New Scientist, Dec 27, 2011, Extended-version
(click here for tragically-neutered version that NS actually published)

What would we learn if we could merge parts of the human brain with those of other species? Might we hear the sounds of the past? Live in naked troops, swapping intimate experiences without words? Or build a new social network? Jeff Warren spoke to some experts.

I’ve spent years thinking about consciousness, and my current obsession is whether we humans can know anything about what it’s like to be a dog, a dolphin, a bat.

The standard response to this was articulated back in 1974 by American philosopher Thomas Nagel in his paper, ‘What it is like to be a Bat?’. Unlike some of the behaviorist thinkers of that time, who viewed animals as little more than stimulus-response automatons devoid of inner life, Nagel didn’t doubt that bats had some form of experience, that it was “like something” to be a nimble, echolocating mammal swooping through the night sky. But he did doubt our ability to say anything true about that experience that isn’t mere projection or imagination.

Nagel may be right, but I believe the human-to-animal mind question is simply an extreme form of the human-to-human mind question: we can never entirely know another person’s experience especially if they come from a wildly different culture, but there are deep points of overlap that can be expanded. So what are the points of overlap with animals – and how can they be expanded?

One answer may be to compare brains and compare environments. I decided to conduct some thought-experiments via Skype with two of the smartest people I know on the question of brains and non-human consciousness: Lori Marino, a comparative neuro-anatomist at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, and Ben Goertzel, author, mathematician, pioneering AI researcher, and former research director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco.

The Conversation
JEFF: Imagine that in front of us are the disarticulated brains of three different mammals – a human, a dog, and a dolphin. What might we learn if we were to reassemble these pieces in unusual combinations?

LORI: This is deeply creepy, but it so happens it is not entirely an academic question. Something like this is already going on in biochemical research with the work around chimeras. For example, a couple years ago researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig inserted a human gene into a mouse, which caused it to grow human-like neurons in the language part of its brain. The resulting mouse was different, its vocalizations were deeper.

JEFF: In her book Inside of a Dog, psychologist Alexandra Horowitz talks about how being immersed in a world of layered smells might affect a dog’s sense of time because you have historical smell traces all around.

LORI: When a dog goes for a walk, they can receive stimuli that are remnants of the past because smells hang around. I’ve heard that audition is similar, that if we had a big enough amplifier we could pick up sounds of people that aren’t here anymore, events that have happened in the past – although no animal that I know of has that capacity as far as we can tell.

BEN: For a dog, smell and vision synergize very well together when they are trying to find stuff outside. Whereas for humans, audition and vision tie together, and olfaction not so much. So if you had a mind in which all three senses worked together closely, that would be interesting. Suppose it was possible to paste brain lobes together within some kind of neural growth medium. There is no way to determine what effect this would have – you would probably get nonlinear feedback between lobes that would settle into some unexpected configuration.

JEFF: Yet, at the same time, we know basic brain structures repeat themselves from animal to animal. A dog’s amygdale, say, looks a lot like the human amygdala and there is good evidence that is does many of the same emotional regulation things.

LORI: This is part of the complexity of our task. The brain is not just plug-and-play. If you stick a dog’s big olfactory bulbs on top of the human brain there’s going to be reverberations throughout the levels of the brain to adjust. At the same time, there is a tremendous amount of conservation of function and structure in nervous systems. Once you have a bilaterally-symmetrical animal with a brain – that’s it. Everything else is a variation on the theme. We only do nervous systems one way on this planet and that is interesting.

BEN: There’s another important point here. Like the auditory system, the visual system is largely hierarchical, using linear feed-forward and feed-back connections. Whereas if you look at Berkeley neuroscientist Walter Freeman’s model of the olfactory bulb using nonlinear dynamics, it’s more heterarchical in construction. Activity is more chaotic, with the formation of transient patterns of energy called “strange attractors” and other related structures responding to different recognizable smells.

JEFF: Let’s imagine this nonhierarchical system dominated the whole cortex. How might that be expressed in consciousness, in experience?

BEN: It has to do with breaking things down into parts. The whole process of analysis (breaking into parts) and synthesis (making stuff from parts) is built into the structure of audition and vision. A cognitive system that was based on olfaction wouldn’t be based so much on breaking things down into parts and wholes. More just on completion of patterns, I guess.

There seems to be no system with a high level of general intelligence that’s like that on earth, and there may be a reason for that. It may be that the hierarchical structure is a really useful heuristic for being intelligent. And without it, you don’t get that smart. But then that might be a particular artifact of the environment on the surface of earth. If you believe our theory of physics, hierarchy is wired into the universe, because you’ve got quarks and gluons, then you’ve got particles and atoms and molecules and cells and organisms.

JEFF: So says the hierarchical brain.

BEN: Yeah the hierarchal structure is just innate to the universe, and so of course the brain should be oriented that way too. But on the other hand, maybe that’s only one possible way to understand physics because we have a hierarchy-oriented brain.

JEFF: I want to stay with this idea, because it is a really important one when we talk about higher-level consciousness in animals. One way to get at it is with cetaceans – whales and dolphins. Their huge brains are 30 million years old – that’s about 28 millions years older than our big brains. Except these big brains didn’t evolve on land – they evolved in a totally different medium. Ben, last year you published a fascinating paper with Allan Combs in The Journal of Cosmology that is very relevant here.

BEN: I was trying to understand what a consciousness might be like if it evolved in a fluid environment. You could relate this in a speculative way to the mind of cetaceans, although their situation is not as extreme as what we were positing. I was thinking about the extent to which human psychology is adapted to a world of solid objects. Solid objects are like billiard balls – you get stuff bouncing off other stuff and therefore you get the psychology of causation. You also get Lego blocks and building material so you get hierarchical decomposition of wholes into parts. Things we take for granted in our cognition may be artifacts of adaptation to a world consisting of discrete solid objects.

If you grew up on Jupiter where the environment consists of different fluids of viscosity and different intersecting vortices and solitons, you might have a completely different psychology. The environment would be more chaotic and rapidly changing, where each event – at least compared to our “solid” world – is correlated with multiple possible future and past events. Some kind of phenomenology of flow states would be dominant – it might be less about an agent “willing X” than “flowing in the direction of X.” Also, rather than focusing on building items from components, these organisms might focus instead on creating temporary self-organized patterns within flows of movement.

JEFF: You could say this is one reason the study of cetacean communication may be important.

LORI: This has actually been discussed as an explanation why we still haven’t “cracked” dolphin communication. Human researchers want to develop a whistle repertoire for dolphins and figure out what the whistles mean as discrete sounds, and that has been somewhat fruitful and has hinted that there’s a lot of complexity there. But it could be that we’re going down the wrong path. At her Wild Dolphin Project in Florida, zoologist Denise Herzing is developing some sort of gizmo that will permit genuine two-way communication between dolphins and humans.

JEFF: Flow makes me think of emotion. How does the emotional brain of the dolphin compare to humans?

LORI: In some respects it is more complex. Dolphins and whales have the only brain I know of where, over time, the limbic system has dramatically expanded its connections into the cortex. It has an entire paralimbic lobe that no other animal has, and that’s really interesting.

JEFF: So cetaceans have these large, emotional brains. They also have heavily integrated auditory and visual cortexes that may underlie their amazing echolocation. Some scientists have argued that dolphins and killer and sperm whales may be able to see inside each other’s bodies using echolocation – a bit like ultrasound. A dolphin may know if another dolphin is hungry, sick or pregnant. Plus there is the behavioral data, the amazing synchronicity between dolphins, the way they won’t abandon one another.

BEN: I wonder how the self-model differs between animals. We can sort of get a sense of that across human cultures. Asian cultures to a certain extent, and Stone Age people to an even greater extent will sort of naturally take a more extended view of themselves – they look at the social context over the individual.

I would think that with a dolphin, whatever analogue of its self-model is there would be dramatically different. If you always travelled with the same posse and could see inside them, could see if they were stressed or relax, if getting ready to take some action, or be able to see if they are in love with another dolphin every time they swim by. You would naturally get a kind of extended self in way that humans don’t have. Still be some individual nature – dolphin has to protect itself and feed, so not total hive mind – but the individuated self like we have wouldn’t be there.

How you tie that into neuroanatomy is unclear to me. Presumably a large part of what the dolphin cortex is doing is this sort of refined spatial/social modeling that humans don’t have to do and are not that good at. You could hypothesize that if we grafted that aspect of the dolphin’s cortex into a human, all of a sudden we would try to detect very fine details of the physical movements of those around us. We would gravitate towards living in a small tribe of naked people who walked around looking at each other and sensing each other all the time because our natural inclinations would be to have a kind of group embodied extended self.

LORI: There has been a lot of talk over years about the dolphin having an extended self as well as an individual self. There is a dynamic quality to the dolphin way of life. Of course they don’t build houses or make weapons – other beings are their substrate, in a very real sense. It’s interesting to think they evolved from herd animals. They may be an example of a species which has taken the herd mentality mind and jacked it up to a whole new level of complexity.

JEFF: It makes me think that maybe cetacean Enlightenment is individuation.

LORI: Maybe! It does explain a lot of odd social behaviors – mass stranding, synchronization, fact that if want to catch a whole bunch of dolphins all you have to do is go after a few one of them – they don’t leave each other. There is a real social imperative in their world that is strange even to us, as social as we are. Compared to dolphins we’re not social at all.

BEN: So Jeff, what would happen if you took the regions of a human cortex and cerebellum that are adapted for tool building and integrated those with a dolphin brain – and gave them thumbs and fingers?

JEFF: They’d build social networking software, except amplified. They’d build long snaking systems of luge-like mirrors that would channel, direct and facilitate even more social closeness but also amplify those effects in all kinds of inventive and unexpected ways. You could imagine all kinds of new social and cognitive insights.

BEN: They’d engineer a global dolphin hive mind.

LORI: Humpback whales already have that.

JEFF: But would we humans be able to connect with a mind like that?

BEN: When humans describe something they make it precise, divide into parts, recombine them – that’s they how build words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. Dolphin language may enforce and harmonize with a quite different way of thinking about the world which we can’t understand that well. You can hypothesize it is somehow about flows and forces of influence, that it isn’t about breaking into parts and building up again.

Maybe these two ways of looking at the world are complementary, like the wave and particle in quantum mechanics. Or maybe they are completely incommensurable perspectives on the world that can’t be added up.

LORI: Except at the same time there is still a huge psychological overlap between humans and cetaceans that has to be accounted for. Decades of work on dolphin cognition tells us they are different but they also recognize themselves in mirrors as we do, they are capable of learning and understanding a symbolically-based syntactical language, their memory systems are very similar to ours. Cognitively they are much more like us than we might expect given other divergences. I also suspect that we share basic emotions such as love – and from working with them, I can tell you they definitely have a sense of humour.

JEFF: In a way we are touching on the ultimate cosmic question: what is shared and what is distinct? I would argue there is always a pith of oneness between any life form, just as there is also a multiplicity of difference. An infinite number of perspectives looking out from something that is common. So even between us and a dolphin, at a high level there is a distinct perspective difference that may be incommensurate in the way Ben describes. But on another level, I can look at a dolphin swimming in the water, and know something about the feeling of water, and movement, and the feeling of having a body. It’s different of course, but the point is there is an overlap: both the fact of our mutual skin-and-bone embodiment, and the shared world in which we swim and play.

LORI: In the end it comes down to how far or how close in you want to get. Where do you want to put the lens? The difference between us comes down to a resolution issue.

Reading references

Ben Goertzel and Allan Combs wrote Water Worlds, Naive Physics, Intelligent Life, and Alien Minds, Journal of Cosmology 5, 897-904.

Among Lori Marino’s papers are Convergence in intelligence and self-awareness, Journal of Cosmology, vol. 14; and Cetacean brains: How aquatic are they?, The Anatomical Record, 290.

Jeff Warren wrote Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Random House, 2007). You can listen to his two CBC Radio documentaries on whale consciousness here.

Mindfulness mindfulness mindfulness. Everyone is freaking out about mindfulness. Witness the cover of a recent Psychotherapy Networker, which asks whether we even need psychotherapy anymore. Mindfulness has hijacked therapy. Hospitals are falling all over themselves to offer Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction courses. Mindfulness vocabulary has infiltrated our universities and our corporate boardrooms, and even, it seems, our supermarkets (see mayo on left – thanks to writer David Chapman for the tip-off).

Now don’t get me wrong. I think this is a positive development. There’s a pile of research to support the clinical benefits of meditation in general and mindfulness in particular. Mindfulness decreases stress and anxiety and reactivity, and increases fulfillment and kindness and well-being. A recent paper in Science put it well: a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Any training that helps people be more clear and more present is a good thing. And yet … I worry about the mayonnaise. There’s a danger that in our sudden enthusiasm for all things mindful, the larger and more radical world of meditation practice will get reduced to a bland and eggy spread.

This is not the way of the Consciousness Explorer.

Yes, the pith helmet looks good – it looks very good, as does your wild and bushy mustache, which cannot be tamed. For the women I have in mind a hemp petticoat, 10-hole combat boots and set of silver throwing stars all tucked in a neat row along the inside of the leg. Of course, in these gender-remixed times, all combination of personal décor will work. One thing, however, is required for all Explorers: a tool belt.

The mayo is still there; call it tool number one, a big jar of it strapped to your hip and encrusted with dirt. You scoop it out with two fingers and use it to style your greasy hairdo. What else? An antique brass telescope, to boost sensory resolution. An elegant snap-on pacemaker, to encourage a softer heartbeat. A canister of Zen nitrous, to expand space (we used to call these whippits, back before we got spiritual). Japanese Koans tattooed along the forearm. A Vipassana vibrator. A single rotting finger – snipped from a corpse – hanging around your neck (Tantra, left-hand path). Several colourful Tibetan mandalas scrolled into a cylindrical leather map case. Jhana morphine jabs in case you get wounded. Chewing tobacco in your shaman’s pouch, maybe a little dried peyote. Couple cosmic chants – obviously passwords of some kind (what door will they open?). And of course, a full line of Karma Yoga Sunglasses ™, to help you adjust life’s moment-to-moment chromatic tint.

These are just some of the tools of the well-rounded Consciousness Explorer.

And now we arrive at the point of this malingering post. Throughout 2012, the Consciousness Explorers Club is getting scholastic. I’m teaching a meditation course that touches on many of the different tools mentioned above. The course is rigorous and friendly and pluralistic. The idea is to equip people with more than one meditation technique, as not only do situations and opportunities change, but people themselves have different abilities and interests. Classes are based on the Basic Mindfulness System of Buddhist teacher and scholar Shinzen Young, who knighted me with a machete a little while back, and has been downloading his diabolical genius into my impressionable noggin for the past 4 years. As he has taught me, I will endeavour to teach you.

Ten classes over ten weeks. Eight people max per class. Suitable for beginners who want to learn the basics, and for more experienced practitioners who want to expand their meditation repertoire. See bottom of the page for schedule, and top of page for my contact info.

The course features a mix of instruction and guided meditation, as well as a bit of historical and sometimes neurobiological context for the different techniques. My intention is to give people the tools to enhance their well-being, and also to increase people’s contemplative literacy without getting all culty and precious. There will be readings, some homework (the expectation is you try to maintain a short daily sitting practice) and support materials written by Shinzen and myself. The course ends with a half-day silent retreat, probably on a Sunday, followed by a drunken orgy – wait no that’s my Vajrayāna class, sorry.

The idea is to have fun, to give people a broader sense of the mysterious awesomeness of meditation, and – just like it says on the mayo jar – to help you get more equanimous and concentrated and friendly so you stop acting like such a shit. Meditation shows you that ordinary experience is actually extraordinary, and who couldn’t use a little of that spread on their ham sandwich?

