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鈥淭he Secret of Secrets鈥� is currently being adapted into a Netflix miniseries by Carlton Cuse (鈥淟ost鈥�).

I spoke with Brown at Toronto鈥檚 Caf茅 Boulud about opening the Pandora’s box of the consciousness debate, his early career as a singer-songwriter and why conspiracy theories are all the rage.

Your new novel is about consciousness and the soul. When did your fascination with the idea that consciousness may not simply be an extension of biological processes in the brain start?

I love writing about big topics. Consciousness is the biggest; it鈥檚 the lens through which we experience reality, but the model we have for it is incorrect in the same way that the model of the solar system was incorrect when the Earth was at the centre.

We are in a moment of sea change with consciousness right now. I鈥檝e spent eight years talking to physicists and noetic scientists who told me that we鈥檝e known for decades that the human mind affects physical matter. We know that precognition exists 鈥� that your brain figures out something before it actually happens.

We know that people having near-death experiences can recount what happened in an operating room verbatim, even though they were dead with no brain activity or had their eyes taped shut. These are things that are anomalies to our current model. Something does happen at that moment of dying that we do not understand, and this book offers one possible explanation for why that is.

One could argue that Robert Langdon has become synonymous with a certain genre of books to the same degree that Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Nancy Drew or Doc Savage have. Can you talk a bit about the original inspiration for the Langdon character, and the aspirations you had for him when you first wrote 鈥淎ngels & Demons鈥�?

I wrote Langdon as a one-off character. I grew up on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire where all the adults in my life were teachers and educators. It was this academic world where cool people were smart. I wanted to write a hero that was intellectually curious.

When Sony Pictures cast Tom Hanks to be Langdon, we had a document that said that they couldn鈥檛 give him a gun, that he couldn鈥檛 be a martial arts expert that knew jujitsu. I thought it was important that he got his way out of a situation with his mind.

When I was younger, I studied creative writing and musical composition. I thought music would be much more fun, so I went to Los Angeles and actually got a record deal as a singer-songwriter. It was a total failure.

When I pivoted to writing with 鈥淎ngels & Demons,鈥� I had no vested interest in whether anybody believed the story 鈥� I believed it. To me, it made more sense than what I was taught in church school. I think the reason it was controversial was because it made sense to so many people. And of course, some people said it absolutely didn’t make sense at all and was in fact blasphemous. In retrospect, I love that there was this great dialogue around it, but I certainly wasn鈥檛 looking to offend anyone.

I imagine that with each Langdon book, you need to come up with artistically compelling reasons for his return 鈥� writing a book is an act of deep commitment and takes years to complete. After the last one, 鈥淥rigin,鈥� what made you realize that Langdon had to return again and save the world?

In 鈥淭he Lost Symbol,鈥� I introduced a noetic scientist named Katherine Solomon who talked about consciousness in general terms: monks that are meditating, changing the rate of randomness in a random number generator 鈥� that sort of thing. Langdon realizes through Katherine that human thoughts can affect the world. I knew that consciousness would be worthy of its own book but couldn’t figure out how to incorporate it in an urgent thriller.

Later, after 鈥淥rigin鈥� was published, my mother passed away and I asked myself what happens when people die. I was reluctant to read New Age or self-help books published in Sedona by people with crystals, but to my amazement, the science was saying that reality is stranger than you think. I hit upon a plot device of Katherine writing a book that could get the information on consciousness out to a reader, and the manuscript later disappearing. That was when I realized how I鈥檇 write 鈥淭he Secret of Secrets.鈥�

With few exceptions, like 鈥淭he X-Files,鈥� 鈥淭he Invisibles鈥� comic book, and of course 鈥淎ngels and Demons,鈥� conspiracy theories were not really part of the mainstream discourse at the turn of the last century. Rightly or wrongly, allusions to conspiratorial networks are now a huge factor in the media landscape and are used to explain everything from geopolitical developments to corporate mergers. Where does this impulse come from, and do you think it is a healthy one?

The human brain despises chaos. When I was seven years old, I had a friend who died of leukemia. I went to church and the priest said, 鈥淭his is part of God’s plan.鈥� When bad things happen that feel random, we like to think there鈥檚 a shadow government or people that have plotted this. You could say that conspiracy theory and religion come from the same source in a way. God has a plan, right? And if things are terrible in your life, that’s God testing you. Lucky you.

When crazy stuff happens that feels terrifying, we love to feel that there’s some network of order underneath the chaos. It doesn鈥檛 matter if we can trust that order or not. We would rather believe in the devil than believe that people just get cancer.

It seems like everyone these days plays Wordle, Spelling Bee and other New York Times puzzles as much as Robert Langdon hypothetically would. Do you enjoy them?

I do a series of puzzles every morning. The fastest I’ve ever done them is six minutes and 10 seconds, but I try to do them in under 10 minutes. Wordle, Connections, Strands, The Mini and Letter Boxed, which I always have to finish in three words or less.

We are in a moment in the arts where hybridity is being welcomed with open arms. I think about literary genres like cli-fi and slipstream, but also how your Langdon books blended elements of the detective novel, historical novel and even fiction engaging with Gothic mysticism. Do you think that the future of books and films will see a deepening of these cross-connective genre experiments, or a desire perhaps for more simplified narrative forms?

I think the answer is both. Our lives are now hybrids, and we live across multiple platforms. As a result, we鈥檙e much better at parsing data. I think that creative people have realized that the human mind needs a little something of everything. In this day of endless hyperlinks though, novels or non-fiction books are the one place where you don’t have the option to click for more information.

There’s something comforting about an author telling you exactly what you need to know 鈥� someone else is “driving the bus.鈥� That can be really fun. I think that reading books is going to come back in a big way, because of how we鈥檙e deluged by screens yelling information at us constantly. With a novel, you have to tell yourself, 鈥淭his is the world I’m in right now.鈥