How do we train humans throughout life to optimize their consciousness? Not just to be smarter or calmer, but to fully use the gift of awareness — to zoom in with laser focus and zoom out to see the whole, to move fluidly between states of attention, and to do this deliberately rather than by accident.
Two thinkers are leading the way on this from very different angles: Michael Pollan (journalist, exploring consciousness from the outside in) and John Vervaeke (cognitive scientist, mapping it from the inside out). Together they sketch a surprisingly practical framework.
Pollan's latest traces the "unmapped continent" of consciousness, bringing scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and psychedelic perspectives together. Key themes:
"Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness."
Also read: How to Change Your Mind (2018) — Pollan's earlier deep dive into psychedelics and their role in resetting rigid patterns of consciousness.
Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto who has built the most rigorous modern framework for understanding consciousness as a trainable skill. His core insight:
Mindfulness is not relaxation. It is the deliberate training of attentional scaling — learning to zoom in (focal attention) and zoom out (distributed awareness) — so you can intervene in how you frame problems and increase the probability of insight.
Key concepts from his work:
Vervaeke argues that mindfulness training comes down to two fundamental moves, practiced until they become fluid:
1. Zooming In (Focal Attention) — Narrowing awareness to a single object, sensation, or thought. Like a microscope. Builds concentration, reduces mental noise, allows deep examination. Practices: breath counting, single-point meditation (shamatha), deep reading, flow states.
2. Zooming Out (Distributed Awareness) — Widening the field of awareness to take in the whole scene, including background processes normally invisible. Like a satellite view. Builds insight, pattern recognition, metacognition. Practices: open monitoring meditation (vipassana), nature walks with no goal, contemplative dialogue.
The goal isn't to pick one — it's to develop flexibility. The ability to shift between these modes at will is what Vervaeke calls trained attentional scaling, and it's what separates automatic consciousness from optimized consciousness.
If we were designing a consciousness training program across the human lifespan, drawing on Vervaeke, Pollan, and the contemplative science literature, it might look like this:
Vervaeke argues no single practice is sufficient. You need an integrated system:
The key insight: consciousness is not trained by thinking about consciousness. It's trained by doing things that demand different modes of attention, repeatedly, in community.
Vervaeke's provocation is that modern society is in a meaning crisis — we've lost the institutional structures (religion, philosophy schools, contemplative communities) that used to train consciousness as a matter of course. The scientific revolution gave us power over the external world but left us untrained in the internal one.
Pollan arrives at the same place from a different direction: consciousness is a gift we barely use. We walk around in default mode — narrating, planning, ruminating — rarely experiencing the full depth of awareness available to us.
The edtech angle is striking: we have trillion-dollar systems for training people to process information, and virtually nothing for training them to be aware. The curriculum above doesn't exist in any school. But the science says it could, and the tools are available. The question is whether we'll build it.