Jeff
President, The Consciousness Explorers Club

TESTIMONIALS

I’ve spent most of my exterior life exploring my interior life, at least I thought that’s what I was doing until I took Jeff Warren’s course in Basic Mindfulness. Back in the old days when I was ‘exploring my interior life’ I basically looked like a guy staring out the window, apparently ‘lost in thought’. Thanks to Jeff Warren’s course I now know how to get ‘found in thought’. Jeff’s teaches the geography of mind. He showed us the way to our own personal light switches. All those years bumping around my interior world in the dark, what was I thinking? Turns out I wasn’t thinking, I was following the yipped commands of a mysterious entity I have come to call my interior border collie. (If I was Johnny Cash I’d write a song about that pesky critter and the way he has herded me along the rocky shores of life.) Jeff taught me how to scratch that restless, mutt’s belly until it rolls over and falls asleep. Suddenly my interior world falls silent. I switch on the light and start exploring what it means to be alive with eyes, ears and heart wide open. It’s so much easier to search when you know what you’re looking for. One word describes Jeff Warren’s calling: transformation. I’d follow him anywhere.”
– David Young, playwright

“I feel very lucky to have met Jeff Warren and to have taken his classes. He’s a smart, compassionate, learned guy. He’s all mind without pedantry, all spirit without flakiness. I went to his first class thinking, “Okay, this won’t work, but it’s a night out,” Right away, however, his intelligence and experience and eloquence—his person—won me over. I tried meditating in my twenties and again in my forties. It didn’t take…wrong teachers, wrong approach. And then I started suffering chronic back pain and couldn’t get relief. I’d given up hope. I was depressed. Now I’m optimistic. I’m still in pain; I just don’t suffer the way I did. Which is not to say that I’m a very good or even a very dedicated meditator…not yet, anyway. But my perspective has shifted. Who knew?.”
– Barbara Gowdy, writer

““The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.” Jeff Warren guides us across the river, the ice, the crevasse, the washed-out bridge—whatever we have put in our own way—to the other side. I always leave his sessions feeling more hopeful. To sit in a meditation group led by Jeff is to experience community at its gentlest and most powerful.”
- Marni Jackson, writer and journalist

“Jeff is a spectacular teacher. He is connected, brilliant, impassioned, funny and self-effacing. He overflows with enthusiasm for the subject matter. He listens intently to each person’s experiences in a real human way. Jeff’s mix of self-care and science is perfect for the skeptical minded cynic. His class has helped me recognize my internal voice, what I once considered reality. I am able to manage anxiety, not by avoiding it but by acknowledging it and allowing it to be. I am a more conscious, more self-aware person in a way that I didn’t even know was possible; the words used to mean something else. I feel more open to life’s vacillations. I feel the world, my body, my mind, more vividly, as a more unified troika.”
- Matt Beam, writer and photographer

“Jeff Warren is an exceptional teacher. He explains difficult, intangible subjects with razor clarity. His enthusiasm is contagious and never wanes – not for his subject or for his students, all of whom he treats with warmth, empathy and professionalism..”
- Roy Baskind, neurologist

“This is your brain on Jeff.”
Jeff Warren brings eloquence, wit, sensitivity and breathtaking knowledge about neuroscience to his meditation classes, making them as fascinating for your average neurotic urban intellectual as they are edifying. Not to be missed!”
- Patricia Pearson, writer and journalist

“With insight, humour and compassion, Jeff Warren opened my eyes to a long-neglected side of myself. A spiritual side. There are no new-agey, feel-good platitudes in his class. Jeff focuses on the heightened sensitivity that comes with paying attention, on helping his students see the world as it really is. In doing so, he opened a new and different world to me – and a life more richly lived. Go to his class if you want to dig beneath the surface. In Jeff you will find a brilliant and sensitive guide.”
- Alexandra Shimo, journalist

In the coming months, I will assemble some my favourites below. The idea is to continue adding to the list and, I hope, begin to create a unique and helpful resource for people everywhere. Each entry will describe when the technique can be used, what the effect is, a bit of context, and step-by-step instructions. I plan to include practices from many mystical and therapeutic traditions. There will be classic Buddhist absorption practices, karma yoga practices, heart-opening techniques, powerful self-dissolving insight practices, non-dual style inquiries, shamanic nature practices, different psychotherapy and hypnosis practices, dream practices, tricks and techniques for cultivating creativity, Christian centering prayers, Western Magick practices and on and on. I will only include practices I personally have experimented with and found interesting or useful.

Feel free to send me your own ideas.

Happy Exploring.

Jeff
President, The Consciousness Explorers Club

So: we meet Monday nights in Kensington Market, from 7:45 – 9:30pm. The sit itself is 45 minutes (from 8 – 8:45pm), afterwards we hang out and talk about life, the universe and everything (my friend Mary calls this part of the evening “Collective Wonderment”). Although I guide most of the sits, the space is guru-free; anyone can suggest and lead a technique. The idea is to continuously experiment with different meditations, from restful absorption to creative visualizations, mindfulness-style noting, loving-kindness, sound meditations, self-inquiry and many others. You don’t need to follow any of these techniques if you don’t want to – some people prefer to stay with their tried-and-true regular practice.

The CEC is passionately nonsectarian – both secular and contemplative traditions are represented. That said, we do have a patron saint and uber-meditation consultant: the pan-Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young, who was at the CEC last November and knighted myself and Secretary of Secretaries James Maskalyk with a machete, click.

If you are interested in joining, send an email to jeff at jeffwarren dot org and I’ll add you to the weekly sit mail-out.

Jeff
President, The Consciousness Explorers Club

For reviews of my writing, click here.

I have these testimonials because I also work as a professional creative consultant, which you can read about here if you’re curious.

“I have worked with many freelance contributors to Ideas during my career. Working with Jeff was one of the best experiences I have ever had. His skills in script writing and his sense of documentary composition are impeccable. He’s a real talent. Jeff has a brilliant, curious and restless mind. He is an adventurer and an explorer. He is deeply committed to exploring and popularizing ideas.”
-Bernie Lucht, Executive Producer of CBC Radio’s Ideas and Tapestry

“Jeff Warren is one of the most interesting thinkers going. That would be enough for most people, but not Jeff, who combines his deep idea-sowing with great ability as a storyteller. Few writers of narrative nonfiction can present complicated ideas more accessibly. He cuts through scholarly jargon like a razor, baring the truth. Use his rare talents while you have the chance.”
- John Geiger, Editorial Board Editor at The Globe and Mail, author of Frozen in Time and The Third Man Factor.

“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; former editor Walrus magazine; author of The Mother Zone and Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign.

“Jeff Warren doesn’t think straight. Turns out, that’s a really, really good thing. He comes at ideas like a heat-seeking missile, dodging obstacles and heading directly for the warm, beating heart of the issue. If you’ve read his work, you already know that he’s practically reinvented science writing as an intensely personal, ever-shifting dramedy. If a little of that Warren magic rubs off on your own ideas – and indeed, it shall – you’re already winning the battle against flabby, out-of-shape, slovenly conceptual thinking. Use him.”
- Richard Poplak, author of The Sheikh’s Batmobile and Ja, No, Man and Kenk: A Graphic Portrait.

“I’ve worked with Jeff on several film projects now and he never ceases to impress me with his ability rip through complicated material and synthesize it into something accessible and magnetically interesting. Although his personal writing style is entirely original, he can adapt it to any medium or approach with apparent ease. Jeff has the improvisational skills of an expert jazz musician and the patience of a Buddhist monk. He can latch onto your inspiration and turbo boost it to new levels. I can say with the utmost sincerity that I wish I could install a Jeff Warren chip in my brain.”
-Adam Gray, ParaDocs Productions.

“I spoke with Jeff regularly during the original conception of my book, the development of the proposal, and then while writing the rough draft. Not only had he been through all these hoops before and thus could offer first hand experience, but his unparalleled brainstorming abilities and capacity for thinking laterally across all fields of arts and sciences helped me widen the scope of what my project could be. Which in turn, was invaluable in helping me choose the direction I wanted it to go. Hire Jeff. And bring a tape recorder. He talks fast when excited, and he’s usually excited.”
-Micah Toub, Globe and Mail columnist, author of Growing up Jung.

“When I started The Current, Jeff was one of the first hires, and one of the best. He constantly brought innovation to the program. He could be a journalist without being confined by the tropes of journalism. His creativity was one of the keys to the show’s success. Jeff is always curious, never quite satisfied with convention, and a pleasure to be around.”
-Jamie Purdon, Director of Newsgathering CBC Radio, former executive producer The Current

“I hired Jeff to do a manuscript evaluation for a book I am working on. He broke it down into digestible bits, creating an easy-to-follow system that highlighted exactly where and how to improve my manuscript. He also wrote an encouraging summary to guide the overall development of my project and my writing. During the research phase, Jeff also checked out my website to get a better idea of what I’m about. He saw that needed help, too. So he ended up rewriting my homepage and reworking the content and structure to be more explicitly about service. There is no question that visitors now have a far better understanding of what I’m offering and what I’m all about. Jeff has a keen ability to see the larger picture and zero in on exactly where and how to reshape whatever you are working on to make it better.”
- Stephen D’Amico, author of Heaven On Earth: A Guide to Enlightenment and a new autobiography, Tracing Back the Witness, available soon.

“Jeff is the first person I go to when I need encouragement or guidance with something I am working on. He has an almost supernatural ability to reveal the latent possibilities of a project, however developed it might be, and the intellectual rigor and imagination to see how it can actually happen. Talking to Jeff, I am always struck, not only by his eloquence, but by the agility and incisiveness of his mind. Forget about “creative consultant.” The man is a tempest of creativity and his energy will carry you further than you’d imagined you could go.”
- Erik Rutherford, founder Ryeberg.com

“Jeff is a one man-brainstorming partner. If you feel stuck, or want to move an idea along, Jeff can be of great assistance. His mind sizzles; he has mental verve and energy. He also is able to play Mr. Big Picture: he sees where you’re going and he helps guide your thoughts into a larger context. When you meet Jeff, you can’t help flipping ideas about like mental flapjacks. Working with him is not only useful– it’s downright fun.”
- Richard Handler, producer, CBC Radio Ideas; “Ideas guy” columnist, CBCNEWS.ca

“Jeff Warren has proven to be a valuable source of inspiration for me as I write my current book. He is a highly creative thinker and has the gift of being able to express and detail exactly what writing techniques and styles will improve a work. Because Jeff is both intelligent and intuitive, his comments are deep, authentic and enormously helpful for a writer seeking a broad audience. I highly recommend Jeff as someone who can expertly assess creative ideas, writing style, technique and fluidity. He has the ability to get an idea that is in your head on to paper, with success.”
-Mary Paterson, author of the forthcoming The Greening of the Soul.

“When making professional decisions, it’s great to be able to talk to someone who understands both the publishing and journalism worlds intimately. In addition to his own book writing, Jeff worked as an editor at the London-based Dorling Kindersley, and as a producer for Canada’s leading current affairs radio show, The Current. He has an amazing idea-brain, and is consistently able to generate new angles, connections and solutions. In my own work he has helped me recast the familiar into something fresh and original. I recommend Jeff to anyone looking for a creative catalyst.”
- Alexandra Shimo, journalist, author of The Environment Equation, former editor at Maclean’s.

“Talking to Jeff, like reading his work, is always a rewarding experience, and particularly if you’ve reached a point of confusion in something you’re working on. Ideas bubble up, both during the conversation and later on, and the right kind of excitement is generated — meaning the useful kind, the kind that gets you re-energized, helps you collect scattered thoughts, and then lets you switch yourself back onto the right track.”
- Tony Hiss, author of In Motion: The Experience of Travel and The Experience of Place

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The official name of Shinzen’s talk was ‘Divide and Conquer: How the Essence of Mindfulness Parallels the Nuts and Bolts of Science.‘ He delivered it to a packed University of Toronto auditorium on November 29th, 2010, just after we got back from one of his Niagara Falls meditation retreats. Part one is a pretty thorough breakdown of his mindfulness approach; part two he gets into why it matters, a bit of science, and some interesting speculation on the future of Enlightenment. I think it must have been one of the first times a teacher has spoken so openly about the dynamics of nondual consciousness (something most people don’t even realize exists) in an academic forum. So I was pretty psyched about that. The fellow introducing Shinzen and I is Dr. Tony Toneatto, Director of the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health Program at the University of Toronto.

Shinzen’s model of mind – partly influenced by his teacher, the great Sasaki Roshi - is both rigorous and sublime. But it’s nothing compared to the actual feedback he gives you on meditation retreats. I realized at one point that Shinzen has essentially created a comprehensive and customizable set of algorithms for delivering mass Realization – it’s bananas. Although he doesn’t get into it in this talk, Shinzen has spent the past 17 years working with a professional programmer on a free automated online platform for mindfulness slash self-realization training, to be launched late 2011 / 2012. Mindfulness 2.0 indeed.

Here is how I introduced him:

Most of the time, when we talk about science and spirituality in our culture, we speak of them as two very different domains – “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once put it. Science is over here – the world of observed facts. And spirit is over here – the world of created meaning and values.

For many years this is certainly how it was for me personally – they were like two languages. I spoke science with my science friends, and I spoke spirit with my spirit friends. I hardly ever mixed them – not unless I wanted to get shivved in a gang rumble. Because the sad truth is these two groups don’t exactly get along – there is a long tradition of mutual disdain and animosity and, if you go back far enough, straight-up burning at the stake.

Things are marginally better these days, but even in civilized conversation the spiritual people accuse scientists of being robotically-neutered information processors, and scientists write off spiritualists as flakey New Agers with poofy Vidal Sassoon hairdos. And ne’re the twain shall meet.

That’s where our speaker tonight – Shinzen Young – comes in. He has no hairdo. He also happens to work within a space where these two Magisteria do overlap, the Venn Diagram of science and spirit known as ‘direct experience.’ Shinzen Young is an Enlightened super-geek with a mind like a high-resolution electron microscope. I do not exaggerate when I say that this man has seen more deeply into the depths of human consciousness than almost anyone else on the planet.

So: that’s quite a claim. Who is this guy exactly?

Well – he’s a Buddhist. But not your garden variety. More accurate to call him a panorama contemplative. Born in Los Angeles in the 1940s, Shinzen became interested in Asian culture very early on, a trajectory that led him to pursue PhD research in Japan. But things didn’t exactly work out as expected – Shinzen never finished his PhD. Instead he entered a long period of monastic training in each of the three major Buddhist meditative traditions: Vajrayana, Zen, and Vipassana. He became a participatory scholar of religion, and set out to experience first-hand the full range of contemplative practices, from Native American shamanic ordeals to Christian prayer to various aspects of the Jewish Kaballah. That’s the spirit side. On the science side, Shinzen got interested in the history of science and technology, and at one point actually taught university-level mathematics.

Since returning to the West, Shinzen has become one of North America’s most respected and pioneering meditation teachers. He has spent the past 20 years developing a rigorous system of mindfulness training that goes a lot further than most of the mindfulness stress reduction programs so popular today.

This is Mindfulness 2.0 – the next generation. Shinzen’s explicit goal for his many students is nothing less than full-blown Enlightenment – which, it turns out, is very real. I am talking about a profound rewiring of the human mind, a figure-ground reversal where thought and emotion no longer belong to you, but rather, are directly experienced as the expression of a vibrating and undulating universe, expanding and contracting like a huge formless lung.

The language is, well, mind-blowing. “Industrial strength spirituality,” in Shinzen’s words. But that’s what happens when you take the Cosmic Perspective.

I believe this kind of understanding is the most important we can develop. It points the way to a profound reduction not of human pain, but of human suffering, which, as Shinzen will tell you, is a different matter. He has a famous equation: Suffering = Pain x Resistance. You cannot eliminate hurt and pain in this life – nor would you want to, it is part, after all, of the rich spectrum of human experience. But, as unlikely as it may sound to those from outside contemplative traditions, you can, over time, dramatically change your response to that pain, and thus free yourself to experience a more spacious and nuanced and ultimately thrilling present. As Shinzen’s favourite poet TS Eliot wrote in ‘Four Quartets,’ “Only through time is time conquered.”

Here to help us understand what Eliot meant is my teacher, Shinzen Young.

For more information on Shinzen, check out his Basic Mindfulness website, and his terrific Expand-Contract YouTube Channel.

In 2007 I spent 3 months traveling around California talking to various thinkers about the mind. Neurobiologists, developmental psychologists, philosophers, mystics and … Huston Smith, peerless perennialist. The CBC Radio show Tapestry heard about my trip and asked me to play a few excerpts. Here they are.

Shows was first broadcast Jan 17th, 2010.

Reviewed here: The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, by Frans de Waal; The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals, by Charles Siebert

“The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want.” So writes eminent primatologist Frans de Waal about a third of the way into his latest, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. As nature readers go, de Waal is among the most accomplished. He has spent the better part of 30 years studying chimpanzees and bonobos, sometimes in the wild, but mostly in his capacity as director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Ga.

And what a sobering education the apes have given him. For six books, de Waal has chronicled their scheming and their turf battles, their amazing problem-solving abilities and sexual politics. From the start, it has been clear to de Waal that the apes represent a kind of proto-human society, with many of our same patterns and preoccupations. These days, there is nothing controversial about this view; it’s trotted out by pundits and newspaper columnists at every opportunity, all of them enthralled by evolutionary psychology – the idea that all of human nature can be explained by adaptive responses formed on the prehistoric savannah – as a kind of arch-explanatory paradigm. If we want to understand ourselves, the thinking goes, then look to our ape ancestors, who exhibit many of the same traits in more elemental form.

De Waal is very much with this program, and he is an astute enough cultural commentator to recognize how the specific details of this narrative influence politics and society. If you believe that humans are fundamentally competitive and selfish – “nature red in tooth and claw,” the body a teaming aggregate of “selfish genes” scrambling over each other to maximize individual profit – then perhaps you let the free markets rule the day. “Can’t fight nature,” shrugs the conservative.

But if you believe humans are by nature altruistic and conciliatory, then perhaps you organize society in a more socially responsible mode, with an emphasis on collective interests.

