Product Description

A world at once familiar and unimaginably strange exists all around us–and within us. It is the world of consciousness, a protean mental landscape that each of us knows intimately in bits and pieces yet understands in its totality scarcely at all. Tied to the body and the brain, consciousness is nonetheless beyond our ability to measure or quantify. Despite the attempts of scientists and mystics, poets and dreamers, crackpots and geniuses, to map its contours and explain its secret workings, the mind remains mysterious. And the more we learn about it, the more mysterious it becomes.

But that is not to say that we know nothing about consciousness. In fact, as gonzo science journalist Jeff Warren demonstrates in this provocative, often hilarious, and always fascinating synthesis of cutting-edge research and personal experience, just how much we do know is little short of astonishing. And when Warren fits the pieces together, the implications of that knowledge are, well, mind-blowing.

Warren begins with the insight that consciousness is not a simple on-off proposition, with rigid demarcations separating waking awareness from the murky depths of sleep, but rather a round-the-clock continuum regulated by natural biorhythms. He then sets out to explore, and to experience for himself, the seemingly miraculous, all-but-untapped potential of the human mind.

From the full-immersion virtual realities of lucid dreaming to the esoteric disciplines of Eastern meditative practices that have reached outposts of consciousness far beyond the grasp of Western science, from techniques of hypnosis and neurofeedback to such exotic states of awareness as the Watch and the Pure Conscious Event, Warren takes us on an incredible journey through our own heads–a journey conducted with the adventurous spirit and intellectual curiosity of a Darwin coupled with the sensibility of a stand-up comedian.

Part user’s manual and part travel guide, The Head Trip is an instant classic, a brilliant summation of consciousness studies that is also a practical guide to enhancing creativity, mental health, and the experience of what it means to be human. Many books claim that they will change you. This one gives you the tools to change yourself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80117 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-04
• Released on: 2007-12-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Warren, a Canadian science journalist, combines the rigorous self-experimentation of Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open with the wacky self-experimentation of A.J. Jacobs's The Know-It-All in this entertaining field guide to the varying levels of mental awareness. Beginning with the mild hallucinogenic state that comes just before true sleep, he tries to hone his skills at lucid dreaming, subjects himself to hypnosis and joins a Buddhist meditation retreat, among other adventures. Along the way, he begins to realize that dreaming and waking are equivalent states, and that we can learn how to induce the subtle gradations of consciousness within ourselves. This could come off as New Age psychobabble, but Warren is well versed in the scientific literature, and he provides detailed accounts of his own research. (During one three-week period, for example, he goes to bed at sundown to recreate a period of wakefulness before returning to sleep that used to be common before electric light reconfigured our sleep schedules.) His self-mocking attitude toward his inability to achieve instant nirvana, along with a steady stream of cartoon illustrations, ensures that his ideas remain accessible. More important than the theories, though, may be the basic tools—and the visionary spirit—that Warren hands off to those interested in hacking their own minds. B&w illus. (Nov. 27)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle

There's a moment about halfway through The Head Trip that epitomizes its tone: enthusiasm tempered by the realization that for some readers this book may be a ride to Woo-woo Land. Author Jeff Warren is summarizing a psychological study in which "one group practiced tensing and relaxing a finger in their left hands, and another group just imagined doing the same thing." When it was all over, the finger strength of the physical tensers had increased by an average of 30 percent, but that of the mental tensers had gone up nearly as much, to 22 percent. Before going on to point out that visualization can prompt the motor cortex to fire in much the same way that actual exercise does, and that Michael Jordan and other athletes have used the technique to help their game, Warren pauses to react: "Isn't that insane?"

But if you look beyond the book's flower-child title, as well as its numerous drawings and diagrams, you find yourself being instructed by a serious journalist with both feet on the ground -- except when he's in bed and taking part in experiments. In The Head Trip, Warren pursues his conviction that "consciousness exists in more widely varied and abundant forms than simple waking, sleeping, and dreaming" by talking with experts and submitting to protocols. In a Montreal clinic, for example, he gets a handle on hypnagogia -- the stage between light and deep sleep in which wild associations can occur -- by wearing a transmitter on his head and letting his night's rest be videotaped.

The resulting film seems to have been every bit as tedious as Andy Warhol's "Sleep," but Warren's discussion of how savvy artists exploit hypnagogia makes good reading. Salvador Dali used to trawl his brain for bizarre images to go into his surrealist paintings by sitting in a chair after a meal with his hands extended beyond the chair-arms and a key held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. When he nodded off, the key would fall to the floor, make a clink, and wake him up so that he could go sketch the melting watch he'd just glimpsed on his inner canvas.

