About Jeff
“To talk with Jeff Warren is to be exhilarated. His intelligence and openness are such that you yourself feel a hundred times more intelligent and open. He performs a kind of compassionate magic. He gives me hope.”
– Barbara Gowdy, author of The White Bone
Jeff Warren is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, public speaker, meditation teacher and all-purpose enthusiast. His primary subject is the mind – the embodied mind, the distributed mind, the contemplative mind, the neurobiological mind. He even has a philosophical position: “radically fun empiricist,” not unlike William James, except with more jokes and fewer smart parts.
He is the author of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Random House 2007), an acclaimed travel guide through sleeping, dreaming and waking consciousness that critics called “exhilarating,” “enchanting,” “audacious,” “hilarious,” “mind-blowing” and even “visionary,” though perhaps that was a typo. His short piece “What is it Like to Be a Whale?” was anthologized in Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction and his piece on the fashionable jungle brew ayahuasca – “The Tourists of Consciousness” – won a Gold medal at the 2011 National Magazine Awards and is included in The Best Canadian Essays 2001 anthology. In 2010, Jeff was awarded the Webster McConnell Canadian Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Massey College.
Jeff has written for The New Scientist, Discover, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The National Post and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is a freelance radio producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Current and Ideas, and appeared as the “on-camera investigator” for a television documentary about remote viewing. He has confused I mean enthralled audiences in Toronto, New York, Hong Kong, Tucson, Santa Fe and Winchester, UK, with his quasi-psychedelic audiovisual tour through the mind, though most of the time you can find him on his porch in Toronto’s Kensington Market, watching kids deal drugs in the park.
What else? He is President of the Consciousness Explorers Club, a weekly meditation sit group he hosts out of his home. He wears a pith helmet during all meditation sits and advises his students to do the same. He is also an enthusiastic cook who has trouble boiling rice, an international ballet phenomenon with a grand jeté that is the envy of the Russian émigré community, and an undisciplined reader of the mystic, the cryptic and the scientific.
Jeff is currently working on a book about whales in particular, animal consciousness in general, and the totally obvious yet utterly astonishing fact that nature looks back at us. He recently completed a user’s manual for a strange mechanical device called the “Dream Director” that promises to remix the dreaming mind. He is also writing a book about meditation and the next frontier of human exploration. And he has written this entire bio in the third-person.
If you would like to hear Jeff talk about various things, click here. If you would like to put him to work, click here.
“Jeff has a unique blend of high rationalism and broad empathy. His reporting from the frontiers – of brain science, of our relationship to other species, of the ability of humans to grow – is brave and curious. He’s a writer and intellectual adventurer, not a specialist in any particular field; his gifts as a communicator help us see the ‘big picture’ and bridge culture to science.”
- Marni Jackson, former Chair of Literary Journalism at Banff Center, author of The Mother Zone and Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign.