Name: Book Club – A World Appears
Start: 2026-04-13T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-05-18T21:00:00-04:00
Location: Nook

$Book Club \u2013 A World Appears$

INTERNAL EXCHANGE Book Club
About this Event

**One drink minimum or food order required. Please tip your baristas & bartenders!**

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INTERNAL EXCHANGE

We are a collection of many parts. Some we show the world; others we archive for ourselves. This is a space to bring the inside out.

We source the nonfiction texts that society often avoids: the raw data on how we love, how we medicate, and the social theories we’ve been told to keep quiet about. We use these books as a lens to peer-review our own lives. It is a space where the private becomes a shared study – a safe place where we trade our own stories for a trusted ear, validating the data of our lives.

The name Internal Exchange is a deliberate paradox. Most internal things are kept locked away, but we believe that the only way to truly understand the self is through the necessity of an exchange. We take our private reflections – the thoughts we usually keep in the margins – and put them on the table as a shared currency. This is a community that isn’t afraid of discomfort; we are a support system willing to go to those vulnerable places together in the interest of learning about ourselves and others.

The objective: to use the page as a mirror. To assemble the self, one chapter at a time.

The book is the catalyst, your thoughts are the currency, the exchange is the medium, the assembly is the integration.

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Reading schedule:

Week 1 – 4/13: No reading required; meet and greet & discuss book theme
Further reading schedule to be posted shorly

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Our next book is by Michael Pollan.

Description:

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity.
When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.
When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.
In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. 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 to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves.
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