This, finally, is the news – the very good news – from de Waal’s book: Yes, like our ape ancestors, humans are “incentive-driven animals, focused on status, territory and food security.” But we are also group animals, sensitive to injustice, highly co-operative and sympathetic. We are, in short, both Canadian and American. And so are the apes. And off we go, into the new age of empathy, in what is for the most part an enjoyable tour through a kinder and gentler animal kingdom.

De Waal is an excellent tour guide, refreshingly literate outside his field, deft at stitching bits of philosophy and anthropology into the narrative. He is also pleasingly opinionated; he seems to have columnist aspirations of his own, and his frequent – usually thoughtful and balanced, occasionally facile – digressions on morality and U.S. politics read like boilerplate New York Times editorials.

Empathy, de Waal says, is one of our most innate capacities, one that likely evolved from mammalian parental care. It begins in the body, a deep unconscious synchrony between mother and child that sets the tone for so many mammalian interactions. When someone smiles, we smile; when they yawn, we yawn; emotion is contagious.

The effects of this can be profound; at one point, de Waal describes some research on long-term married couples, who, studies have apparently shown, do come to resemble each other over time. It is as if they “internalize” one another, de Waal writes, the constant synchronization of facial expression and mood slowly morphing two into one.

And chimps, too, feel this contagion – apes ape. They mirror and they console, they grieve and they co-operate, they hold to principles of fairness beyond personal gain. And more besides. De Waal is thorough in his documentation, sometimes too thorough: The second half of the book reads at times like a social scientist’s checklist of category-fulfilling anecdotes.

He makes up for it in his final chapter, which presents a rich and multilayered model of empathy. Like a Russian doll, simple body-to-body “state matching” is contained within a larger concern for others, and this in turn is contained within the imaginative ability to take on another’s perspective. As humans, this may be our greatest gift, though, as de Waal demonstrates, perhaps not ours alone.

If de Waal only points us toward this intriguing and still mysterious perspective-taking capacity, journalist Charles Siebert – also a poet, and thus perhaps more willing to take literary risks – takes us further. In his Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals, Siebert tries to go in – through the eye, directly into the “deep-brown, druggy swirl” of a chimp’s steady gaze.

The chimp in question is Roger, former circus performer and now resident of the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla. Siebert meets Roger one afternoon while touring the rehabilitation facilities. The author, we learn, is “uncommonly attuned” to chimp vibrations; several encounters with chimps in the past have left deep impressions on him, and Roger himself seems to recognize in Siebert something familiar. They become acquainted, as it were, and Siebert decides one night to hold a vigil in front of Roger’s cage, for eight hours sitting face to face with his “primatological doppelganger,” wondering at Roger’s almost-humanness and his own forsaken animality, locked together into a strange communion, “like two primates,” Siebert writes, “passing in the night.”

This single encounter is the primary narrative thread of the book, and if at first the device feels a bit contrived, it eventually pays off – indeed, after returning again and again to Roger looking out from his enclosure, his long fluttering hands, the tight whorls in his facial hair, something unexpected beings to happen.

Not unlike de Waal’s “internalization,” these moment-by-moment descriptions create a present-ness with Roger that is rare in the literature. It goes, finally, beyond anecdote, because Roger isn’t actually doing anything clever, or primal, or even interesting. He’s just being. How weird, we come to realize – how completely astonishing, in fact, his being actually is. And so we are taken out of ourselves, into a gently expanded community of nature.

If Roger is an avatar of suffering at human hands, he also represents something new: a “humanzee,” in Siebert’s language, one of several thousand exiles from the wild, domesticated (in Hollywood studios and traveling circuses and roadside zoos) just enough to be estranged from their heritage and then abandoned in an inhospitable limbo state somewhere between animal and man. Siebert tells the stories of other humanzees, sometimes pulpish and bizarre, as in Stalin’s dreams of a Red Army of human-ape hybrids, sometimes heartbreaking, as in the story of a young female chimp raised as human and then returned to the forest.

The writing is terrific, breezy and good-natured, with just the right amount of controlled outrage. The book’s emotional centre is about elephants, not chimps, an almost biblical parable of “wholesale psychological and cultural collapse” that Seibert first told in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. Their parents slaughtered before their eyes, and bereft of parental guidance, a generation of young African and Indian elephants are wreaking havoc on the countryside, trampling huts, goring villagers, even – in an act of human-like perversity that’s as revealing as anything else – raping and killing rhinos.

The wild isn’t just in revolt; it’s suffering full-blown PTSD. This is the judgment of Uganda-born animal ethologist Eve Abe, who noticed the similarities between the rogue elephant teenagers and the hollow-eyed child soldiers of her village, who often witnessed their own parents slaughtered and grew up in horrific conditions.

Like humans, sensitive elephants depend on a web of familial and social relations for orientation and guidance. Without it, they unhinge. They are animals, in Siebert’s memorable phrase, with “minds enough to lose.”

The Wauchula Woods Accord is an animal manifesto, a plea to see our wild cousins as integral parts of ourselves. With the world’s remaining wilderness frontiers collapsing, this recognition can’t come soon enough. “They have no future without us, the chimps, the elephant, the whales and the rest. None. The question that we, the keepers, are facing is whether we’d mind a future without them … whether we’d be bothered by an Earth with no living vestiges of our own differently shaped selves.”

Made for CBC radio’s Tapestry, this half-hour doc profiles some neo-Jungian ideas of poet and author Rodger Kamenetz from his book The History of Last Night’s Dream. Kamenetz believes that dreams, by showcasing our craven lusty anguished interiors, actually reveal our “authentic selves.” To add texture to his ideas, I managed to convince three writer pals to record on-the-scene descriptions of their own strange nocturnal effusions. Dreamy.

Shows was first broadcast Sept 7th, 2008.

Download the full PDF here: New Scientist piece

Mini video my friend Michael Corbiere (BrainCloud films) put together that highlights some early televisual tomfoolery. Clips from an interview I did at some TV station in Vancouver – gesturing wildly and looking freakishly excitable – and then some clips from my very first public appearance, the launch of The Head Trip at the Gladstone Hotel ballroom in Toronto.

Cultural critic and all-purpose rogue scholar Erik Davis – whose website Techgnosis has piles of his excellent writing – interviewed me recently for his Progressive Radio Network show “Expanding Mind.” Fun talk, including riffs on hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, scientific vs spiritual knowledge, the role of science journalists in describing the nature of reality, how ocean may shapes mind, psychedelics and more.

My friend Jennifer Dumpert has a really interesting practice around dreaming. When she has a memorable dream she wakes up and walks out of her San Francisco pad and then looks for some evocative place in the city to embed the dream. Maybe it’s the slope of a particular awning over an old storefront, or a particularly vivid red stop sign. She embeds dream details into the psychogeography, and then takes pictures of the scene so she remembers where she put the dream. She’s done this for years. Now when she walks around the city it’s hectic with dream information, two worlds overlapping in all kinds of unexpected ways. You can read more about her project here: www.urbandreamscape.com

Anyway, Jennifer is a professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, where she teaches a course on dreaming. She uses Head Trip as a text book. This is a short video interview I did for her class.

Download Ocean Mind TwoSheet

The hypnagogic is the ultimate paradigm-busting tool. As your brain slips into an associative, impressionistic state, it is no longer bound by conventional wisdom. Saucy ideas – impossible within a certain rational framework – clamour for attention. Images become metaphors for concepts, and suddenly everyone is a poet. The thing to realize here is it’s not just associations of degree, but associations of kind. So in addition to making new factual and ideational links on the “rational” plane, you also get visual images linked to concepts, or mathematical formulas linked to sounds, or physical experiences linked to emotions. This cross-platform synaesthetic mixing is the primeval soup of creative thought, and while something similar may also be happening in regular dreaming, in this case there is a crucial difference: the waking state continues to wield influence in the hypnagogic; thought structures – although loose – maintain a bit of that cause-and-effect robustness. Thus dreamers are able, as another commentator has put it, “to critically evaluate images while they’re still before the eyes.”

I’ve experienced a bizarre phenomenon that seems emblematic of this state. Occasionally as I drift off to sleep I’ll find myself obsessively reviewing some mental image. It is almost always absurd—the cross section of a tennis shoe, for example—but it seems charged with significance. I’ll spend long minutes trying to qualify the shoe according to various bizarre criteria: the number of right angles, possible scientific names, political affiliations, cool handshakes. Then I’ll pass out in defeat. It’s as if as soon as I hit the tunnel of sleep, select mental arrays or structures from waking—like sturdy cargo trains—stay activated, but the freight itself is swapped for some absurd new cargo.

The cargo train metaphor is a useful way to think about associative thinking. Cargo trains can be any kind of mental array or set of relationships: a social hierarchy, some political situation at work, or—as often happens in my case—some type of conceptual taxonomy. So to give a more elaborate example of the latter, let’s say my cargo train is a taxonomy of stone arches. There I am, awake, thinking about my system of stone arch classification—triangular arch, elliptical arch, lancet arch, and so on—all of them lined up in their proper order according to class and architectural style and whatever other technical aspects I have in my head, the whole exercise an almost automatic procedure on the part of the ever-classifying rational mind. Now as soon as that cargo train hits the tunnel of sleep onset, something peculiar happens. The orderly stone arch taxonomy remains, but suddenly the freight—the individual stone arches themselves—gets swapped for something new. So now it’s combinations of wallpaper patterns, or the faces of people I saw on the bus that day, all now arranged in a taxonomy built initially for stone arches. Which leads to absurd thoughts like trying to calculate the weight load of a particular swirl on the wallpaper next to my bed. This is a very literal example; the associative mind seems to substitute whole other classes of elements into these mental arrays. They may be emotions—feelings you have for some person, for example, now structured by stone arch style—or they may be random bits of sensory input—the smell of citrus, say, or the balled-up texture of sweater lint. Something to keep in mind the next time you find yourself obsessively classifying sweater lint as you drift off to sleep. You are not alone!

Providing you can find a worthier subject than the tennis shoe, all of this suggests that the hypnagogic is perfect for problem solving. The question is: how do you retrieve solutions when you are charging into sleep, the notorious memory-obliterator?

One answer can be found with the kingpin of problem-solvers, Thomas Edison. Edison’s mechanical mastery appeared to extend to his own body. He claimed to need very little in the way of sleep, but he was a champion napper, a state that in its first 20 minutes is almost pure hypnagogia. When Edison was stumped on a problem he would find a comfortable chair and settle into one of his naps. On the table in front of him he would place a pad of paper. In each hand he would grip a steel bearing, and on both sides of the chair he would deposit a tin plate. He would then sit back in his chair, dangle each hand over its respective plate, and doze off to sleep. As he began to drowse, one or both of the bearings would fall out of his hands and hit the tin plates, waking Edison with a start. And it was in that period of half-wake, half-sleep that many new ideas came to him. The falling bearing was the associative mind, racing away with the insoluble problem. The tin plate was the leash of waking consciousness. With a clank it would yank back unexpected connections for Edison to inspect and duly document in his notepad.

Salvador Dali apparently used a version of the same technique to prepare for his own creative exertions. He called it “slumber with a key”:

In order to make use of the slumber with a key you must seat yourself in a bony armchair, preferably of Spanish style, with your head tilted back and resting on the stretched leather back. Your two hands must hang beyond the arms of the chair…Your wrists must be held out in space and must have been previously lubricated with oil of aspic…In this posture, you must hold a heavy key which you will keep suspended, delicately pressed between the extremities of thumb and forefinger of your left hand. Under the key you will previously have placed a plate upside down on the floor. Having made these preparations, you will have merely to let yourself be progressively invaded by a serene afternoon sleep, like the spiritual drop of anisette of your soul rising in the cube of sugar of your body. The moment the key drops from your fingers, you may be sure that the noise of its fall on the upside-down plate will awaken you…

Finally, after some practice, I have developed my own personal technique. Although it has yet to revolutionize organic chemistry, or send Parisian art critics shrieking from the gallery, it is nevertheless a reliable way to come up with unexpected insights and associations. It can be used for naps or at night before going to bed. I begin by writing about my target subject, obsessively mulling over connections and meanings. You need to really prime those neural networks, get them (and you) all fired up. After half an hour or so of this I’ll lie down, try to empty my mind, and set the alarm for 20 minutes. Inevitably, as I start to drift away ideas begin to pop around me like soap bubbles. They’re always one track removed from my main preoccupation, like mental echoes from an adjoining dimension. I scribble the most interesting ones in a notebook, though there is always the danger that I will fall asleep first, and like a drowning swimmer drag the new ideas down with me to hopeless irretrievable depths. This is where the alarm comes in; it helps bring ideas back, though you have to document them quickly before they float off. The whole technique seems to work better if I’m in a good mood or am excited about the subject. If I’m bored or feeling indifferent, then the bubbles do not pop. They sputter and fizz and then they beep because that’s the alarm and the nap is over.

Of course, for every real insight there are dozens of lemons—this isn’t magic, it’s still your fallible human brain operating. I also had the idea of serializing The Head Trip as a comic, and for a tantalizing few minutes was absolutely convinced that the She-Hulk would make a great allegorical protagonist. My favourite story of bad dream ideas is an unnamed poet who wakes with what he imagines is a sublime verse. He scribbles it down and returns to sleep. When he wakes the next morning, he turns to look at the words, “which he doubted not would make his name immortal:”

Walker with one eye,
Walker with two,
Something to live for,
And nothing to do.

In the interests of readability and accessible, and due to my near-uncontrollable ADD, I have injected Head Trip with every imaginable graphical teaching device. Foremost among these are the “passport stamps,” which end every chapter, and summarize where – in the wide wide mind – the reader-voyager has just been. Each state of consciousness is like a place you can visit, a country with its own language and customs. So I ran with the metaphor. Here is one of 12 stamps. Ch-thunk, “next please.”

I love this drawing, with its explicit message that eight hours of “monophasic” or consolidated sleep – what we call a “good night’s sleep” in the West and consider a universal norm – is in fact only one option among many in the human (and cetacean) kingdom. Like the brain, real sleep is plastic – you can stretch it out, chop it up – it’s like silly putty. This figure appears in Head Trip’s Watch chapter, which is all about chronobiology and the secret history of segmented sleep. I write about 3 weeks spent in a remote cabin in the woods on an all-natural light program. My sleep patterns got all wiggy and – perfectly balanced between waking and dreaming – I was overcome by a violent tide of collective dream mythology, which lifted me up above the bed and then hurled me backwards through time and space like a 70s B-movie actor in a wind turbine. Then I ate a sandwich, and a single tear rolled down my cheek. I thought: ‘oh Aslan, thee were’t such a goodly kitty.’

Courtesy of the pioneering psychologist Stephen LaBerge, this is arguably one of the greatest scientific figs ever assembled by Man. It may not make much sense unless you know the full story, detailed in chapter 3 of my book, The Head Trip. But basically the fig describes one actual lucid dream and the subsequent eye-signaling that took place between the dreaming subject and his peers in the sleep lab, who watched the whole drama on the EEG and EOG computer screens. It is one of the first examples of real-time communication between two domains of consciousness. I think in a century from now the scientific “discovery” and subsequent validation of lucid dreaming will be considered one of the great unheralded discoveries of our age. Seriously. Part of a new era of investigation into the mind. “Isn’t lucid dreaming some kind of New Age thing?” Don’t be ridiculous. Let me spiel about why this matters to everyone.

We can start with the doubling of existence. We live in two realities. Two. Waking and dreaming. And yet we’re only capable of noticing one. This is because most of the time in dreams we’re on automatic, plus various memory processes are muted. This combination makes dreams powerfully forgettable. But it turns out you can learn to wake up in a dream with all your waking faculties intact: reason, memory, intentionality. They’re all there, booted up and ready to serve you, Dream Warrior, dream hairdo blowing in the dream wind like you’re in a Vidal Sassoon shampoo commercial. Look how magnificent you are! But I have become distracted. When you wake up in a dream with all these rational waking faculties – well, what happens is your understanding of reality immediately, and forever, explodes. That’s because you find you’re not in some washed out memory of a dream – you are moving in real time through a completely real-seeming virtual universe, paralyzed with shock, heart pounding in your chest, repeating to yourself

“holyshitholyshitholyshitIcan’tbelievethisishappening.”

Yes – it’s that mind-blowing so wake up and look for yourself. People ask me what lucid dreaming is like. Stop reading and look up from your computer – look around the room, at the walls, through the window. Touch the seat of your chair, feel the texture of the rug on the floor. That’s what lucid dreaming is like. It’s like waking reality. Period. At least it seems that way at first. But soon you begin to notice differences. As you begin to explore – again, this real place, with people and cars and shit – you begin to realize there are a set of universal experiential laws in this domain that are akin to the laws of physics in waking. And yet no one even knows they exist, including 99% of sleep scientists. This is the second time your mind-gasket gets blown. Because I’m not talking about some wimpy post-wakeup dream interpretation – the so-called “rules” of dreaming you get from reading dream symbol books or even from talking to a smart dream therapist. Most of these aren’t universal – they’re personal. But universal laws do exists. These have to do with the dream’s operating system, the structural rules that govern the movement of your dream body and why things get unstable and how expectations shape the scenes you find yourself in and on and on – real laws amenable to empirical investigation and peer-to-peer validation that anyone can take part in – that is, if they take the time to learn how to become lucid. Because you have to be lucid to really participate. Otherwise you’re only looking at dreams after the fact – which is a little like trying to learn about India by watching a TV program about it. Go to India! Smell the incense, buy a local dinner, get diarrhea. Everything else is hearsay.

