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: #315084 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-04
• Released on: 2007-12-04
• Original language: English
• 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

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.

Review
"Jeff Warren has done a great job with The Head Trip. Writing about any aspect of consciousness is treacherously difficult, but his take on the subject is clear, original and -- amazingly -- funny!" Rita Carter, author of Mapping the Mind and Exploring Consciousness"The Head Trip is an amazing book. Jeff Warren manages to be funny while packing in tons of fascinating science. Rather than sticking to conventional boundaries, Warren follows his own formidable curiosity, producing a book that is quirky, refreshing and nothing short of groundbreaking." Tom Stafford, co-author of Mind Hacks"What makes Head Trip so exhilarating is that, rather than merely tell us about such weird states as the hypnotic trance or the meditative pure conscious event, Warren actually dives in and tries to experience these consciousness states for himself.""Ultimately, it's Warren's engaging first-hand experience that brings all this to life. As he undergoes hypnagogic experiments, SMR training, lucid dream classes in Hawaii or meditation in the Scottish Highlands, you're right there with him. You'll never look at waking, sleeping or dreaming the same way again." The Independent on Sunday

Customer Reviews

Bold, daring, expect to be surprized
Jeff Warren moves through the latest thinking on consciousness, mind, and sleep, with ease and zany wit and humour. Written from the perspective of a culture vulture trying to figure out what's going on inside his own head, he effortlessly synthesizes much of the latest thinking about the brain in fields as diverse as psychology, neuro-biology, immunology and others. Thomas Kuhn, Sigmund Freud, Steven Johnson, and many other great thinkers show up in this bold, adventurous journey through the mind.

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.

WOW -- Mind opening, entertaining, and a real trip
This one was fun; and it really changed the way I think about consciousness. The author is very entertaining, and the style and delivery of the content is unique. The fact that he did all of these things himself (experimentally) added a whole new level to this book's importance. If it had just been a dry documentary, it wouldn't have been the same.

I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who's willing to take a wild journey into themselves, and who isn't afraid to change the way they see the world around them (or dream it!).