{"id":2007,"date":"2025-01-25T14:16:11","date_gmt":"2025-01-25T22:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/?p=2007"},"modified":"2025-01-25T14:16:11","modified_gmt":"2025-01-25T22:16:11","slug":"notes-on-pollan-the-botany-of-desire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/2025\/01\/25\/notes-on-pollan-the-botany-of-desire\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Pollan, The Botany of desire"},"content":{"rendered":"
Notebook Export<\/div>\n
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World<\/div>\n
Pollan, Michael<\/div>\n
Citation (Chicago Style): Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World<\/i>. Random House Publishing Group, 2001. Kindle edition.<\/div>\n
\n
Introduction<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 6 \u00b7 Location 57<\/div>\n
All those plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 12 \u00b7 Location 145<\/div>\n
Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.<\/div>\n
Chapter 1<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 24 \u00b7 Location 296<\/div>\n
Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.<\/div>\n
Chapter 3<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 130 \u00b7 Location 1754<\/div>\n
These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based \u201cflying ointment\u201d that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the \u201cbroomstick\u201d by which these women were said to travel.<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Page 132 \u00b7 Location 1780<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 154 \u00b7 Location 2080<\/div>\n
(ethnobotanists call them \u201centheogens,\u201d meaning \u201cthe god within\u201d)<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 156 \u00b7 Location 2107<\/div>\n
The literary critic David Lenson, for one, believes it was crucial. He argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge\u2019s notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that \u201cdissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,\u201d an idea whose reverberations in Western culture haven\u2019t yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 156 \u00b7 Location 2112<\/div>\n
\u2018dissolution, diffusion and dissipation\u2019<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 157 \u00b7 Location 2129<\/div>\n
One of the things certain drugs do to our perceptions is to distance or estrange the objects around us, aestheticizing the most commonplace things until they appear as ideal versions of themselves. Under the spell of cannabis \u201cevery object stands more clearly for all of its class,\u201d as David Lenson writes in On Drugs. \u201cA cup \u2018looks like\u2019 the Platonic Idea of a cup, a landscape looks like a landscape painting, a hamburger stands for all the trillions of hamburgers ever served, and so forth.\u201d A psychoactive plant can open a door onto a world of archetypal forms,<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 161 \u00b7 Location 2178<\/div>\n
Allen Ginsberg suggested that the negative feelings marijuana sometimes provokes, such as anxiety, fear, and paranoia, are \u201ctraceable to the effects on consciousness not of the narcotic but of the law.\u201d<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 161 \u00b7 Location 2184<\/div>\n
Taking account of this phenomenon, Andrew Weil describes marijuana as an \u201cactive placebo.\u201d<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 163 \u00b7 Location 2207<\/div>\n
In 1988 Allyn Howlett, a researcher at the St. Louis University Medical School, discovered a specific receptor for THC in the brain\u2014a type of nerve cell that THC binds to like a molecular key in a lock, causing it to activate.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 163 \u00b7 Location 2213<\/div>\n
The cannabinoid receptors Howlett found showed up in vast numbers all over the brain (as well as in the immune and reproductive systems), though they were clustered in regions responsible for the mental processes that marijuana is known to alter: the cerebral cortex (the locus of higher-order thought), the hippocampus (memory), the basal ganglia (movement), and the amygdala (emotions). Curiously, the one neurological address where cannabinoid receptors didn\u2019t show up was in the brain stem, which regulates involuntary functions such as circulation and respiration.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 164 \u00b7 Location 2221<\/div>\n
Raphael Mechoulam (working with a collaborator, William Devane) found it: the brain\u2019s own endogenous cannabinoid. He named it \u201canandamide,\u201d from the Sanskrit word for \u201cinner bliss.\u201d<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 164 \u00b7 Location 2228<\/div>\n
some of the various direct and indirect effects of cannabinoids: pain relief, loss of short-term memory, sedation, and mild cognitive impairment.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 166 \u00b7 Location 2247<\/div>\n
The purpose of THC could be to protect cannabis plants from ultraviolet radiation; it seems that the higher the altitude at which cannabis grows, the more THC it produces. THC also exhibits antibiotic properties, suggesting a role in protecting cannabis from disease. Last, it\u2019s possible that THC gives the cannabis plant a sophisticated defense against pests. Cannabinoid receptors have been found in animals as primitive as the hydra, and researchers expect to find them in insects. Conceivably, cannabis produces THC to discombobulate the insects (and higher herbivores) that prey on the plant; it might make a bug (or a buck or a rabbit) forget what it\u2019s doing or where in the world it last saw that tasty plant.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 167 \u00b7 Location 2261<\/div>\n
Ma, the ancient Chinese character for \u201chemp,\u201d depicts a male and a female plant under a roof\u2014cannabis inside the house of human culture.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 168 \u00b7 Location 2278<\/div>\n
Cognitive dysfunction?<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 169 \u00b7 Location 2290<\/div>\n
The scientists I spoke to were unanimous in citing short-term memory loss as one of the key neurological effects of the cannabinoids.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 169 \u00b7 Location 2292<\/div>\n
All talk about the difficulty of reconstructing what happened mere seconds ago and what a Herculean challenge it becomes to follow the thread of a conversation (or a passage of prose) when one\u2019s short-term memory isn\u2019t operating normally.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 170 \u00b7 Location 2300<\/div>\n
Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn\u2019t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 171 \u00b7 Location 2320<\/div>\n
\u201cIf we could hear the squirrel\u2019s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar,\u201d George Eliot once wrote.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 173 \u00b7 Location 2343<\/div>\n
The first part of Nietzsche\u2019s essay is a moving and occasionally hilarious paean to the virtues of forgetting, which he maintains is a prerequisite to human happiness, mental health, and action.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 173 \u00b7 Location 2346<\/div>\n
Like the American transcendentalists, Nietzsche believes that our personal and collective inheritance stands in the way of our enjoyment of life and accomplishment of anything original.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 175 \u00b7 Location 2377<\/div>\n
My lawyer father, once complimented on his ability to see ahead three or four moves in a negotiation, explained that the reason he liked to jump to conclusions was so he could get there early and rest. I\u2019m the same way in my negotiations with reality.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 175 \u00b7 Location 2383<\/div>\n
Colors,\u201d in classical rhetoric, are tropes.)<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 177 \u00b7 Location 2403<\/div>\n
Sagan, who was convinced that marijuana\u2019s morning-after problem is not a question of self-deception so much as a failure to communicate\u2014to put \u201cthese insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we\u2019re down the next day.\u201d<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 178 \u00b7 Location 2419<\/div>\n
Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting\u2014on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive\u2014it\u2019s often said that drugs \u201cdistort\u201d normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true\u2014that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Page 180 \u00b7 Location 2451<\/div>\n
From a brain\u2019s point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notebook Export The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World Pollan, Michael Citation (Chicago Style): Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. Random House Publishing Group, 2001. Kindle edition. Introduction Highlight(blue) – Page 6 \u00b7 Location 57 All those plants care about is what every being cares about … <\/p>\n

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