Why do I think this is so important? Because it’s the other part of reality. Why did the explorers leave Europe? Because they had shit to learn, adventures to undertake, diseases to spread. The opportunity to conduct rational experiments in lucid dreaming has only just arrived – only the mystics made any use of it in the past, and we’re scared of mystics on account of how they threaten our worldview. But now scientists can – and a few actually are – get in on the action. Using agreed-upon patterns of eye-signals, people like the psychologist Stephen LaBerge pass messages back and forth from dreaming to waking – again, in real time. Him and his fellow investigators make reports. Their dream hairdos look awesome. They conduct experiments and publish them in peer-reviewed journals. Where are all the other scientists? The place should be packed with nerds and their dream slide-rules. Instead the whole subject is written off as a flaky epiphenomenon.

Who knows what we’ll find down there if we take the time to look carefully, mindfully, without assumptions. The boring unimaginative view of dreaming considers dreams solely the domain of you – you may be able to learn things about your own psychology, but that’s it. WRONG. You can learn plenty about your psychology, but you can also learn about the physics of mind more generally – this is mind in a pure culture, without sensory input to dilute everything. And then – and here is a completely heretical idea but one I think may be the bestest ponderschniffle I ever had – there is also the possibility that you can learn something about the external world too, which is distorted and reflected back into the dream in ways we’ve hardly begun to appreciate. Who knows what we’ll uncover as we plumb the transition zone between the internal and the external.

This is a new story, the beginning, in fact, of a new category. Dispatch the galleons!

Click HERE for a comic I made about this new adventure in the making.

“Now look toward me. As you hold your head in that position, look up toward your eyebrows—now, toward the top of your head. As you continue to look upward, close your eyes slowly. That’s right . . . close. Close. Close. Close.”

The key is keeping the eyes looking up as the lids go down. The amount of sclera (white) that shows — as weird and unlikely as this sounds –is a good indicator of innate hypnotic capacity. If your friend’s eyes go all white and zombie then they are very likely a good candidate for hypnosis and you should try and have sex with them immediately. If their eyes don’t budge they’re probably a boring skeptic with a rigid uncompromising worldview which makes me wonder why they are indulging your nerdy hypnosis fetish in the first place. Maybe they see some way of making money. I make these spurious conclusions, by the way, because, according to the inimitable Spiegel and Spiegel, it also so happens that a person’s innate hypnotic capacity is a decent indicator of their personality type. To generalize most grotesquely, people who are easily hypnotized are flaky artist actor types, “Dionysians” in the Spiegel scheme. On the other extreme you get the stiffs – “Apollonians” – the robot mechanists (see this article for more ponderation of this categorification). In between – where most people fall, including me -are the agonized “Odysseans”, fluctuating between tendencies, trapped between action and despair. None of this will make a lick of sense of you don’t check my book but what the hell I’m ranting here for free. Now go check your eyeballs and join your category.

Here is mine. It appears at the end of The Head Trip, originally spread over two facing pages. Unlike other maps of consciousness, its focus is the shifting experience of consciousness, that is, what dimensions best describe the way different states of consciousness feel? Below the fig you can read a long-winded explanation, which – if you are one percent of the population (ie, you’re a 40-year old male virgin into D and D), you will find thrilling – but if you are the other 99% (what’s it like?), you will want to jam a fork in your eye. Fortunately, this being the internet, you can always click away.

As always, the map is not the territory, but hopefully the map will get you thinking about the territory in new ways.

I realize the map – and the following description – may not make sense unless you’ve read The Head Trip; I include them both solely in the interest of expanding global consciousness using obscure hermeneutic systems of classification that no one will understand (we all have our own role to play).

So, the first thing to note is the fold that separates the two pages and the two sides of the diagram. This is the sensory dividing line between waking, on the left-hand side—where the mind is immersed in a model of the world built from sensory input—and sleeping, on the right-hand side—where the mind is immersed in a model of the world built from memory. These worlds get more vivid the farther out you move from the dividing line, which is why slow-wave sleep is tucked in close and REM sleep is way out at the edge.

As we’ve seen, the dividing line between waking and sleeping can be more than a little ambiguous, which is why I have labeled those areas closest to the center Dissociation Zones. So on the left inner side are waking states of consciousness that are tweaked by sleep or dreaming processes (trance, sleep paralysis); on the right inner side are sleeping states of consciousness that are tweaked by waking processes (sleepwalking, REM Behavioral Disorder). The hypnagogic and hypnopompic states are at the edge of their respective Dissociation Zones, with the former moving into sleep and the latter into waking. Although the Watch does skip back and forth into dreams, I characterize that state as more of a waking phenomenon, and thus it’s located on the left side of the spread.

The vertical axis refers to level of brain activation or energy in the system. Even when we’re slumbering peacefully, the brain is highly activated in REM sleep, which is why REM is at the top. Similarly, even though we may be sleepwalking through the neighbor’s backyard and thus our bodies are aroused, our brains are not—we’re actually deep in slow-wave sleep, and thus sleepwalking is at the bottom of the activation axis. A general principle to keep in mind is that the intensity of conscious experience depends a lot on activation; in fact, the former may be a function of the latter. There is also a link here to general arousal. And as we saw in the trance and meditation chapters, the more aroused we are, the greater our capacity for absorption, which is our next axis.

Absorption refers to how immersed we are in whatever we are experiencing, a kind of unself-conscious doing, as opposed to its opposite, the hyper-conscious mindfulness. Examples of the former are the prototypical REM dream and the absorbed end of the Zone, where we hurtle along on automatic, responding to changing conditions without a lot of rumination. At the other end of the scale is the alert clarity of both the lucid dream and the SMR, both of which I classify as species of mindfulness. These are flexible states in which attention can be directed out at the world (or, in the case of lucid dreaming, out at a memory model of the world) or inside to our own thought processes.

The horizontal axis, which does not extend into the two Dissociation Zones, requires a bit of explaining. It refers to orientation toward or focus on the external, on the one hand, or the internal, on the other. This is easy enough in waking: external focus is external focus (on the daffodils, the butterflies, our hairdos in the mirror), while internal focus happens when we’re daydreaming or lost in thought. The focus in sleeping is trickier, and not all internal, as one might suppose. Yes, it’s all happening in our minds, but it still makes sense to distinguish between two poles of orientation. In a normal REM dream we are externally focused in the sense that we are paying attention to the dream imagery and rushing along responding to new situations that, from the point of view of the dreamer, seem real. The opposite pole is slow-wave sleep, in which sleepers report fewer vivid dreams and more repetitive mentation. No fireworks here; the waking equivalent would be sitting on the sub¬way thinking about your laundry.

Finally, though I have a hard time showing it with my clumsy boxes, both sides of the map are supposed to taper at the high back-end because there are certain very deep states of absorption that can be reached only with relatively high brain activation. Here things get even more wildly speculative. At the very back, it no longer makes sense to even talk about the presence or absence of sensory input. Once you get into the meditative jhanas, both external and internal stimuli apparently fall away, and you get deeper and deeper into your own mind until finally you arrive at that big spooky sphere in the center: the Pure Conscious Event, or PCE. Here there is no content whatsoever, not even, paradoxically, your inquiring mind itself. (see footnote 1 at bottom)

So what do we notice then, about this map? The most important thing is that the sensory divide acts as a mirror, and each state of sleeping consciousness has its waking twin. This, for me, was a completely unexpected finding, one that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been suggested elsewhere, though it does fit more generally into Stephen LaBerge’s and neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas’s idea that dreaming and waking are equivalent states. By plotting all these states on a single map, I found no nighttime state that did not have a daytime equivalent and vice-versa; in their range of potential states, consciousness at night and consciousness during the day are almost identical (slow wave caveat to come). The primary nighttime difference is that changes of state are more rigidly demarcated, and the ballooning of memory fragments in a world without constraining sensory input (along with the activation of unconscious schemas and expectations) means we tend to forget the larger context in dreaming, and thus skip more credulously from moment to moment.

To get back to the map, then, one way to think of the slow wave is as a sleep version of the daydream—low activation, deep absorption, and internal focus. This hints at something else quite radical: on some level—barring a coma—we may always be conscious. Not “conscious” meaning aware of the external world, obviously, but “conscious” meaning mental content of some kind is skittering through our heads. This could be the wildest point in the entire book, buried in the Epilogue, but there you have it. Now, a note on the slow wave: the real experts of internal witnessing—the long-term meditators—report the slow wave is a state of “intense bliss,” like nothing else we experience. Add this to the conventional wisdom that during many slow wave wake-ups people have nothing whatsoever to report, and you end up with a pretty superficial resemblance to daydreaming. To really plot this state properly, I would need to blow right out of the 3D paradigm and lay down some mad fourth dimensional bliss/void axis. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a lot of sleep lab evidence points to some kind of mentation going on. It may be exactly like those times we zone out when we’re driving on the highway—we’re simply lost in low-intensity thought, oblivious to the outside world. This is hard enough to remember in waking, let alone in deep sleep, when we have to rise up four fathoms to make our report.

The typical REM dream, with its high activation, external focus, and deep absorption, I have paired with the more automatic side of the athlete’s Zone. In both states we are moving and responding to external “events”; self-consciousness is an interruption. The lucid dream is paired with the SMR or waking mindfulness; in a lucid dream, we’re able to pull away from the dream, to get some perspective and thus be less absorbed. In both states we can choose to pay attention to “external” events, or to our own internal thoughts—something I experienced firsthand with the NovaDreamer when I spent most of the dream sitting in a sturdy model of my bedroom wondering how this whole insane scenario was even possible. I should also say here that although in the text I have occasionally taken Alan Hobson’s lead and characterized lucid dreaming as a type of dissociation, I don’t actually think this is the most useful way to conceive of it. Certainly the man who has studied the phenomenon most, Stephen LaBerge, doesn’t think of it as a dissociation. LaBerge argues that lucid dreaming is simply a kind of mindful awareness—a very evolved and mature species of awareness—that we are capable of tapping into anytime. As we saw with the SMR, this can be every bit as hard to do in waking.

Finally, REM Behavioral Disorder (RBD) and sleep paralysis are like juiced-up versions of waking trance, all of them deeply absorbed and highly activated, but each with a dissociative foot in the other world. (In RBD the foot is literally in the other world in the form of uninhibited movement; with trance and sleep paralysis the otherworldly features are muscle paralysis and dream imagery or some other kind of dissociation.) Though low on the activation scale, sleepwalking too is a kind of trance—a little like the dull end of the Zone, where you’re moving on autopilot, barely awake, and barely tuned into the external world. So the Zone, then, is kind of over here too—a long, diagonal oblong running all the way through the daydream to low trance.

This taxonomic sloppiness highlights another important aspect of the map: it falls apart when you really examine it, because there is so much overlap every¬where. These balloons aren’t so much rigidly demarcated states of consciousness as they are extreme tendencies of consciousness. The reason there is no regular waking consciousness on this map is because there is no such thing as regular waking consciousness—consciousness is literally all over the map. Waking consciousness is constantly in flux. It’s a mixture of alert mindfulness, absorbed action, and distracted rumination, sometimes plunging deep into one of these tendencies, but more often an overlapping combination of all three. This will sound like common sense regarding waking consciousness, but as I have shown here, I believe this is also true of sleeping consciousness, though again, those same tendencies are more rigidly proscribed by cyclical changes happening in the brain (you can’t fake-out the deep, synchronized swells of delta sleep).

If it isn’t obvious already, I consider hypnosis, meditation, and neurofeedback to be induction tools that can all lead more or less to the same places. They are all methods that amplify certain tendencies within consciousness, in particular, our innate capacity for absorption and mindfulness, but also our capacity for dissociations. Each of these tools is capable of pushing at the limits of any one of the dimensions described on the map. Trance and SMR do not “belong” to hypnosis and neurofeedback respectively; they are simply that technique’s name for a state that can be accessed in many different ways. Trance simply means deep focal absorption; in hypnosis, this kind of absorption has been shown to tap into our natural suggestibility. I would guess that deeply absorbed meditation and neurofeedback subjects—whether you describe their journey as following the path of concentration or the path of alpha—are also deeply suggestible, something that would not be difficult to verify. There is also plenty of evidence to show that we don’t even need to be deeply absorbed to be open to suggestion. Hypnosis can also tap into very alert and externally directed states, as I experienced firsthand in Herbert Spiegel’s Manhattan office. Suggestibility may simply be—as Spiegel suggests—a phenomenon independent of noticeable state changes.

The practice of meditation has the greatest range and depth of experience because it has two and a half thousand years of history and hundreds of thousands if not millions of practitioners, many of whom practice the techniques for ten hours a day for their entire lives. There really should be a whole other map for the meditative experience, except of course it can’t really be mapped. The states are so nuanced that they slip through the coarse weave of classification. Still, I hope someone will try.

What do you mean by the term “Wheel of Consciousness” in the title of your book?

The Wheel of Consciousness is my metaphor for some of the dramatic and dramatically strange ways our awareness changes through sleeping, dreaming and waking. Picture a wheel in the centre, folded, involuted. Around it is a jagged halo that represents the brain’s electrical activity. The wheel is the brain, it pushes up from below, changing the contour of consciousness from one moment to the next. The wheel is spun, in part, by our biological clocks, which move us through changing levels of alertness during the day and the various stages of sleep at night. It is a hardware model, and one of the things I discover on my adventures is this model is incomplete: the brain—at least the reductive modular view of the brain—is not enough. Because pushing down in the other direction is the mind itself, a still-mysterious top-down catalyst for all kinds of unusual special effects within awareness.

The thesis of my book is that consciousness is far more variegated and expansive that most of us realize. Waking, sleeping and dreaming are like three points of a huge triangular table, on whose surface we careen like billiard balls. Often these balls move automatically, little Newtonian machines in a cause-and-effect trance. But we’re capable of changing our course at any time, capable, in fact, of levitating right off the table and zinging into a much larger and stranger room. There is nothing religious about this – these things are available for anyone to experience, and neurobiology is beginning to provide a loose sort of explanatory framework.

The Head Trip is about what happens when you investigate consciousness from experience forward, instead of—in the style of the vast majority of consciousness books—theory back. My experiences—my adventures—take me all over the world, from lucid dreaming workshops to meditation retreats, neurofeedback clinics, sleep laboratories, hypnotist chairs and more. I eventually realize that each of the twelve states of consciousness I profile has its own specialized brand of knowledge and insight. They have personal as well as scientific value, which should hardly be surprising, though it was for me, perhaps because, like so many of us, I have a tendency to think and act and live on automatic.

Are certain states of consciousness more “real” or “authentic” than others?

This is one of those simultaneously complex and simple questions that can be answered in one gnomic line (if you’re a mystic), one efficient paragraph (if you’re a scientist) or a rambling ten-volume treatise (if you’re a philosopher), to the dissatisfaction of everyone.

From the point of view of the subject, all experience is real, insofar as it is has a felt, experienced quality. Where it gets fascinating is the waking / dreaming distinction. When we fall asleep sensory input is removed and we move through a world simulation constructed from memory and experience. We call this The Dream. It feels perfectly real, has a vivid fully immersive quality that most of us don’t question—that is, unless we’re able to wake ourselves up inside the dream and conduct a proper lucid investigation. But that’s another matter.

In waking we tend to think The Dream vanishes, evaporates in daylight like morning dew on grass. But it doesn’t. The unsettling Matrix-esque truth here is that we all live in world-simulations, pretty much all of the time. The brain isn’t out in the world; it’s locked in a dark box in your head. Patterns of information ting against our senses and get routed into the brain for model assembly. One of the core insights of the science of perception is our models of the world are heavily interpreted—our own expectations and cultural mores and personal history shape “The Real,” so that in some ways our personal little submarines move through an ocean of our own making. This is The Dream, subtle but always there, seeping into our interiors, influencing the waking world in ways we are only beginning to appreciate.

One state of consciousness you describe in your book is called “The Watch.” What is it?

All of us wake up in the night, though these wake ups are usually so short we forget they ever happen. But sometimes they’re longer, in fact there is intriguing scientific and historical evidence which suggests that pre-Industrial Revolution the great majority of humankind may once have slept in a bi-modal sleep pattern, that is, we slept once in early evening, and then again in the early morning. In between we rose to a peculiar state of consciousness called the Watch. In the Watch high levels of prolactin circulate in the brain, thought by one scientist to contribute to a kind of meditative calm. If the state is celebrated and not simply endured it can be luxurious: we skip along the surface of sleep, bobbing back and forth between waking and dreaming, our waking thought informed my dreaming images, and our dream ideation shaped by waking concerns. It’s as if we are looking inside but also out, each state mixing into the other in all kinds of novel and wonderful ways.