One of Warren's best chapters covers lucid dreaming, in which the sleeper knows he's dreaming (when the images get silly enough, a kind of emcee function in the dreaming self seems to kick in). Here again Warren is burdened with a contraption, the NovaDreamer, a mask worn on the face, with a button to push; if it flashes and chirps, you know you're awake. In the course of the experiment, Warren has an experience that reminds us what a diabolically complex organism the brain is: He pushes the button that will prove he's awake, nothing happens, and he realizes he has dreamed the whole button-pushing sequence. His investigation of lucid dreaming brings him a new understanding of how important the mind (as opposed to the more primitive brain-stem) is to the direction dreams take, and he finds himself agreeing with one theorist's explanation that the weirdness of dreams is "exactly what you would expect if you let the mind run free in a milieu without sensory input to restrain it."

Among Warren's practical suggestions is that "consolidated" sleep -- eight hours straight -- may not be the best way for everybody to get his daily allotment of sawn wood. Tribal people tend to bunk down in communal rooms, and they may mix periods of waking and sleeping throughout the night. The Mediterranean siesta offers another alternative to what sleep scientists call the "Western" pattern, with its insistence on down-you-go-and-don't-stir-till-morning-comes. (Few Westerners will find it convenient to break the eight-solid-hours mold, but that tells you more about the kind of society we are than what our bodies and minds might really need.)

Warren concludes his voyage to the end of the night by formulating what his research has been leading up to: "We can learn to direct our own states of consciousness" -- "we" being not just Buddhist monks and contemplative nuns, but people living workaday lives. It may be a bit early in the game to be so sure of this -- as the author himself notes, sleep research is only about 50 years old -- but by this point Warren has buckled on enough devices, schmoozed with enough experts and provided enough diagrams to make a good case that those italicized words aren't just a pipe dream.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author
Jeff Warren is a freelance producer for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio. He has lived and worked in Paris, London, Montreal, San Francisco, and Vancouver, and currently lives in Toronto.

Customer Reviews

A distillation of disciplines
Books on dreams and dreaming seem to fall into one of two types. Either it's an academic study with white-coated researchers measuring brain waves and chemistry, or it's personal accounts with perhaps a bit of counselling thrown in to establish credibility. Jeff Warren has made a sincere effort to combine these two methods. He's interviewed a number of brain/consciousness researchers as well as undergoing their testing procedures. The result is a highly personalised account of dreaming research as it stands today.

Don't be put off by the "pop-psych" title. Warren makes a serious attempt to bring to the lay reader some of the issues in consciousness studies. Except that much of this work involves the periods when we're not "conscious". His mechanism is to provide readers with a breakdown of consciousness, which he depicts as a wheel. A neat dozen segments are portrayed representing the chapter subjects to follow. The topics are enhanced with images of "passports" to explain where you are going and something of what you will learn. The passport gives the name of the topic, how to go there, what you might find and a personal example. "Passport" may be misleading - it's not a trip to a physical segment of the brain you are undertaking, but a tour of a condition.

The conditions have been the subject of many studies in recent years. Although much of the narrative is a list of Warren's personal experiences, those events have been done with the assistance of brain scientists. Warren carefully recounts the various theses proposed about what the brain is doing during sleep, dreaming, in "trance" state and other periods when it's more-or-less operating on automatic pilot. Many researchers are delving into these conditions from various perspectives, offering fresh insights and conclusions, although definitive theories remain elusive. It takes a book such as this to begin synthesizing the wide spectrum of ideas and proposals to begin formulating meaningful answers.

Active conscious states are a different topic, well covered, as Warren notes, elsewhere. There is also the issue of recording "events" or impressions gained during the various sleep or semi-conscious states. "Subjective science" becomes the knee-jerk response by some, who are generally attempting to dismiss this sort of research. As Warren reminds us, however, "subjective" accounts of what goes on in the brain during sleep is all we have. Measuring brain waves and neurochemistry tells us something of where in the brain changes occur and how intense those changes are, but only the subject can tell us what they perceive. Inadequate or not, we must use the tools available, and the subject of the experiment is the best one we have.

