Inventions » Jeff Warren

All I did was draw when I was a kid – mostly elephants, and then, again and again, The Incredible Hulk. At some point I figured out I would never meet any girls if I kept up with the comic book obsession, so I dropped the whole thing and entered the unimaginative mainstream of late teenage life. Then, 15-years later, came The Head Trip. I realized that if I wanted to create a true x-ray of my mental processes then comics had to be part of it. I was imprinted by their exaggerated tone and “kapow!” “thwack!” visual grammar so that even now, whatever my literary aspirations, the overly-excitable comic nerd visual-explainer is always there. So Head Trip is also a kind of comic book. There is a further reasoning too, which I’m sure you will be thrilled to learn about. The comic panel is to the scientific fig what subjective experience is to objective brain science (and what I hoped Head Trip would be to the typical science book). Sloppy expressionist truant vs anal materialist authority. Head Trip is meant to bridge these two worlds.

The Dream Director

Publishing a book is a bit like firing one of those emergency flares into the air. You never know who it’s going to attract. Most of the time nobody. You set the flare off in the Arctic tundra, get excited for some human contact, the light dims, cold sets in, and you die of exposure. But once in awhile someone comes by to take a look. And once and a while they bring with them something really cool.

The Wheel of Consciousness

The core metaphor of my book. The brain is a wheel, and consciousness is a pliant membrane pressed into the rim. Consciousness is always there – it never moves. But the wheel moves, spun by our biological clocks…

The Consciousness Mixing Board

Easily the most radical visual in the book, and a summary of much of what I learned while writing and researching The Head Trip. Via expectations, suggestion and possibly even intention, we can learn to remix consciousness. We live in special effects studios of the mind …