You mention that its absence may explain the insignificance of mythology in our lives.

Yes, in the sense that dreams are a great oceanic source of mythology and fantasy. Imagine how it may once have been. Warm in our beds we wake from The Dream. The darkness provides a screen onto which we can project lingering images and scenarios. In this protected mid-night eddy, where few daytime concerns intrude, we turn the details of our dream over and over in our minds. We make new connections, we steep in emotional atmospheres. We slip back and forth between worlds. Dreams are the original teaching stories. But in 21st century life most people discount them. It’s a shame; like myths, they have much to tell us. Plus who couldn’t use a little more lounging in bed?

The chapter on lucid dreaming was fascinating. What is a lucid dream and how have scientists verified its existence?

When we think about our dreams they often have a washed-out, etiolated quality. But this is not what dreams are like—this is what our memories of dreams are like. Dreams when we’re actually in them are vivid and thrillingly real. The best vantage from which to see this is from the lucid dream, when we “wake up” inside a dream and recognize the manufactured nature of our dream surroundings. Ordinarily in dreams we race around like headless chickens, running from perceived threats, pleading with 10-ton bowls of porridge or whatever. The point is we don’t think very carefully about the larger – often absurd – context. In lucid dreaming we are better witnesses. Various waking capacities – self-consciousness, rationality, memory, agency – are back online, and we can wander through the dream interrogating dream characters, conducting experiments, whatever. Most people fly around looking for opportunities to have sex. I usually strike out in that regard, in fact my dream characters almost universally ignore me. Perhaps this is because I am disappointingly uncoordinated in my lucid dreams; I walk like a drunk, crashing into hedges and buildings, and when I try to fly I seize up like a voodoo doll, flip onto my back, and summersault helplessly while all around dream forces hum with oblique intent. Thus I have democratized the state for losers everywhere.

Still, the fun house quality of the mind at night is only part of its appeal; lucid dreaming also has scientific value. It is an unparalleled opportunity to examine some of the operating rules of consciousness—after all, there is no sensory input to overwhelm the normal mechanisms of attention. The sensory tide has receded; all kinds of psychological crustaceans lie revealed on the exposed stretch of beach, to use an admittedly weird and probably inappropriate metaphor. One of the things I most enjoyed about writing The Head Trip was trying to identify the psychological “laws” which govern the dream world, universal operating rules roughly equivalent to the laws of physics in waking.

The story of how sleep scientists verified lucid dreaming’s existence is fascinating and a little too involved to get into here. It involves moving eyeballs and crackling EEG machines and can be read about on dozens of dodgy websites. In fact lucid dreaming and altered states in general are paragons of internet knowledge. My book is a distillation of all that ephemera, filtered through the sensibilities of reliable investigators.

What is a “Pure Consciousness Event?”

Earlier I referred to waking, sleeping and dreaming as forming three corners of a huge triangle within which all non-drug induced alterations of consciousness take place. In fact, this is not quite right. In Indian philosophy there is reference to a “fourth state.” This is Pure Consciousness, a term coined by the Transcendental Meditators but one that applies to a common experience found in practically every meditative tradition and regularly visited by initiates.

It is a deeply mysterious state, more mysterious even than slow wave sleep. Science has very little to say on the matter, though it is beginning to take reports of Pure Consciousness seriously. Essentially a Pure Conscious Event is what happens when all the content of consciousness—all the thoughts and sensory input and emotions and whatever else – when all that recedes and you are left with an empty luminous void. To extend the beach metaphor I used above, first the sensory input waters recede, but then the beach itself recedes, it’s like a great mystical existential tide that sucks back all psychological matter so that the observing “I” is left floating in space. In fact even the observing “I” is gone, even space. It’s paradoxical and profound and of no help whatsoever if you’re trying to order a pizza.

Is it a realistic goal for us to direct our own states of consciousness?

Yes it is. The brain’s plasticity is thrilling. You can learn new mental habits and burn them into your cortex, you can reroute old neural grooves. Most of us fire down our neural luges like Jamaican bobsledders. We hug the track, we imagine (if we imagine at all) that our course is predetermined. But with a little practice you can fly right over the lip and set out on a new path. Fuck the judges! Meditation teaches you this, so does neurofeedback, and hypnosis and lucid dreaming. These are all techniques for self-regulation, tools for changing our experience of waking, dreaming and sleeping in ways that are profoundly hopeful and useful and cool and fun.

Of course you may drive yourself insane trying to get there, but that’s why we have teachers, and books—books like mine, to draw a road map and indicate the sharp turns and the many swamps and farmer’s fields into which one may crash one’s car, as I crashed mine, where in fact, my car is right now, idling but on its last drops of petrol, driver’s hands on the heat vent, eyes on the gathering darkness. Time to ditch the car and set out on foot; some of the best trips begin at night.

(Note: car crashes and roadmaps should not be confused with bobsled and luges, two different through perilously similar metaphors)

When Jane Jacobs died earlier this year, Canada—and the world—lost a passionate educator on the complexity of cities, on the local interactions and administrative minutia that keep them functioning and flourishing. Fortunately her spirit lives on, and one thinker in particular has taken her lessons to heart and begun applying them to an even broader range of scientific and cultural phenomena. He is the author Steven Johnson, and his fifth and most Jacobsian book to date is The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.

The Ghost Map is the story of a 1954 cholera outbreak in London, and two men—Dr. John Snow and the Reverend Henry Whitehead—who mapped the course of the virus and ultimately solved the mystery of its distribution. It is the first of Johnson’s books to feature an actual narrative, and the picture he paints of Victorian life and mood would do Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew proud. Johnson is particularly good at making the reader feel complicit in the sense of scientific discovery; he gives us all the pieces of the puzzle and then we join the two lead characters in assembling a larger picture.

The real protagonists in this book are the ideas. This is one of the primary pleasures of reading Johnson. He’s an ideas guy; in his capable hands the reader is moved from one entertaining and educational digression to another. The effect is something like a chatty, narrative-driven Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s hardly a field of human endeavor—from brain science to epidemiology, literary criticism to urban planning—that doesn’t get pressed into story telling service.

If Johnson’s technique is on occasion a bit pedantic (how much do we really need to know about the anti-bacterial properties of beer?), by the end a larger pattern emerges: the story of how a large and unwieldy network—Victorian London—ultimately bested its microbial foes, and in so doing became the world’s first truly sustainable mega-city. As Johnson is fond of illustrating, it was a conflict that played out on multiple scales: the microscopic and the local, the municipal and the global. He writes, “There is a lovely symmetry that comes from telling the story this way, because a city and a bacterium are each situated at the very extreme boundaries of the shapes that life takes on earth.”

This seems to be one of Johnson’s goals in writing this book: to explode our square-meter world views, and show how there are laws of organization operating at every power of 10—indeed, each of these levels is connected in ways we rarely appreciate. Johnson gets positively giddy pointing this out. He jumps from level to level, waving his arms, tearing the curtains off the machinery. The reader is kept in a state of delicious conceptual vertigo, shifting between images of swarming bacteria at one moment and “pulsing clusters” of human settlement patterns the next.

And what, finally, is the sum of Johnson’s networked vision? Like Jane Jacobs, Johnson is a lover of bottom-up organization, patterns that evolve from below—like neighborhoods, like John Snow’s map of London’s cholera outbreaks. For better or for worse, says Johnson, we are moving toward a high-density urban future. At the time of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak, less than 10% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today we’ve just tipped 50%, and that proportion is rising fast. Yes, big cities make big targets (for bombs, for microbes), but as Johnson argues, they also generate their own solutions, particularly if mechanisms are in place to extract street-level expertise.

It’s worth noting here that Johnson doesn’t offer this vision as writer and cultural commentator only. Johnson has played a part in many web-based enterprises over the years, from the defunct web-magazine Feed to the news filter Plastic. As The Ghost Map was released, he rolled out a new web-based collaboration from his Brooklyn home called ‘outside.in’ Outside.in is designed to consolidate all the diffuse bits of local neighborhood information floating around in the cyber wilderness. Fifty-one American cities (no Canadian ones yet), over 3000 neighborhoods and growing. Thus local residents can track everything from new restaurant openings to police reports to the latest neighborhood blog gossip. The information is there. We may all be John Snows in the 21st century.

The Dungeon turned out to be the perfect namesake – the bar was dark and narrow in parts, with sweaty brick walls and furtive patrons. Over tumblers of courtesy bourbon, our new friend told us that, although above ground, his bar was really for “basement types.” Basement types, he said, “lived below the water line.”

At the time I assumed the man was talking about underground culture or some other stylish scene of which I was oblivious, so I just nodded and kept drinking. But his words stayed with me, and over the years they’ve taken on a more existential – if literal – cast. Because now I think he was just talking about basements – the kind found under homes – and what it means to dwell in them.

Basement apartments – at least the ones in Toronto – do not have good reputations, despite attempts on the part of homeowners to sales-pitch their “spacious three-and-a-half’ conversion units. Spacious maybe, but not vertically – many are subterranean versions of the Lestercorp offices from the film Adaptation, with ceilings so low they only half-qualify as their own floor. You hunch your head like a troll and in the dark listen to obscure noises banging from above (not a bad analogy for how primitive man must have related to the gods). The air is damp. One friend spent 2 months in a basement apartment before succumbing to “toxic mold.” He said he felt like “some weird alien spore” was taking over his body and mind.

Something does take over your mind when you live in a basement. If the effect of grand open spaces – St. James Cathedral, Santiago Calatrava’s BCE place – is to make you feel open and expansive, then basements have the opposite effect: they turn you inwards, to the private meditations of poor grad students and recently divorced Dads. This doesn’t have to be oppressive. Basements are also intimate places, perfect for beds, and sleep, and protected confessions between lovers. I know a spiritual advisor who meets clients in her basement apartment. The closeness of the atmosphere provokes just the right combination of communion and introspection.

When I lived in a basement at the edge of Forest Hill I stopped taking my cues from the external world – from people, or sunlight. Instead I’d lie in the windowless dark and let my biological clock drift. I’d emerge blinking in the early afternoon, and, surrounded by mansions, often felt like a bum. My friend Scott says landlords treat you differently if you live underground – “they don’t believe you should be afforded the same consideration as people who have enough self-respect to insist upon living above ground,” he told me, “like you are basically a homeless person who accidentally ended up in their cellar.”

Basements are excellent for narrative immersion – for reading, for TV watching, even for writing. American author Jon Krakauer, for example, works in a nine-by-nine foot basement cubicle, with no windows to distract him from his inward diorama.

All of these things suggest living below the water line means nurturing internal cues. It’s the domain of dreams, the unconscious.

Of course, I might be exaggerating. Perhaps I’m out of touch – it’s true I’m writing this in an office filled with sunlight. But my bedroom, at least, is another matter. It’s dark and sheltered from the sun. The drapes are thick, the temperature kept cool. I’ve done everything I can to make it feel like a basement. What can I say? In some ways, even above ground, I’m still Dungeon people.

Jeff Warren is the author of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

Special to The Globe and Mail

SAN FRANCISCO — At the northern edge of San Francisco’s Mission district, where colourful Latino storefronts blend with used bookstores and hipster cafes, there is a place of great repute. It draws hungry patrons from across the city, indeed, from across the continent. For even in far-away Canada I can hear the siren song of Pancho Villa Taqueria and her most famous son — the burrito — object of adoration for the shoestring gourmet.

There is always a lineup at Pancho Villa, one of the largest taquerias in the Bay Area, though it moves quickly. On one side is a long counter, staffed by six or seven young Latinas. They are part of an efficient assembly line, and at their fingertips is a panoply of California treats that puts the sad Canadian burrito to shame.

Like many grotesquely large things, the modern burrito is an American invention. A pared-down version was imported into the southwestern United States from northern Mexico in the late 19th century. Made for ranchers and miners, it was portable protein, a piece of meat wrapped in a flour tortilla. They called it “little burro,” a tough little mule capable of carrying many ingredients, at first only meat, beans and a bit of rice. But in northern California the mule’s load doubled. Vegetal abundance met the American appetite and the result is a stunning self-contained food object with the size and heft of a WW2 artillery shell.

Though Pancho Villa serves all the usual Mexican suspects — enchiladas, tacos, quesadillas, flautas, tamales, chile rellenos — the burrito is the backbone of the business, and business is good.

Start with the “Super.” No point in coming all this way for a ladyfinger. First choice is the primary filling. This being California, there are, of course, tofu and veggie options. But I’m here to eat meat, which means carne asada (flame-broiled steak), barbecued chicken, chicken in a chile verde sauce, tongue and, my personal favourite, al pastor: Marinated barbecued pork. Then there are the beans: Pinto or black, whole or refried. The Super comes with all the trimmings: chunky guacamole, tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream, Monterey Jack cheese and, of course, salsa. Six kinds, reflecting freshness off the smooth stainless-steel bowls. More on salsa in a minute, there’s still one more choice to make: Will that be a flour, whole-wheat, spinach or red-chile tortilla? I go for the yuppie green one; that’s a wrap.

Assembly happens quickly, a blur of ladled browns, greens and reds. It’s time to order a refreshment. A chilled cerveza is a fine accompaniment, as are the many aguas frescas — watered-down fruit and cereal juices — from classics like horchata and tamarindo to strawberry, pineapple, melon, lime and sandia, a.k.a. watermelon.

At the cash register the attendant throws down the finished burrito, some grilles cebollitas (spring onions) and a complimentary scoop of tortilla chips. I drop the lot on one of the low tables and, hands shaking slightly, make my way to the altar, I mean salsa bar.

California is salsa heaven. Don’t even talk to me about Canadian “salsa,” that grim tomato-paste-cum-dipping-sauce with its generic veg-matter pellets and 10-year expiration date. Here in God’s country, the salsa aisle in the gourmet supermarket runs the length of the store. Mango, jicama, cucumber, avocado, fire-roasted: You can’t think of a single combination they haven’t. And the chips, as big as playing cards, are encrusted with sesame seeds and chunks of black bean.

Pancho Villa makes its own salsa, and for the past six years has blown the lid off the California State Fair Salsa Awards. The winning ribbons line the bar. Beneath, customers help themselves to salsa verde, pico de gallo, spicy Oaxaca, stone-ground molcajete and as many marinated radishes and fire-roasted chiles as they can wedge into the little plastic cups.

It takes about half an hour to eat a Super burrito, and the chips go on and on. Conversation is kept to a minimum. A well-moustachioed Pancho Villa looks down on the scene from a painting at the back. With his rearing steed and straps of ammo, the revolutionary looks furious, put out, perhaps, by his wayward children, who bailed on the old country in search of better wages, TV reception and, no doubt, burritos.

This is the place to thank them for it.

The Sassy Science Podcast (”Matter that Matters … and Anti-Matter too”) is put together by my pal, science journalist Sonya Buyting. All Sonya’s podcasts are terrific, with their adrenaline-fueled mix of breaking news and breaking beats. I spieled more than usual on this one on account of Sonya’s open disposition. Good overview of Head Trip and a few lurid extrapolations.

“Cities are plastic by nature. We mold them in our own images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them.”
–Jonathan Raban, Soft City

Where to start?

From 1999 to 2002 I lived in London, worked at Dorling Kindersley, and shared an office with a talented designer named Nigel Hayler. Both of us were obsessed with London – its history, art, architecture, but also where to loiter when you’re skint, where to find the most interesting textures, and how to position yourself at dusk so that the city’s most interesting interiors illuminated in front of you like stage sets. We eventually built what we called an “impressionist encyclopaedia” of London. The idea was to create an online forum for everyone’s subjective take on the city – artist, banker, hedonist, anarchist, curator, whatever. The conceptual highlight was a “Mood Palette” – 120 different moods arranged along a mind-body / positive – negative continuum, each capturing some flavor of experience, from “awestruck” to “surreal” to “sexy.” The site looked gorgeous and functioned beautifully, way ahead of its time.

Unfortunately, after 2 years of hard work – I wrote hundreds of pages on London and spent endless hours working out the site’s complex functionality with Nigel – just as we prepared to launch urbantherapy the dot com crash happened. We couldn’t find anyone to fund the thing, and we were too broke to continue. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

Walking around the city for months on end, peeling back its many onion skins, struggling to capture the shifting phenomenology of urban experience – it was the most fun I ever had and mentally primed me for Head Trip. I still love cities and plan to write a book one day about how cities affect the mind. I’ve posted a few screenshots from an old version of the site below.