Warren, in order to demonstrate that fact, puts himself as the subject of many experiments related here. It is hoped the reader can at least identify with his concerns and disappointments, but clearly not all of the "tests" are likely to be repeated by a single individual. It's also apparent that the "ground state" of each reader will differ from every other, something Warren touches on too lightly to suit this reviewer. One topic that eludes him entirely is the non-dreamer. As one who has had no more than a dozen remembered dreams since childhood, much of this book remained elusive. I simply had no idea what the author, or even many of his scientific contributors were talking about. The chapter on "lucid dreaming" - dreams in which you are conscious of dreaming - seemed the height of fantasy. What is the state of research into brains that don't appear to dream, or fail to remember any that take place?

In a couple of chapters in the book, Warren delves into a "mind-body problem". However, the "problem" is one of his own devising - how do unconscious but impressionable states cause physiological changes in the body? The chapter on hypnosis is one of these, in which the author claims that women in the US have enlarged their breasts by a "group average of 1.37 inches [3.47 centimetres]". While there have been many researchers looking into brain-body interactive pathways, Warren either ignores them or hasn't heard of them [i.e., Antonio Damasio is mentioned because one of Warren's interviewees had a copy on a shelf, but V.S. Ramachandran isn't present anywhere here]. Nonetheless, like so many works on related topics available today, Warren's book raises many issues that demand attention. Neither his book nor the work of those he relates can be ignored nor dismissed as "soft science". These are the plans and bricks needed to build the edifice we call the "mind". Understanding that is essential to our comprehension of what we are as a species. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

What A Trip!
There has over the past few decades been an increasing interest in something which we all take for granted: consciousness. Just how the inert molecules in the brain manage to make us conscious, or just what consciousness is, or what the different states of consciousness are, hits on huge questions within philosophy and neurology, questions that remain mysterious. To heck with all the mystery; let's just have some fun! That seems to be the attitude of Jeff Warren, a writer and broadcaster who specializes in science themes, in _The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness_ (Random House). Not to be too grandiose: in the illustrations in the book, that's the "Wheel O' Consciousness". Warren sets out to pursue consciousness, not just the waking, sleeping, and dreaming that we all go through (although his nocturnal adventures are among the most interesting), but also hypnosis and meditation and more. He does have fun throughout, and doesn't mind telling us about it in jocular, enthusiastic prose (and his own cartoon illustrations), although anyone who thinks about consciousness for a long time will wind up, well, thinking about it for a long time. There is thus a lot here to chuckle over and to contemplate.

Just dreaming is not enough. Warren has to pursue different types of dreaming, like hypnagogic dreams, the ones that last a few minutes just as you are falling into sleep. Warren writes about how to use hypnagogia for problem solving, and it produced the idea of this book, but some of the ideas he had were real lemons ("... this isn't magic, it's still your fallible human brain operating.") In a lucid dream, you know you are dreaming and you can play around in the dream world, pushing it to do what you want. But Warren himself has some difficulty with manipulating a character in a specific dream; conjuring up a dream meeting with a long-ago crush, he scoops her into his arms to find, "It was like kissing a zombie. Her head lolled to the side and her eyes were blank. Man, my characters were terrible, what the hell was wrong with me? I was disgusted with myself. No wonder I wrote nonfiction." Warren goes to investigate "The Watch", a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night that might be the natural pattern of sleeping given to us by our tribal days. He tries hypnosis, he investigates daydreaming (yes, some scientific research has been done on daydreaming), and of course he gets hooked up to a biofeedback (or more specifically neurofeedback) machine. He goes to a seven-day Buddhist meditation retreat, and reports on all the paradoxes he finds in "the experience of no experience".

Warren doesn't do drugs. Or at least none of the chapters here is devoted to any sort of illicit experimentation, but during his neurofeedback phase, "One friend remarked that I seemed more relaxed, but that may have been because I was drunk at the time." Almost all the conscious states here are available to anyone, although like Warren you might have to invest time and money to find the particular expert to bring the state on. The appeal of this funny and informative book is best when it throws light on states like sleep and dreams and daydreams, states which all of us go though and to which few of us pay as much obsessive attention as Warren has. "We can learn to direct our own states of consciousness," he insists, and he has demonstrated the truth of this astonishing fact in his researches. We might not all learn to do so, but we would be wise to attend and celebrate states with the jubilation and delight that Warren presents to us.

Still worth it for psychonauts: a User's Guide to the brain for normal humans
The concepts here may not be new for those who've gone of the way to get experienced with their consciousness, but the level of detail (dig that bibliography!) and attention to recent developments in various fields -- sleep science, neurofeedback, even hypnosis -- is enough to inspire all sorts of new inquiry.

For the "layperson," however, or "non-freak," this condenses what it took your average freak ten years of living to explore and confirm on his own. Read it and save yourself the time!