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"An audacious, enchanting, and often hilarious journey into the slippery nature of human consciousness, from deep slumber to lofty states states of enlightenment. This book will blow your mind."
- Sandra Blakeslee, co-author of The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
"As readable and fun as a novel, yet accurate and up-to-date, this book is about your most precious possession - your consciousness - and the fascinating states it goes through."
- Charles T. Tart, author of Altered States of Consciousness
"An amazing book. Jeff Warren manages to be funny while packing in tons of fascinating science. Rather than staying within conventional boundries, Warren follows his own formidable curiousity, producing a book that is quirky, refreshing, and nothing short of groundbreaking."
- Tom Stafford, co-author of Mind Hacks
From the Publisher:
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 PureConscious 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.
Hardcover.
Table of Contents
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| Chapter 1 |
The Hypnagogic |
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| Chapter 2 |
The Watch |
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| Chapter 3 |
The Lucid Dream |
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| Chapter 4 |
The Trance |
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| Chapter 5 |
The SMR |
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| Chapter 6 |
The Pure Conscious Event |
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Conclusion: Emergence |
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Epilogue: A Phenomenological Map of Consciousness |
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Notes and Sources |
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Index | |
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Editorial Reviews:
The Washington Post - Dennis Drabelle
"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."
Publishers Weekly
Warren, a Canadian science journalist, combines the rigorous self-experimentation of Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Openwith the wacky self-experimentation of A.J. Jacobs's The Know-It-Allin 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 2007 Reed Business Information
Mary Ann Hughes - Library Journal
What is it like to experience lucid dreaming or to be hypnotized? Having traveled around the world to experience 12 distinct states of consciousness, Canadian science journalist and radio producer Warren here reports on what they're like and what such experts as neuroscientists, chronobiologists, anthropologists, and monks have learned about them. Much is already known about the aforementioned states of lucid dreaming and hypnotization, but Warren also addresses more obscure conditions, e.g., the Watch, a period of relaxed, middle-of-the-night half-wakefulness achieved by people living in areas of long winter nights and exposed to little or no artificial light. Other conditions, such as hypnogogia, the state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, are familiar to most of us at least fleetingly or unheedingly. This entertaining book, complete with Warren's own black-and-white, cartoonlike drawings, manages to convey a good deal about the science of cognition in an easy-to-absorb narrative. Highly recommended for public and undergraduate libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
A Canadian journalist goes deep into history and his own psyche to explore all the possible permutations of sleep. Warren had one primary motive for writing his enjoyably big and baggy book: "I wanted to catch sleep in the act." In a welcome attempt to bring some well-needed levity to the often paralyzingly earnest discussions of such matters, Warren structures the book as a Wheel of Fortune-like spinner on which a "You Are Here" sign points to different stages, from The Hypnagogic to The REM Dream, at the start of each chapter. Although necessarily afflicted with new-age tendencies-he does love his dreams-Warren isn't a preacher trying to convert the masses to his stunning new understanding of the unconscious mind. Instead, he offers a good-natured and self-deprecating ramble through the worlds of sleep and wakefulness, organized around the idea that consciousness is too complicated to be divided into two states, asleep and awake. He partakes in the usual visits to experts, researchers who show him how they can track particular moments in the dramatic flow of his dream narrative by a spike in the EEG chart. He also attends a lucid-dreaming seminar in Hawaii. One of the most engrossing sections follows Warren's discovery of historian Roger Ekrich's contention that in premodern Western society, people tended to sleep from 9 p.m. to around midnight, then around 2 a.m. to dawn. To replicate the experience of periods of sleep interrupted by one or more "night watch" bouts of wakefulness, Warren travels to a remote cabin without artificial light and waits for his body to adjust. Not surprisingly, it does, leaving him to note, "eight hours of consolidated sleep is really one option among many,and we likely do ourselves a disservice when we insist on its universality."A sprawling and occasionally goofy examination of a shockingly little understood aspect of our lives. Agent: Don Sedgwick/Transatlantic Literary Agency
Author Biography: 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.
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