“I have often amused myself with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium. A politician thinks of it merely as a seat of government in its different departments; a grazier, as a vast market for cattle; a mercantile man, as a place where a prodigious deal of business is done upon ‘Change; a dramatick enthusiast, as the grand scene of theatrical entertainments; a man of pleasure, as an assemblage of taverns, and the great emporium for ladies of easy virtue. But the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.”
–James Boswell, Journal

Homescreen:

Every listing had an image, location details, general reusable place text (black), and then special mood or obsession-specific text (blue) that could be constantly refreshed. Here is the first listing I wrote – part of a feature on tactile London.

Another listing, for those feeling reflective:

Jeff Warren’s The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness is far less psychedelic than its title might imply. Instead, Warren combines journalism from contemporary research into consciousness with first-hand reports of his own experiments with activities that range from lucid dreaming to meditation to a form of sleep called “the night watch.” He weaves all of this into a “psychological and neuroscientific and experiential story of how consciousness changes over twenty-four hours,” while stopping to attend to such “adventures” of consciousness as daydreams, the Zone, trances, and something called the Pure Consciousness Event. The result is a compelling first-person account of our daily-increasing knowledge of mental activity.

From Warren’s point of view, we need to think much more purposively about the relationship between mind and body, because it turns out that thoughts matter, and are not determined in any straightforward way by neurochemical activity: “consciousness exists in more wildly varied and abundant forms than simple waking, sleeping, and dreaming. By describing some of its different stations, I hope not only to give you some insight into the biological and psychological processes that underlie our changing experience of consciousness — to reveal, as it were, some of the operating rules of the Self — but also to show why this matters…[:] not only that we have far more agency over our changing mental states than most of us suspect, but also that each of these states taps into its own unique blend of knowledge and insight.”

Warren is an engaging field guide in these adventures, and The Head Trip will interest anyone curious about the black box of consciousness. In the interview below, he explains why “dreaming is bananas,” why we shouldn’t listen too seriously to the evolutionary psychologists’ Just-So stories, and why we should think more explicitly about our habits of mind.

What’s the origin of The Head Trip? From internal evidence, it seems to have been in the works for some time…

The genesis of The Head Trip was an accident I had at 21, when I fell out of a tree and busted my neck on a street in Montreal. The hardest part of the recovery was psychological; when I returned to my studies I found I couldn’t write essays the way I once could. My style of processing had changed. My thinking went from being very linear and progressive to more lateral and associative. I don’t know how much of this interpretation is a flabby split-brain gloss on a problem I had long ago, but I can say that at the time I knew nothing about neurobiology, I only knew I couldn’t direct my attention the way I once could; the mental objects I did retrieve were often two preoccupations over from my main concern. It was like fishing for trout and hooking clams. My roommate tells me I used to bawl at my desk and moan about leaving “my brains on the road.” Eventually I developed a technique of color-coding my notes by tangent, so that when I veered off into 10 different tangents a day at the end of the week I could still string all the, say, purple tangents together into something like a coherent theme.

After this transformation I became more attuned to inner experience. This was augmented by several years of tedious seasonal tree-planting work, where there was literally nothing to do for weeks on end but plant saplings, swat black flies and endure the shifting rhythms of my own shallow stream of consciousness. I became obsessed with how writers described the texture of everyday awareness, whether it was Edgar Allen Poe describing his sleep onset visions, David Foster Wallace on the fugue state of athletic absorption, or Annie Dillard talking about the unselfconscious moment. I began to collect these descriptions, with the vague idea that one day I would put together a taxonomy of elemental states of mind. A separate interest in the biological function of sleep led me into the fantastically variegated world of sleep and dreaming consciousness. In 2004 I started writing The Head Trip.

Its structure is also quite interesting: the longer chapters, plus trip notes, all interspersed with cartoonish illustrations and handy tables. How did you arrive at it?

Each stop on the wheel of consciousness has its own chapter, and every other stop is yoked to an actual adventure of some kind. I spent a long time trying to tease apart the different states, which in the scientific literature are all mashed together. The stages of sleep and dreaming are pretty straightforward; waking is more difficult because the differences are subtler. What’s the difference between the daydream and the zone? Between flow and the trance? Between alertness and different species of meditative absorption? And how do they relate to the sleeping states? Classifying all of these was immensely pleasurable, comparable — in reductive ecstasy — only to the “Consciousness Mixing Board” and “Phenomenological Map of Consciousness” visual figures near the end of the book. (The former a grouping of all consciousness “special effects,” the latter a depiction of how waking and sleeping states mirror one in another.)

A lot of these ideas are very abstract so wherever possible I tried to figure out some visual container for them — either a graphic metaphor in the text, or an actual illustration. In The Head Trip the comic panel is to the scientific figure what subjective experience is to objective brain science. Sloppy expressionist truant vs anal materialist authority. The book is supposed to be a bridge between these two worlds. Plus a comic-book theme runs though the entire narrative, which is essentially an X-ray of my own excitable and probably developmentally-delayed thought processes.

One of your key images is the “wheel of consciousness” (at least, that’s what it’s called in the illustrations and the title; early on you write that “the brain is a wheel, and consciousness is a pliant membrane pressed into the rim.”) I guess I have two questions about that wheel:

* To what extent is it metaphorical, and to what extent do you think it names something meaningful about the structure of mental experience?
* To what extent do you see your wheel as related to other famous wheels (medieval wheels of fortune, karmic wheels, etc.)?

It’s more than a metaphor. Changes in brain and changes in mind map onto one another. So when brain activity has dipped down to the big delta swells of slow wave sleep the corresponding experience is slack; subjects woken at this time have very little to report. Similarly, when waking alpha activity in the brain is desynchronized, there is often some furious mental processing going on. The neuroscientist Richard Davidson and his posse of researchers have reported that the higher the gamma activity in the brains of long-term meditators the greater the corresponding “luminosity” of consciousness. So the contour lines of the brain’s electrical activity seem, in a very general sense, to follow the contour lines of mental experience. Some of this, no doubt, is causal, but other times, if we’re honest, we can only say there is a reflection happening between these two domains. So, as an example, in the REM dream, is the fired-up amygdala causing the high emotional content, or is the mind — freed from sensory constraints and thus prone to rushing into narrative extremes — is the mind the real driver and we’re only seeing that emotional activity reflected in an agitated amygdala? That may sound like a heinously boring question, but experientially it actually makes for high adventure. Plus it gets into the whole deep mystery of existence thing.

The visual wheel is actually more inspired by Jessica Helfand’s collection of paper wheel charts in Reinventing the Wheel (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002) than the Buddhist Wheel of Life, though the Buddhist perspective definitely looms in the background and eventually makes a mangy appearance near the end of the narrative.

Is it fair to say that a chief point of the book is to displace the mind/body (or, psychology/chemistry) distinction? On the one hand, almost all the science you describe is pretty nascent; on the other hand, it also seems as if they tend to point quite clearly to a reciprocal relationship between thoughts and chemicals.

The chief point of the book is to re-empower the mind. The mind — in the form of expectations, beliefs and, most optimistically, intention — is a more-than-epiphenomenal driver of actual physical change in the body and brain. You can learn to create your own special effects. You have agency. As I write in the book, “this is both supremely hopeful and utterly depressing, since it means in nurturing, enlightened environments we may be able to cultivate whole new standards of mental health, but in violent, regressive environments we risk spawning awful new permutations of mental affliction. Technology — that great onrushing field within which our minds are shaped — compounds all of this, for better and for worse.”

As far as the actual relationship between mind and body, that, thankfully, is still a mystery, despite the exaggerated claims of the neuro-reductos, whom I love, and the exaggerated claims of the quantum mysticos, whom I love.

I guess the two other chief points of the book are: 1. to wake people up to the deliriously varied terrain of their nighttime lives, and 2. to help people look beyond black and white waking rationality, which turns out to be just one capacity on a very bright and colorful palette. Different states of consciousness seem to privilege different styles of knowledge.

There’s now a little mini-genre of writers opening their own brains up to the tools of modern neuroscience — your book, Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open, and Dennis Cass’s Head Case. What’s the appeal of subjecting oneself to these tools?

The scientist James Austin has a quote I like: “We will all be neurobiologists to some degree in the new millennium.” We’re all learning a new language, and I guess you could say these books are part of a new mythology. They’re teaching stories that dramatize our expanded understanding of the brain and self. That said, a lot of the neuro-imaging stuff is overrated, and the media’s obsession — and I am also guilty of this — our obsession with pairing aspects of human life with bits of the brain (“the God module” etc) can get ridiculous. That’s why I still like Freud. At least he could write, and he had a lot more to say about the richness and complexity of inner experience than, say, mirror neurons.

I can’t help but think of the 1890s, when Freud more or less invents/ discovers/conceives of psychoanalysis through his own self-analysis. It’s probably hard to write convincingly about mental experience without resorting to one’s own mind?

Our minds are the only first-order event we know; everything else — even other people’s reports of their mental experience — is secondary. So it always at least starts from your own experience. Plus, if your subject is the mind — and not just behavioral or brain activity — then you have to rely on first-person reports. There’s no other way. The question is how to do it rigorously. My own rigor is questionable, but then I’m a writer, not a scientist. The most precise approach I have come across is Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson’s new school of neurophenemenology, which essentially trashes the idea that the everyday mind has any kind of default psychological baseline.

It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect — and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about sleep?

I would like to spiel about dreaming for a moment if you don’t mind. The writer Rodger Kamenetz tipped me off to a great Borges quote. Borges once wrote: “Lately I’ve been rereading psychology books, and I have felt singularly defrauded. All of them discuss the mechanisms of dreams or the subjects of dreams, but they do not mention, as I had hoped, that which is so astonishing, so strange — the fact of dreaming.”

The fact of dreaming. When you wake up in a dream and actually take a look around — it’s bananas. It’s the absolute craziest goddamn thing in all of human life. Every night we beam down into an elaborate virtual world where we can pound the walls with our oven-mitt fists and sniff giant daisies and have elliptical conversations with archetypal bus drivers. From inside a dream there is nothing vague or washed out about the experience — dreams are totally real, as real as getting off the plane in Lagos and ordering a beer from some guy at the side of the road. You are at this place — you’re IN it! At the time it’s every bit as solid and real as waking. Except… and this is what’s so cool… except when you’re self-consciously aware inside the dream you can then squeeze up real close to the walls with your little magnifying glass and look for suture marks. You can conduct experiments. You come to realize that there is a set of laws operating in the dream world that is every bit as real as the laws of physics in the waking world. What are these laws? And why aren’t there as many scientists down here with their slide rules and theories as there are out there? We spend our lives in two worlds and yet we only pay attention to one of them — the other is seen as an embarrassing curiosity, a forum for banality-rehearsal and botched sex.

People protest: “but it’s not real, stop living in fantasy.” All experience is real. On the personal side, dreams reveal all kinds of junk about the self. On the scientific side, our dreams represent an unparalleled opportunity to examine the dynamics of consciousness. I mean think about it: without sensory input to dilute everything, you get consciousness in a pure culture. And it so happens that this pure culture — The Dream — runs like an underground creek beneath the waking world, muddying the ground in all kinds of interesting ways.

And that’s just the conventional science. Who knows what else we may discover digging around in the dream world. For those interested in the wooly world of mind-matter speculation, the epistemological rabbit hole goes very deep indeed.

This is going to sound hyperbolic but I really believe we’re at are at the dawn of a new age of scientific exploration. The external world is mapped; now the explorers are turning inward. The galleons have left port. They’re approaching a huge mysterious continent. They won’t be the first to arrive. There are paths already cut in the forest, where shamans and monks and others have set up outposts and launched their own expeditions into the interior.

It’s a thrilling story, a lurid epic in the making, and yet almost no one has any idea it’s happening.

As far as our misconceptions about sleep, I would say the biggest one is this idea that we lose consciousness when the lights go out. This couldn’t be further from the truth. At night consciousness just turns inside out. Instead of moving through a world constructed from sensory input, we move through a world constructed from memory and imagination. We do lose certain self-reflective properties, and — critically — our short-term memories are compromised so we don’t remember many of our experiences. But when you wake people up in the night most of them report some kind of mental activity — either the strange snap-shot narratives of sleep onset, the fully immersive dreams of REM, or the low-level “mentation” of deep sleep. Even in the emptiest bliss-saturated realms of slow wave sleep the experiencing self remains. Consciousness is 24-hours.

What surprised you the most about brains (or about your brain)?

It’s mind I find most surprising. RE: brains, I would say the most surprising thing I learned was about the role expectations — a big mind culprit — play not just in shaping experience but in actually provoking specific brain activity. This gets into the whole placebo thing which is also mind-boggling and revolutionary. My guess is placebo will be another big theme in the New World explorations described above.

Were there any cherished beliefs about brains (your brain) that you had to relinquish?

I guess my world-weary evolutionary psychology outlook — about the hardwired inevitability of our modular mental inheritances — that pretty much got blown out of the water while researching the book. Now I think the sociobiologists are the cavemen. More interesting than the evolutionary story, to me, is the fresher and more nuanced story of how our neuro-plastic brains interact with our mongrel-fantastic culture.

Except for one footnote, you largely avoid the question of drugs and altered consciousness, despite the prominent role these have played in the study of consciousness (Coleridge & de Quincey with their opium, Freud with cocaine, Burroughs with heroin, Leary with LSD, the Beats with speed and marijuana, the variety of drugs used in religious/spiritual rites, etc. etc.). Can you comment on what we might have to learn from these states?

I’m interested in drug-induced alternations of consciousness, but my feeling is they’re the really obvious shit. Too many “investigators of consciousness” overlook the fine-grained shifting texture of day-to-day consciousness. It’s the difference between the big budget Hollywood blockbuster and the art house Henry James adaptation. Drug-induced alterations of consciousness have great CGI — which is fine, I mean who doesn’t appreciate form constant explosions and DMT Machine Elves? — the problem is, character development sucks, or rather, the characters — and by characters I mean the objects of consciousness — tend to be cartoons. They’re exaggerated, that’s what psychedelics do — “non-specific amplifiers” Stanislav Grof calls them. They expand the whole topography of the mind. It’s possible more than this is going on but that’s another story.

This expansion can be valuable for understanding consciousness since it boosts the resolution of previously discreet mental dynamics. But cartoons, of course, are caricatures. If you watch only Jerry Bruckheimer movies you risk losing your ability to appreciate — and even notice — the subtleties and complexities of real life and consciousness, which, to circle back to my original metaphor, is more like a Henry James adaptation.

That’s a long way of saying to understand conscious experience, I think it helps to start from the more subtle naturally-occurring variations, and then work your way out.

Something else I’ve noticed about the hard-core psychonaut set: if you get too deep into the mind you can become convinced of anything. Certain psychedelics — ayahuasca, ibogaine, DMT, LSD — they’re like cannons, they can fire you so far that you can’t find your way back out again. People can become permanently disoriented, one basket filled with brilliant insights, one with grotesque delusions. It’s serious: the mind is both a reality-perceiving and an illusion-generating machine. So people confuse their metaphysics with their epistemology, to paraphrase the philosopher Jerry Fodor. Even great noetic qualities like profound truthfulness or “unity” are less consoling when you realize that they too may be on-demand effects generated by that murky combination of subjective beliefs and objective brain activity. This doesn’t negate the mystical or shamanic worldview, by the way, it just inserts it into a much more challenging context. And it means that when it comes to drugs, you better have a seasoned guide who knows what she’s doing otherwise you can lose your marbles.

Relatedly, in recent months there’s been a flurry of media attention about scientists/academics who take concentration aids to get their work done. Stories about rich kids using Ritalin, Adderall, and the like to gain an advantage on tests are also legion. These stories are controversial right now — do you see a movement toward embracing these chemical enhancements to consciousness? (Are there mental practices one might explore as an alternative?)

I would say chemical enhancements are only the beginning. Once market-driven technology gets deeper into the neurobiology we’ll see a whole suite of consciousness enhancing goods and services — from implants to interfaces — each engineered to tweak a different component of cognition. Just read the transhumanist literature, they’re delirious with Utopian plans, like Marxist social engineers crossed with high-tech entrepreneurs.

There are natural alternatives that help with concentration: a good sleep, for one. Meditation and mindfulness training had been use-tested for a few thousand years — it definitely improves calm focus. And as I discuss in my book, neurofeedback is a noninvasive technology that covers some of the same ground as meditation.

Have you altered your own habits/mental practices in any lasting way as a result of writing the book? Do you still try lucid dreaming, or have you taken up meditation, or reverted back to the “night watch” model of sleep?

I regularly take advantage of the hypnagogic state at sleep onset to work out creative problems — that’s become a fixture in my life. I do meditate, though I’m pretty erratic. When I meditate regularly I notice I’m calmer and I sleep better, but then I get caught up with life and the practice slides. I try to work on being mindful in general, to check when I’m obsessing or zoning out. But to be honest this is probably more driven by my nerdy curiosity about how the mind works than any kind of self-improvement program.

