn onderzoekswereld, kan geweldig goed mensen ontwapenen en interviewen én hij charmeert en boeit zijn kijkers; in dit geval lezers.
Plant en psyche is het resultaat van meer dan 25 jaar onderzoek, ik ben benieuwd wat deze schatkist aan informatie nog meer zal opleveren. Wat Michael Pollan schrijft is belangrijk, zet mensen en overheden aan het denken en kan misschien wel de wereld ten goede veranderen. Laten we het hopen. (