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The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness Hardcover – December 4, 2007
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.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateDecember 4, 2007
- Dimensions7.35 x 1.16 x 9.28 inches
- ISBN-101400064848
- ISBN-13978-1400064847
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About the Author
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; F First Edition (December 4, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400064848
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400064847
- Item Weight : 1.66 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.35 x 1.16 x 9.28 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,079,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #248 in Scientific Experiments & Projects
- #1,426 in Popular Neuropsychology
- #4,742 in Medical General Psychology
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It is written by a journalist, not a scientist or doctor, and it has a fun, quirky style with a lot of humorous comic book style diagrams.
The first, most interesting, half is about sleep. Different stages of sleep and types of dreams. The best parts are the sections about lucid dreaming and the watch. I am a person who strives to achieve lucid dreams and I liked the stories about people who are tremendously successful lucid dreamers, and ways to improve the chances of having lucid dreams.
The section on "the watch" changed the way I looked at sleep. Our modern expectation is that we will have an Ambien night - go to bet, konk out, and wake up in the morning remembering nothing of the night while we were asleep. Historically, the author tells s, people fully expected to lie awake for a while in the middle of the night. It turns out that this is, to quote the Talking Heads, a "good place to get some thinking done."
This book has actually changed my life, in a sense, because I now no longer dread lying awake for a while in the middle of the night, but see it as a positive thing. Plus, f you no longer fear "the watch" it doesn't last as long. If I'm not afraid of being awake for a while I get back to sleep much more quickly.
The second half on waking consciousness, regrettably, was not nearly as interesting.
But seriously, I would highly recommend this book to anybody who ever sleeps (or is awake). Ha ha - sleep is a huge part of our lives, but how much do we even know about it?
Consciousness, the focus of the hippy era in the 70's, has come full circle and is now a serious study. Warren recreates the atmosphere of the classic film `Easy Rider' with his metaphors and language. He even looks like Art Garfunkle from that era.
His wheel of consciousness is the easiest way for us to understand an incredible complex topic. It gives the reader a linear, tangible series of states that we can grasp. It is illusory; a metaphor that Warren admits towards the end; all states are capable of `bleeding' into the others and capable of being `re-mixed' like music.
This book is not easy to understand unless you have some existing knowledge. Thankfully each chapter ends with a summary in the form of a passport with the words `Thank you for visiting the SMR state'.
This book combines of psychology, neurobiology and spirituality with offbeat humour. If you are wondering if this book is for you, I advise checking out his You Tube video `The Head Trip - a tour through your mind'.
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!
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Too bad I lost it on the train halfway through.
Peace,
Or
Unfortunately, the zeal degenerates into a little too much self-absorbed detail at times. I wasn’t really interested in which coffee shop the author stopped at on the way to a particular interview. His confessed distractibility results in humorous asides at times, but eventually becomes a drag on the narrative. The most obvious and irritating manifestation of this is the frequent and tangential footnotes. Surely these could have been integrated with the other thirty pages of commendable notes at the end. Normally I would knock off at least a star in my rating because of these concerns, but I really don’t want to discourage anyone from reading this interesting work. If enough people do, maybe a second, more concise edition will come along.