I’d love to lucid dream more often, it just takes work. You lose sleep, and there are various techniques you’re supposed to practice in waking when you could be doing, you know, normal waking things like everyone else on the planet. So as a result they really only happen spontaneously for me, though sometimes if I wake up in the night — to my favorite state of consciousness, the Watch — then I try to slip back into the dream I left, applying the most delicate pressure on the narrative, until the perspective switches and I’m no longer thinking about the scene, but am inside it, lucid and aware, and my heart beats forcefully in my chest, and I go explore.

“”Thanks for The Head Trip! You’ve invented and simultaneously mastered a wonderful new kind of hugely informative and meticulously rollicking science writing, and I can’t wait for your next book.”
-Tony Hiss, author of The Experience of Place

“I love your book!”
-Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and a large pile of inspiring etcetera.

“In The Head Trip, Jeff Warren takes readers on an audacious, enchanting, and often hilarious journey into the slippery nature of human consciousness, from deep slumber to lofty states of enlightenment. This book will blow your mind.”
-Sandra Blakeslee, New York Times science writer, co-author of On Intelligence and Phantoms in the Brain

“Thoroughly entertaining ….exhilarating ….You’ll never look at waking, sleeping or dreaming the same way again.”
-Doug Johnstone, The Independent [LINK]

“The best contemporary book on the psychology of consciousness.”
- Andre Kukla, University of Toronto professor emeritus, author of Mental Traps, Mind: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction, Studies in Scientific Realism and others.

“In The Head Trip, Warren plunges into mundane and exotic states of mind with the verve of an intrepid travel writer…Warren’s initial motivation, he confides, was that of an experience junkie. By availing his body and brain to sleep scientists, hypnotists, neurofeedback researchers and the like, he hoped to savor all the “special effects” the mind is capable of orchestrating. With prose full of humor and nuance – no small feat for a topic as vague and subjective as consciousness – he makes that enthusiasm absolutely infectious. Especially since these states of mind are available to anyone. In that sense, Head Trip almost reads like an Oliver Sacks essay turned inside out; instead of rare neurological cases, we get the standard-issue noggin, which turns out to be every bit as exotic.”
–Trey Popp, front page of San Francisco Chronicle Book Review [LINK]

“Jeff Warren … is my kinda guy: an experiential pragmatist in the William Jamesian mode, he is restlessly eclectic, deeply informed but pop, aggressively open to (and dissatisfied with) both neuro-reductionist and mystical accounts of consciousness, and keenly aware of the anthropological soup all this stuff is floating in … There are tons of books about consciousness, but … The Head Trip is an entertaining, substantive, and deeply stimulating book that, by staying focused on the concrete, actually contributes something to the field … a much more interactive picture of consciousness than the wiring diagrams and evolutionary-psych workouts we have come to expect from pop science accounts of the mind.”
–Erik Davis, author of the excellent Techgnosis andThe Visionary State [LINK]

“The Head Trip is an amazing book. Jeff Warren manages to be funny while packing in tons of fascinating science. Rather than sticking to conventional boundaries, Warren follows his own formidable curiosity, producing a book that is quirky, refreshing and nothing short of groundbreaking.”
-Tom Stafford, co-author of Mind Hacks

“Call it a travel guide to consciousness. From familiar landmarks like REM sleep and daydreaming to more exotic way stations like the “pure conscious event,” Warren’s exhilarating tour probes 12 varieties of conscious experience. Between lucid outlines of the latest research, Warren recounts his own adventures: training his attention with neurofeedback, trying his hand at Buddhist meditation, and banishing artificial light in search of a tranquil nocturnal wakefulness known as “the watch.” Culling the insights of anthropologists, neuroscientists, and monks, Warren offers a heady trip indeed.”
-Psychology Today

“Warren’s hilarious writing makes the nearly 400 jam-packed pages a fun and entertaining read. Using dozens of interviews wide a wide range of scientists, Warren paints a picture of the current scientific understanding that underlies each state. But the real strength of The Head Trip is that Warren gives first-hand accounts of what it means to experience each variant of consciousness … The Head Trip opens the reader’s eyes to what it really means to wake, sleep and dream; it is “a trip into our own wheeling heads.”
-Nicole Branan, Scientific American Mind

“It never occurred to me that you could write a travelogue about your own mind, but that is more or less what journalist Jeff Warren has done with The Head Trip, an entirely original and completely fascinating tour through the myriad states of human consciousness. For a lay person who loves books by Oliver Sacks, or other such dispatches from the realms of neuropsychology, this field guide to the latest mind/brain research is a must-read…There are no drugs involved. It is not altered consciousness that interests Warren, but the transmutable guises of everyday perception. He takes us around the clock, beginning at midnight, to explore 12 distinct states of being that raise some incredibly interesting questions about what it means to be conscious…a rich blend of research, theory and personal encounter.”
–Patricia Pearson, The Toronto Star [LINK]

“[The Head Trip] is staggeringly ambitious in scope…and yet it’s also friendly and direct. The scientific research is solid and sometimes daunting to readers who haven’t retained much from past biology and chemistry classes, but the tone is conversational, smart and often wickedly funny…. one gets the sense of a fully engaged mind weaving an overwhelming glut of fascinating material into a synthesized, though multilayered, whole. And just as we must use the mind to examine the mind, Warren is fully present at all times in the narrative, with all his doubts, vulnerabilities and anxieties along with his infectious enthusiasm for learning about what makes us tick. It’s a highly readable, innovative work – while there have been many pop-science books on consciousness written for a general audience, this is the first to approach the topic from a personal perspective.”
–Damian Rogers, Eye Weekly [LINK]

“Best book of the year. Using an original approach, Jeff Warren distinguishes twelve different states of consciousness, from lucid dreaming to the transcendental. It stands out because the author bases his ideas not only on the views of neuroscientists, anthropologists and mediation practitioners but also on his own personal explorations. Particularly fascinating are his discoveries about the murky realm of sleep. Sprinkled with comic panels, this book is as entertaining as it is insightful.”
- Peter Russell, author of The Global Brain, The Conscious Revolution, and From Science to God.

“Jeff Warren has done a great job with The Head Trip. Writing about any aspect of consciousness is treacherously difficult, but his take on the subject is clear, original and — amazingly — funny!”
-Rita Carter, author of Mapping the Mind and Exploring Consciousness

“As readable and fun as a novel, yet accurate and up-to-date, The Head Trip is about your most precious possession – your consciousness – and the fascinating states it goes through.”
-Charles T. Tart, author of Altered States of Consciousness

“[C]ombines the rigorous self-experimentation of Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open with the wacky self-experimentation of A.J. Jacob’s The-Know-It-All in this entertaining field guide to the varying levels of mental awareness… 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.”
-Publishers Weekly

“[…An] enjoyably big and baggy book… 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…[A] good-natured and self-deprecating ramble through the worlds of sleep and wakefulness…”
- Kirkus

“The Head Trip is … trippy and inspiring, as well as enlightening. It’s more elegantly written, entertaining and illustrated (with Warren’s own pencil drawings and ruminative doodles) than what one might expect from, let’s say, a Dummy’s Guide to the Mind. But it’s just as user friendly. Definitely something you’ll want to pack on your own nerdy head-trip.”
- Juliet Waters, Montreal Mirror

“When Warren does fall asleep, the dreams are Spielberg-worthy: At one point, iPods turn the world’s population into flesh-eating zombies; the author takes refuge “in a large medieval castle,” from which he and his fellow survivors launch “a series of spectacular supply raids in converted World War One fighter planes.” The Head Trip is a fascinating read … Warren provides a valuable service, beyond merely documenting the breathtaking scope of conscious (and unconscious) experience. Science has tiptoed around the mind because it is too close to home: Other disciplines ask us to observe the world around us with the best available lens; the mind, awkwardly, is that lens. Warren has attempted to turn that lens on itself, and has reminded us just how difficult that task is.”
- Dan Falk, The Globe and Mail

“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…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.”
-The Library Journal

“The Head Trip is notably distinct from most books on the subject of consciousness. Rather than issue recondite field reports on contending theories, such as the debate between those who believe that what we call “the mind” can be located in the neurons and other physical properties of the brain, and those who contend that it is an irreducible process, Warren instead sets out to actually experience what it feels like to measure, and inhabit, altered states of consciousness …He treks in winter to an isolated cabin without electricity, heat or water to experience sleep the way our ancestors did…In another exploration, Warren uses a delightfully odd device called a NovaDreamer to induce “lucid dreaming” … He also endeavors mightily to become hypnotized, experiments with biofeedback and spends seven days at a meditation retreat. Through all these inner adventures, he gracefully interweaves descriptions of new empirical methods to detect and describe conscious states … in The Head Trip, [Warren] manages to plumb inner depths that few other writers have attempted to explore.”
-Michael Antman, Chicago Sun-Times

“In this likeably evocative book, Jeff Warren goes on a safari of his own mind … The author illustrates his ideas with cartoon strips and amusingly rambling footnotes, and the book is full of sentences that make you stop and consider daily experience from a different angle. For example: “All wakefulness is in theory sleep deprivation.” It struck a powerful chord with me.”
-Steven Poole, The Guardian

“I liked the part with the Jamaican.”
-The author’s mother

“My God … that rank smell – so like a durian fruit, and yet it is a book.”
-No one

I can’t even believe how cool this thing is. Bob Yoshioka up the street at Shark Teeth Films made the animation based on my specs. At every moment in the brain, massive numbers of neurons build up and then release little electrical charges. When these neurons fire in unison, it’s an indication that they are part of a single process or “conversation.” Although at any one time there are many different local conversations happening in the brain, there is often a dominant global conversation which – like a fingerprint – can be used to identify most of the shifts in consciousness that happen as we move around the wheel.

Both the colour legend at the bottom and the undulating brain wave line animation in the background refer to the speed at which that dominant global conversation is happening in a particular state. Originally we wanted to make the brain pulse at the real EEG frequency, but it’s impossible to get a frame rate of 40 flickers a second, which is gamma. So we prorated everything down. Purple-blue is slow, red-orange is medium, and yellow-white is fast. The faster the conversation, the more energy in the system, the higher our state of arousal. That said, this is an extremely gross characterization – there is a lot more than this going on in the brain at any one time.

This is probably the most radical concept in the book, infantilized in a cartoon figure to ensure no one takes it seriously. In a way it’s a summary of much of what I learned while writing and researching The Head Trip. Via expectations, suggestion and possibly even intention, we can effectively remix our experience of consciousness. This is what the cumulative story of hypnosis, neurofeedback, meditation, lucid dreaming, psychosomatic medicine and others all point to. We can – in theory – learn to control levels of alertness, sensory resolution, lucidity in dreams – it goes on and on. What’s more, we can actually remix domains of consciousness previously thought to be discrete – fire up dream imagery in waking, introduce waking lucidity into dreams and more.

These aren’t just vague “mental” phenomena. They are driven by real changes in the brain. The mind-body connection is a two-way street. The implications of this are huge. We could teach applied meditation in schools, forty-five minutes a day of systematic compassion. This week’s homework: improving your reflective pause. In health care, meditation, neurofeedback, and hypnosis have all shown results in treating disorders as varied as depression, epilepsy, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, OCD, and addiction. And then there are the applications for life in general: the potential to shape everything from our sleep to our dreams to our many reflexive habits and responses that define how we relate to the world. There is a level of human agency and autonomy here that is thrilling. As one man whose life was transformed by neurofeedback put it: “It allows you to get your hands on the steering wheel and steer, instead of just being along for the ride.”

I love the idea that consciousness can be remixed, but I never thought anyone would actually build an invention that could help do this. No, I’m not talking about a new pill. I’m talking about the Dream Director, a device base, in part, on The Head Trip. You can read about it here.

“The greater the power of imagination, the wider the circle of here.” – William Blake

You can now watch this full talk on YouTube, here.

“Jeff Warren’s Head Trip show takes you on a journey through your own mind – including to places you barely knew existed. He doesn’t just tell you about them – he makes them happen….. you arrive back at the beginning with a new vision of inner space. Truly fantastic!”
-science journalist Rita Carter, author of Mapping the Mind and Consciousness

How well do you know your own mind? The Head Trip is an audio-visual journey through twelve distinct states of waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness, complete with jokes and dance moves. Although informed by science, the show’s primarily focus is first-person experience—what it feels like to be aware at different times of day and night. The idea is to use moving image and music and narration to hypnotically provoke each state of consciousness in the audience, to move them peristaltically through contrasting perspectives until, 45 minutes later, they are deposited gently on the other side, blinking and dumbfounded, their sense both of self and reality altered forever. That is, if they don’t nod off during the tedious bits.

Although I presented shorter versions of the Head Trip show in Toronto and New York, the full show had its international premiere at the gala night of the Asia Consciousness Festival in Hong Kong on June 5th, 2009.

Here are some pictures of the audience:

Look at the people of Hong Kong, they are so very happy.

Some of these people are nerds of quite high repute, and yet still they smile, for it is nice to have the abstract subject of consciousness presented in such an accessible manner.

People seem to really like this show, with its combination of mind-blowing ideas, feel-good tone, and theatrical presentation style. Two more successful performances happened at the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference in Hong Kong on June 13th, 2009, and at the Art and Mind festival in Winchester, UK on June 27th, 2009.

Asia Consciousness festival link here.
Art and Mind festival link here.

For fun I’m including one the many satiric pieces I wrote and voiced for The Current. I play a neurotic Canada being psychoanalyzed about my unfulfilling relationship with the US. Someone enjoyed this first episode, so my bosses kept making me write new and progressively less funny episodes, until I finally had to leave the CBC altogether to escape. Joan Webber (from the German – “VEE-ber”) was my skilled producer, and my analyst was Vancouver’s Dr. Saul Miller. Best line is about Expo 67. So true.

Toward the end of my full-time tenure at The Current I started appearing on air more, chatting about different subjects. Here is one such piece. Epigenetics has profound implications for what it means to be human. Not only are genes not fate, it also seems as though their expression in life is shaped by the experience of our ancestors, who continue on inside us, their lived decisions echoing through the genome. Or that’s my slightly poetic gloss, anyway. Features interviews with McGill University’s Moshe Szyf, and Tel Aviv University’s Eva Jablonka, who wrote a brilliant book called Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Those interested in a more expansive view of human nature should check it out.

right click here to download

My two documentaries on sleep and dreaming, where I spent multiple nights in a Montreal sleep laboratory having my head examined, among other nighttime adventures. I have been told these are among the most requested Ideas shows. I wrote them while researching The Head Trip. They began out of my total amazement that we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deep mysteries; the more you look into them the more mysterious – and variegated – they get. The idea here was to pair both advances in sleep science with first-person descriptions of different parts of the night – what is it like to fall asleep, to dream, to be in slow wave sleep, to wake in the night, to become lucid in a dream? It’s all here, including an admittedly bizarre dramatic reenactment of a lucid dream I had in Hawaii.

‘While You Were Out’ was produced by Alan Guettel. Without him they wouldn’t have made any sense.

The shows were first broadcast April 10th and April 11th, 2006.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGxbGaBz_iU

Producer Ben Aylsworth put this together for CBC television’s The Hour. Hours of green screen gesticulation for 3 minutes of blurb. Answers once and for all that most pressing of questions: if you die in a dream do you die in real life?

Mat Knegt, an animator at Canada’s Discovery Channel, spent months building this fantastic 10-minute animated tour through the mind, based on my book The Head Trip. It first aired back in May, 2008 on a science show called Daily Planet. Host Jay Ingram – who has written his own book on consciousness – and I spent a hilarious afternoon gesticulating in front of a green screen. The final work looks like something out of Shrek – complete with fire-breathing dragon, psychedelic tennis ball, 60s lounge furniture and me doing a grotesque pimp-roll down a virtual hallway.

Watch video here.

Yes, sigh, I am Supernatural Investigator.

Actually this half-hour television documentary – originally commissioned by Vision TV – was enormous fun to make, mostly because the directors – Adam and Andrew Gray, and their partner in crime Rob Spence – are such excellent guys. Remote Viewing is the purported ability to psychically “see” across time and space to remote events and scenes. It sounds like total baloney, but it happens to be baloney the US government spent a big chunk of money funding in the 70s and 80s as part of their “we’ll try anything to beat the Russians” counter-intelligence programs. Except, as I eventually learned, it may not be all baloney. If you take the time to actually read about the history of ESP research you find a lot of very interesting scientific experiments, and a great number of intelligent sympathizers – both historical (William James and Sigmund Freud) and contemporary (Freeman Dyson, Charles Tart, Marilyn Schlitz, Dean Radin and others). Despite the claims of various scientific and religious authorities, no one knows the true relationship between the mind and the world. It’s a mystery – the biggest mystery of all in fact. It’s very likely the mind is an emergent property of the brain, as is the orthodox consensus view, but it’s also possible there is some deeper relationship between the mental and the material, as is the mystical and the New Age view. We simply don’t know enough about the nature of existence to be sure one way or another. When it comes to ESP, I personally am on the fence, and I’ll probably stay there until Shirley MacLaine downloads the entire contents of her mind into my frontal lobe, at which point I may reconsider. One thing I will say: every skeptic should read Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Meyer, if only to correct their innate biases. Then – though you may still find the whole notion preposterous – it least you can say you’ve looked openly at the research.

