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Sign up todayThe Head Trip
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Learn moreA 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 and yet understands scarcely at all. 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—even more so the more we learn about it.
Yet, as gonzo science journalist Jeff Warren demonstrates in this provocative and entertaining synthesis of cutting-edge research and personal experience, just how much we do now know is little short of astonishing. And when Warren fits the pieces together, the implications of that knowledge are, well, mind blowing.
Beginning with the insight that consciousness is not a simple on-off proposition, with rigid demarcations separating waking awareness from sleep, Jeff Warren explores twelve distinct, natural states we can experience in a twenty-four-hour day, each offering its own kind of insight and adventure. He then sets out 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 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, conducted with a spirit of adventure and humor, curiosity and wonder.
Jeff Warren has lived and worked in Paris, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco and London. He has published articles in the Globe and Mail and the National Post. His two hour-long documentaries on sleep and dreaming for CBC Radio’s Ideas became the springboard for The Head Trip. He is an on-again, off-again producer for The Current and is researching his next book.
Raymond Todd is an actor and director in the theater as well as a poet and documentary filmmaker. He plays jazz trombone for the Leatherstocking quartet, an ensemble that gets its name from one of his favorite Blackstone narrations, The Deerslayer. Todd lives in New York.
Reviews
“An audacious, enchanting, and often hilarious journey into the slippery nature of human consciousness.”
“Thoroughly entertaining…exhilarating…You’ll never look at waking, sleeping or dreaming the same way again.”
“Warren’s commendably ambitious work…offers non-scientific readers a brilliant distillation of the latest studies in that still-mysterious realm of Mind…It’s certainly the best-priced trip readers can take this year.”
“Warren…combines the rigorous self-experimentation of Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open with the wacky self-experimentation of A. J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All in this entertaining field guide to the varying levels of mental awareness…His self-mocking attitude toward his inability to achieve instant nirvana…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.”
“Raymond Todd narrates this book with a sense of wonder appropriate for its topic, making the experience a delightful one of discovery and learning. His delivery keeps the listener alert to some unusual concepts, and he smoothes over the technical jargon.”
“Enjoyably big and baggy…a welcome attempt to bring some well-needed levity to the often paralyzingly earnest discussions of such matters…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…A sprawling and occasionally goofy examination of a shockingly little understood aspect of our lives.”
“This entertaining book…manages to convey a good deal about the science of cognition in an easy-to-absorb narrative. Highly recommended.”
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