Writer, activist, and food guru Michael Pollan keeps discovering the relationship between human identification and flora. His recent full e-book, How to Change Your Mind, argues that psychedelics, like travel, can feed each frame and soul. Over interviews from his timber-lined Northern California domestic observe, the writer of classics like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food described how the journey could break down cultural walls. Pollan is well-known for thought-scary mantras like ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plant life’. He explains how human beings can first-rate follow this principle when they journey; he discusses how tour helps us shift our angle and dishes on a number of the maximum memorable food he is had around the world.
Q: You’ve called tribalism one of the most significant threats facing civilization nowadays. Why is that?
The objectification and demonization of the ‘different’ – people unique from us because of religion, race, ethnicity, and so on. – Is at the basis of so much war nowadays. We are building partitions in place of connecting.
Q: What are a few methods that journey can help wreck down cultural partitions?
One of the most putting matters approximately tribalism, racism, etc., is that it prospers in the region in which touch among exceptional peoples occurs much less frequently. The human beings maximum against immigration in America are individuals who stay in locations where immigrants do not…
This argues for exposing specific forms of human beings to each other, and travel is, of direction, a super manner to try this. So, yes, the tour does have the ability to interrupt down cultural partitions. Though I fear the human beings maximum willing to tour are the ones sympathetic to ‘others’ of all kinds.
Q: Why is travel excellent for breaking preconceptions and changing minds?
Neuroscience shows that our brains are prediction machines that we don’t take within the international via our senses as it’s miles, but as an alternative, formulate predictions based on as few facts as viable. Travel is a perfect analog of psychedelic experience in that it disables the projections of the one. It forces us to take in more excellent statistics – sensory or in any other case. We begin from scratch in a strange vicinity, similar to the kid who must take in a tremendous amount of data because the shortcuts of the everyday notion – been there, completed that – aren’t to be had. This opens us as much as experience, which opens us up to wonder, awe, etc.