There’s a new mind theory out there. Its big and ambitious, a bridge between biology and psychology that, to quote a recent New York Times piece, “provides psychiatry with perhaps its grandest working theory since Freud.” It’s called the Imprinted Brain, and it comes to us via Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics.

The theory is worth paying attention to because, well, it’s about you. Or at least two of you: the careful, analytic you, and your misguided shadow, who spends altogether too much time in the “wrong” section of the bookstore. One of you is a Mechanist. The other is a Mentalist. Though you may not realize it, you are two tribes on opposing sides of a battle that began in utero.

First, the biology.

Your parents have sex; you fuse into being. Half your genes come from Dad’s sperm, the other half from Mom’s egg. Well it turns out that some of these genes – in particular some of the genes responsible for brain development – are not neutral. Rather, they’ve been “imprinted” ahead of time by Mom or Dad’s self-interest. They’ve been corrupted – biased, epigenetically-primed – to favor, in your coming life, the survival of either Dad’s or Mom’s genes.

So, the theory goes, genes imprinted by Mom lead to babies that are easier for Mom to handle. They’re smaller at birth, less behaviorally demanding, more “attuned to interpreting and understanding the mental states of others,” in the words of Badcock and Crespi. These babies become kids who like to finger paint, talk about their feelings, and help with the dishes.

Dad’s imprinted genes, on the other hand, give rise to babies that are generally bigger at birth. Large babies are more robust – they live longer and are more resistant to disease. In this sense, they favor father’s genes at no cost to father himself. The cost, rather, goes to Mom. Big babies require more energy to suckle and nurture. But that’s only one part of it. Because it turns out these father-imprinted babies have other conspicuous traits: they are more behaviorally demanding, and possess a cognitive style more attuned to understanding and manipulating the physical state of the world. These babies become kids who tear around the backyard with no pants on, poking frogs with sticks, and conducting experiments on the family cat.

In other words, certain key brain development genes seem to favour “thing” people, while others favor “people” people. In psych-speak, there is a cognitive continuum with more “mechanistic” thinking at one end – a preoccupation with the external physical environment – and more “mentalistic” thinking – a preoccupation with the internal mental environment – at the other. Mechanist and Mentalist.

One reason that so many researchers are excited is that the theory seems to provide the beginnings of a comprehensive explanation for psychiatric and developmental brain disorders. Badcock and Crespi theorize that if you get an overly unbalanced portion of either set of genes, you run the risk of mechanistic or mentalistic derangement. On the mechanistic side, we get autism. These souls are all mechanism. They often have a genius for interpreting the world of objects, but when it comes to interpreting the world of people – intention, emotion, motivation – they’re at a loss. They suffer from what psychologist Simon Baren-Cohen calls “mindblindness.”

On the mentalistic side, we get psychosis, a suite of disorders which include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression. Here it’s the opposite problem: an excess of mentalism. Extreme mentalists experience mind everywhere – they hear voices, they suffer delusions of conspiracy. Where the autistic famously avoids other people’s gaze, the psychotic imagines he is constantly being watched. Where the autistic has a muted or underdeveloped sense of self, the psychotic is a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur.

It’s worth pointing out the obvious: most us are neither autistic nor psychotic. We live in a vast middle ground between two cognitive extremes, a little bit Mechanist and a little bit Mentalist. When we’re trying to figure out why the car won’t start we look to our inner-Mechanist; when we’re trying to figure out why an employee won’t start we look to our inner-Mentalist. We’re Mechentalists: the human condition.

Fig 1 . Mechanistic vs Mentalistic cognition
(from Crespi & Badcock, “Psychosis and autism as diametrical disorders of the social brain,” Behavioral And Brain Sciences (2008) 31, 257)

**

The Mechanist and the Mentalist provide a compelling picture of the extremes of the human mind. But here I’d like to move from Crespi and Bascock’s theory into a larger debate, for it seems to me that these two cognitive styles also inform Big Picture discussions over the nature of reality itself, and particularly about the relationship between mind and world.

The mechanistic side is the most familiar to us, because it is the dominant scientific narrative: we live primarily in a world of matter, one that can be objectively observed and tested using the experimental method. It is a world of great mechanical and organic beauty, a squishy clockwork of physical and biological laws that operates quite independently of our knowing about it. Though the human mind can of course observe the world – and in a local way affect great change within it – we are not yoked in any meaningful way to the larger physical and biological processes that surround us. Whatever meaning life may have is ours to create.

But there is also a mentalist side, familiar to spiritual practitioners, some religious believers, and a large section of the population that can be broadly described as “New Age.” The mentalist view is, by its nature, a little trickier to pin down, but in its broadest form it sees mind at play in the world, of being a direct part of an animate universe. In the past this view sat comfortably within religious and animistic views of a living cosmos, but the latest fashion among the New Age camp has been to try and describe it using the language of science itself. So, they argue, our interior subjective world interfaces in some direct way with the external objective one (although the nature of this interaction is unstable and contradictory and generally a pain in the ass to quantify experimentally). Some argue that it happens via a vaguely-defined energetic field in which the word “quantum” has a prominent explanatory role. Others suggest that the matrix of time, space and matter is really a huge multi-dimensional hologram produced by the cosmic unconscious. Whatever the descriptive vocabulary, at root is the belief that mind is a fundamental – if not the fundamental – property of the universe.

Although this mentalist view is marginal from the perspective of mainstream science, it seems to be growing in influence and popularity, and not just with viewers of What the Bleep do We Know? In fact I’d even argue that the conflict between Mechanists and Mentalists is the real culture war, one that covers a wider area than the science vs religion debates that have been getting so much attention lately.

Here are some of the ways the war plays itself out beyond the familiar conflict between atheist and believer. In medicine, you have the conventional vs alternative divide—the former with its unencumbered physical body, the latter with its esoteric energy-body-mind interactions. Within consciousness studies you have the hard-core materialists – who argue that everything is matter, and mind at best a “folk fiction” – vs. the panpsychists, who argue that all matter has the capacity for mind. In anthropology it’s the sober social scientists vs the Carlos Casteneda school of peyote-powered reality surfing. In ecology it’s orthodox biologists vs noosphere-obsessed Gaians. In physics it’s practical engineers vs disorderly quantum theorists. The list goes on. The common feature in all of these skirmishes is a fundamental disagreement over the relationship between the mind and the world.

Now, we simply don’t know enough about existence to know which of these broad paradigms is right. Perhaps both – or neither. Personally I’m an agnostic. I love Mechanistic science – its collegial transparency and ordered predictability (the scientist, too, has a kind of prayer: ‘repeat this thing for me that I may know it’) – and I can understand the appeal of being an obedient journalist, reporting the latest Mechanist consolidations and writing cranky dismissals of homeopathy. Except … I love and respect the Mentalist view too. At the fierce psychosis-saturated end of the continuum it may be terrifying – think Ezekiel and the wrath of God, or the reality-shattering visions of Philip K. Dick. But it has a softer expression too: a deep life-affirming sense of connectedness. This is important. The Mentalists insist they aren’t just talking about intellectual understanding, but an experiential bond. They feel this connection, it roots them in the world and leads – by many accounts – to exceptional levels of physical and mental and spiritual health.

So what’s going on here?

The Mechanists, of course, have a theory, one that takes us all the way back around to the nature of mentalistic cognition. You can read about it in a recent issue of the neuroscience journal Cortex, which is devoted entirely to the “paranormal mind.” The paranormal mind, write guest editors Peter Brugger and Christine Mohr, has an experimentally-proven propensity for finding meaning in coincidence and random noise. Once called “magical thinking,” the latest clinical term for this is “apophenia.”

Now, to take the Mechanist view for a moment, these are experimentally real results. You put a bunch of Mentalists in front of a set of randomly moving triangles on a computer screen and they are more likely to see some ordering logic or intent that isn’t there. So much for astrology (the triangles have message!) and religious belief (the triangles have mind!), says the Mechanist. Thus the numinous center of much of spiritual life is comfortably explained away, and the Mentalist herself is deposited into a neat (object-like) category.

Except the Mentalists don’t seem to notice. They have their own books and schools and journals, their own experiences. They hum along behind the triangles, plugged into a divergent narrative. If they acknowledge their “errors” at all it is only to remark these are surface symptoms of a deeper openness the Mechanists, with their “objective” tools, cannot – or will not – see.

Two tribes; one continuum. One side looks out, the other looks in. And behind each are the long shadows of the autistic and the psychotic, sculpted – in part – by a few pivotal genes, living in two different worlds that may just be of their own making.

copyright 2009 Jeff Warren

Fig 2. What do we miss when we look objectively in and subjectively out?

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.

Finally, one answer to a question that is top of everyone’s mind: what is it like to be a 10-ton echolocating sperm whale with stumpy flippers but excellent aqua-dynamics?

Wrote this piece at the Banff Center in the Rockies. Its real subject is animal consciousness – that is to say, the felt texture of animal experience, as opposed to animal “cognition” or animal “problem solving” or any of the other boring mechanical euphemisms that pass as inquiries into animal consciousness these days. There is a revolution in perspective happening in the world of animals.

The whales are coming.

Hide the krill!

Here are a couple short excepts:

Imagine you are a whale.

Start by picturing the ocean. Picture yourself slipping into the water, naked. Hold your breath. Sink down. Imagine your body expanding with a comforting layer of fat. Imagine it lengthening. Feel each vertebrae click as your spine draws up and back, a little shiver as you shimmy out of your pelvic girdle, legs and hips set adrift. In their place you sprout a triangular fluke, which you force down now in a long, muscular undulation that drives you forward through the water. Your neck thickens, the back of your skull rolls forward and your face moves out to meet the sea. You fill your lungs with air and dive, plunging towards the sea floor. Your long smile extends back almost to your arms, which have retracted into your barrel chest, leaving four long fingers stiffened with webbing which you use to direct the massive energy of your surging body. They direct you down, into the dark, the light from the surface fading quickly. But new lights gutter in your head; soon the hunt will start, and the lights will turn to sound, and the sound will light the dark, and these are some of the things you feel, some of the things you know. The waters close around you.

≈≈

There is a debate in the world of comparative neuroanatomy about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. On the one hand, a lot of scientists think that a big brain is a big brain: more computational power = more smarts. This puts sperm whales, killer whales, and elephants at the top of the brain chain, with humans down somewhere below dolphins. Others point to the human “world-domination-we-know-quantum-mechanics” thing, and argue relative brain size is a better indicator, which puts humans near the top, though not so high as the shrew, who drags around a proportionally massive 2-gram brain, presumably weighted down with frustrated will-to-power scenarios (“If only we had more time!”).

From “What is it Like to be a Whale?” in Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction.

My first book. It took me two months to write and Frommers paid me six grand. At first I hiked every trail and tried to canoe around every lake, but I soon ran out of time (as well as trail descriptive adjectives – “rooty”); by the end of the summer I was peeling through campground parking lots in my Granddad’s old K-car, neck craned, noting distinguishing details. Best part of the book is the 30-page park ecology guide at the back, where I got to wax on about the mighty moose (“the wild-eyed bell-tower hunchback of the animal kingdom”), the flying squirrel (“beware the pale gray flashers of the forest, exposing themselves at 40ft”), and the streamlined otter (“reclining on the river current, belly to the sun, little articulate fingers tearing off strips of crayfish – I ask you, is there a more soulful animal in the whole of the wild kingdom?”).

Here is an excerpt:

Storm Watching in Algonquin

There’s a way of watching storms in the area around Algonquin that I’ve honed over the years. It began when I was young, not far from the park borders at our family cottage. Either my brother or I would remark on it first: the eerie calm, the still leaves, the whole forest tense as if holding its breath. We’d stand on the dock and watch the lead-colored clouds mount across the lake. The hairs on the backs of our neck would stir before any ripples were visible on the water. And then the winds would start—the gust front—racing ahead of the storm like barking scouts of war.

This is when you had to dig in. The cedars would bend back and the padded foam on the deck seats would be ripped into the air and flung across the bay. The distant snarl of thunder would get louder and fork lightning would suddenly leap up all around us, great corrosive bolts burning the air, sometimes twisting into pinwheels. Soon the forest would be roaring with wind and electricity. And still we’d sit (as you should sit—as low as possible) terrified but waiting for the big payoff: the Wall of Water. It would sweep across the lake like a dense gray curtain, frothing over obstacles and blocking out the light. We’d wait until the last possible moment before turning and running for the cottage, our heels wet with the licks of rain but our faces dry in the receding cell of empty air. And I have done this too in Algonquin, and my tent has seemed very fragile indeed. But the wind dies and the heavy rain passes and half an hour later the sun comes out. With a spectacle so short, it’s worth paying attention to the details.

Environment Canada calls late-April to mid-October “summer severe weather season” in Ontario. Fierce thunderstorms blow in off the Great Lakes, on average 150 a year. Of these 15 or so produce the necessary wind rotations for tornadoes, huge pipes of striated air whose winds whip across the land at 200+ kilometers (125+ miles) an hour. Algonquin bears the scars of these tornadoes in the form of felled trees—wide swaths of raised wilderness. But no need to get paranoid. The park only gets half a dozen or of these thunderstorms per summer, and tornados touch down only once every few years.

For the most part these storms are an observer’s sport, loud but distant. The scale of the landscape is so huge in Algonquin that it’s possible to watch multiple storm systems move slowly across opposite ends of the horizon like buffalo on a prairie. They rumble ominously as they graze, and their dark bellies are filled with lightning.

From Frommer’s Algonquin Provincial Park, 1st Edition, by Jeff Warren. Toronto: CDG Books Canada, 2002.

right click here to download

Fifty million years ago we shared a common ancestor, a shared seed of mammalian sentience and emotionality. Then we split: one branch stayed on land, and one returned to the water. These two documentaries I did for CBC Radio’s Ideas are about the mind that returned to the water. How did the ocean shape the brains, the societies, and the sensory worlds of whales and dolphins? Drawing on the latest thinking from the world of cetacean neurobiology, animal culture, and a lot more, these docs attempt to capture what it’s like to be a whale. Part one is more scientific; part two is more imaginative – it features me rambling incoherently in a flotation tank, and ends with a soundscape of the whale’s auditory world co-created with my friend, electronic music producer Noah Pred (noahpred.com). Producer on this series was the incomparable Bernie Lucht.

Visit Ideas‘ Ocean Mind website here.

The shows were first broadcast Dec 15th and Dec 22nd, 2008.

My piece about mind, nature, and the fashionable jungle brew ayahuasca won a Gold Medal for best personal journalism at the 2011 Canadian National Magazine Awards. You can read it here, in the Winter 2010 issue of Maisonneuve.

I wrote Head Trip not only because I love the mind and the brain and get a science journalist (ish) kick out of attempting to explain their difficult relationship, but also because I like to actively hack my mind; that is, to go on natural head trips that alter my experience of reality, without resorting to buying pills off some sweaty guy at a rave. I’m interested in the special effects of consciousness, the primary phenomenological effects that are produced – or induced – when the mind is remixed. At the end of the book I even have a figure called “The Consciousness Mixing Board” which describes some of these effects. Dream hallucinations, body buzzes and hypnotic dissociations, degrees of alertness and clarity, degrees of absorption and relaxation, mindfulness in waking and in dreams, even bizarre psychosomatic phenomena – these are available in varying degrees across the expanse of consciousness, and may be primed with the right kind of suggestion, expectation, and – in some cases – intention.

I never thought anyone would actually invent one of these, but this is in essence what Paul Williams has done. As Paul told me when we first spoke, the Dream Director is basically a lab kit that could have come with my book. Note: “kit.” This is no one-night switch. Rather, it is a set of tools that can be experimented and played with over many months and even years. The applications are as limitless as the mind itself.

You can download the manual here.

Though Paul didn’t realize it at the time, back in the 1890s, the American neurologist Leonard Corning built a device that is the progenitor of the Dream Director. Sleep researcher Robert Van Castle describes the contraption in his excellent book, Our Dreaming Mind: “His subjects slept with a leather hood over their heads which held metallic saucers in place over each ear. Music was delivered through a long piece of tubing connected to an Edison phonograph.” Later Corning would add a stereopticon – ancestor of the film projector – to cast “chromatoscopic images” onto the wall in front of the sleeper. Though the effectiveness of the projections is disputable, Corning claimed the music (usually Wagner) produced salutary, even transcendent dreams.

The core metaphor of my book, The Head Trip. 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 changes of state we move through at night are fairly proscribed; things are much looser during the day, though our general levels of arousal do rise and fall on a strong circadian tide. Magnified many times, the surface of the wheel is not smooth: it has a jagged circumference, a shifting continuum of sharp, raised bumps and crooked dents. This is brain activity; it pushes up from below, changing the contour of consciousness from one moment to the next.

Click here to view a cool animation of the wheel.