The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness. Toronto and New York, Random House Canada and USA, Oneworld in the UK, 2007. Also being translated into Korean and Italian. You can get an audio book too. This cover from the Canadian paperback edition. Buy it here

My guide to all the weird permutations of waking and sleeping consciousness – Oliver Sacks said he loved it, the UK’s Independent called it “exhilarating” and The New York Times’s Sandra Blakeslee said it was “audacious, enchanting, and often hilarious … This book will blow your mind.” Click here for more reviews.

Head Trip is a hybrid work, a science adventure meets scholarly treatise by way of illustrated arts and crafts project. My ambition was to classify all the most elemental ways we are aware — the ultimate hopeless quest, because every time you think you have a state of consciousness pinned down it morphs inside your gaze, until you feel as though you are going insane, perhaps because you are insane. “It’s like trying to pin Post-it notes on the ocean,” my friend Matt observed, sympathetically, right before nodding off. Of course, this sort of serious inquiry demands that fun be had, because, really, who gives a shit?

To write this book I became a guinea pig for all kinds of experimentation – scientific and otherwise – including sleep lab analysis, lucid-dream workshops, hypnotic inductions and neurofeedback trials. Eventually – after years of bird’s-eye swooping –began to make out intriguing patterns in the topography. Most of what I learned is summarized in The Head Trip. Lots on the reality-bending nature of dreaming, one of the first popular accounts of neuroplasticity, and a chapter that everyone seems to love on ancestral sleep patterns and what it’s really like to be awake in the night. The book will introduce you to you own mind, which may cause you to recoil in confusion, for it’s not everyday that you meet such a freak.

Click here for the Head Trip website, which contains little descriptions of each state of consciousness, a long excerpt from the introduction, a cover gallery, reviews and a bunch of other stuff.

Click here for a mini-summary of some of the states I wrote for The New Scientist.

Here is a short excerpt about The Zone, one of 12 states of consciousness profiled in the book:

The Zone

There is no agreement as to who first called it the Zone. Some say it was the legendary baseball slugger Ted Williams, others tennis great Arthur Ashe. Whatever the case, most athletes recognize the place once they’ve arrived. With its heady combination of exceptional performance, mental equilibrium, and razor-sharp alertness, the Zone may be, to quote former St. Louis Cardinals linebacker Dave Meggyesy, “the essence of the athletic experience.”

It may also be, as one psychologist and “peak-performance trainer” has put it, “definable in terms of EEG.”

Over the past ten years, a growing number of sports psychologists have been studying the brains of professional athletes as they practice their game. They’ve found that, compared to novices, these athletes all tend to share a unique pattern of brain activity. As University of Maryland kinesiology and psychology professor Bradley Hatfield explained to me, “We see the same principles again and again.”

Typically, candidates for these sorts of studies are archers, rifle shooters, and golfers, because they’re about the only athletes who can do their thing with a thicket of wires sprouting from their heads. The first thing researchers have found once they get their EEG signals up is an overall increase in alpha power compared to novices. Alpha activity can be interpreted in many ways; for the purposes of this discussion, alpha can be thought of as efficient, experienced functioning over a large area. When the brain is humming with synchronous alpha, it is not engaged in some novel local processing. Subjectively, the professional is composed, her thoughts stilled, brain settling now into a familiar neural groove. There is a slight jump in left temporal parietal activation as she runs through her mental checklist, but this quickly drops off.

By contrast, the brain of the novice is more desynchronized: alpha is interrupted by faster-frequency explosions of disconnected regional activity. His novice brain is whizzing with thoughts, processing unusual new visual stimuli, trying to figure out how to balance the rifle, thinking about the wind, his hair, that damn attractive German markswoman polishing the barrel of her high-powered tactical rifle in his peripheral vision. His is a less efficient neural network.

According to Hatfield, another notable difference in the mind of the markswoman as she prepares to take her shot is much lower activity in her left temporal region, an area that controls “feature detection.” She is no longer actively scanning the field, but relying instead on internal models to guide her behavior.

Into this relative calm the shot is fired—a perfect hit, a tiny cloud of dust lifts from the bull’s-eye. Again, in contrast, the novice’s brain never shuts up. His feature detection area is lit up like a Christmas tree, the visual-spatial parts of his brain are frantically signaling the motor areas; frenzied desynchronized activity continues unabated. He shoots wildly into the impact berm, curses, and yanks out his EEG wires; the German markswoman turns away in contempt.

From The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness. Toronto and New York, Random House Canada and USA, Oneworld in the UK, 2007.