http://www.jeffwarren.org Thu, 26 Aug 2010 04:00:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/Tapestry-HustonSmith.mp3|titles=Huston Smith Interview|autostart=yes] right click here to download 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. ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/radio/at-home-with-huston-smith My friend Helen snapped this one. She too loves chickens. http://www.jeffwarren.org/chickens/proud-chicken People who hang around with this chicken for too long often disappear. It's pretty mysterious. http://www.jeffwarren.org/chickens/the-yeti-chicken From The Globe and Mail Books section, Saturday October 3rd, 2009. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/the-human-in-them [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/Tapestry-Real-World-of-Dreams.mp3|titles=Real World of Dreams|autostart=yes] right click here to download 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." ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/radio/the-real-world-of-dreams Wrote this for The New Scientist - summarizes a few of the states from my book. Download the full PDF here: New Scientist piece http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/life-on-the-wheel-of-consciousness [qt:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/Jeff-Warren-media-reel.mov http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/JeffWarrenMedia-main.jpg 450 250] Click the image to watch Mini-Media Reel or right click here to download the video. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/tv-and-film/jeff-warren-mini-media-reel [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/ExpandingMind-JeffWarren.mp3|titles=Expanding Mind Interview|autostart=yes]right click here to download 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/author-interviews/expanding-mind-erik-davis [qt:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/JeffWarrenInterview.mov http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/DreamingInterview-WEB.jpg 450 250] Click the image to watch interview or right click here to download the whole video. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/author-interviews/dreaming-interview These guys want to make a film out of my Ocean Mind article and CBC Radio Ideas documentaries: ParaDOCS and Film Works Now they need to find partners or something. We'll see what happens. Download Ocean Mind TwoSheet Download Ocean Mind TwoSheet http://www.jeffwarren.org/tv-and-film/ocean-mind-the-film Excerpt from The Head Trip, this bit below comes after a long riff about how different artists and scientists and thinkers have used the hypnagogic state at sleep onset for creative problem solving. The hypnagogic is the ultimate paradigm-busting tool. As your brain slips into an associative, impressionistic state, it is ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/hypnagogic-problem-solving Made this site when The Head Trip - came out. If you click on each wheel segment you can read a little blurb about each different state of consciousness. Also excerpts the entire introduction of the book, and has some other stuff too. http://www.jeffwarren.org/websites/the-head-trip-website High drama in Head Trip chapter one: I spend time in a Montreal Sleep Lab falling asleep. The tension for the reader is obviously unbearable: what will Jeff’s sleep onset experiences reveal about the true character of the hypnagogic? Where exactly do these hypnagogic images come from, and is there ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/the-author%e2%80%99s-hypnagogic-wakeup The mysterious psychologist Andreas Mavromatis – another obsessive classifier – spent a lot of time trying to work out the exact progression of hypnagogic experiences. I’ve taken his findings and re-expressed them in this fig, the very first I drew for The Head Trip. Hypnagogia: the Everyman’s Psychedelic Trip. http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/mavromatis%e2%80%99-four-stages-of-hypnagogia 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/hypnagogic-passport-stamp 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, ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/will-the-real-sleep-please-step-forward 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/example-signal-verified-lucid-dream Use this chart to hypnotize your friends. Actually it won’t help with that at all. But it will help with figuring out which of your friends can be easily hypnotized should you wish to bring the fuckers once and for all under your total beneficent control. Head Trip chapter 5 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/the-spiegel-eye-roll Start at the bottom. And you thought meditators we’re just closing their eyes. These are the deep trippers of the animal kingdom, they go way down (or up, depending on your metaphor). But the going is tricky – beware the snakes! Then again, meditators consider even snakes to be opportunities – ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/ascending-the-jhanas Robert Forman is a former professor of religion, and the author of some excellent articles in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I think of him as a kind of mystical action figure. He transitioned into nondual consciousness a few years ago, neural tubes “unzipping” along the back of his neck ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/forman%e2%80%99s-mystical-progression For people of a particular disposition (nerds), mapping consciousness is a popular pastime; lots of psychologists and at least one neurologist have tried it out. It’s sort of the ultimate reduction, an attempt to jam that great, unquantifiable diffusion of consciousness into a nice, neat box. Yet for all their ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/a-phenomenological-map-of-consciousness 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/author-interviews/california-literary-review Wrote this review of Steven Johnson's Ghost Map a couple years ago for The National Post. I write hundreds of reviews but I do it in the inside front cover of the books I'm reading, so when I pick them up later I can remember what I thought of the ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/the-ghost-map-review Wrote this for the Globe and Mail recently - an editor there said they were doing a spread on basements and wanted a first-person take. He knew I had lived in one. These are the easiest writing assignments - I mean who would ever think 'I'm going to write something ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/living-below-the-water-line Putting this in because the subject of fresh salsa is very important to me. Lived for 3 years in San Francisco's Mission District, scribbled this out on dirty napkin during a recent visit. Published in the National Post and a few other chained papers. My friend Samantha took the photo. ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/burrito-paeon [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/sassyscience_jeff-interview.mp3|titles=Sassy Science Interview|autostart=yes] right click here to download 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/author-interviews/sassy-science “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? Back in 2000 I lived in London, UK, worked at Dorling ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/websites/urbantherapy Bookslut Interview with Jeff Warren Jason B. Jones, June 2008 Read the original here. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/author-interviews/bookslut Check out all the 5-star reader reviews on Amazon.com ""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, ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/reviews/head-trip-reviews Click here to view animation: headtrip_compressed 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/animations/wheel-animation I wanted Head Trip to feel accessible right from the start, hence this little comic, which touches on some of the book's mysteries and revelations. My female protagonist appears one more time at the back of the book, post-superpower expression. http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/head-trip-opening-comic 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/the-consciousness-mixing-board Chickens are amazing. http://www.jeffwarren.org/chickens/so-soft-and-feathery This talk attempts to bring the audience into the mind, bodies and sensory experiences of cetaceans using ideas, images and sound. Drawing on new research from comparative neurobiology, behavioral ecology, acoustic tomography and the sensory dynamics of echolocation, the idea is to start with the science and continue on into ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/talks/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-whale [qt:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Head-Trip-Promo-small.mov http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/HeadTrip-show320240.jpg 320 240] Click image to watch promo or right click here to download. "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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/talks/head-trip-mind-tour [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/Current-Canada-on-the-Couch.mp3|titles=Canada on the Couch|autostart=yes] right click here to download 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/radio/canada-on-the-couch [audio: http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/radio-neurofeedback-talk-tape.mp3|autostart=yes|titles=Neurofeedback] right click here to download Here's another piece I did for The Current. It's about the controversial use of neurofeedback to treat childhood ADD - the radical idea here being we can learn to self-regulate our own mental processes using nothing but a few EEG leads and a computer ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/radio/neurofeedback [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/radio-epigenetics-talk-tape.mp3|autostart=yes|titles=Epigenetics] right click here to download 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/radio/epigenetics [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/radio-while-you-were-out1.mp3|titles=While You Were Out (Part 1)|autostart=yes] right click here to download [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/Ideas-While-You-Were-Out-2.mp3|titles=While You Were Out (Part 2)] 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/radio/while-you-were-out httpvh://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? http://www.jeffwarren.org/tv-and-film/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-dreaming-but-were-afraid-to-ask Watch video here. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/tv-and-film/mansion-of-the-mind [qt:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/remoteview-trailer-copy.mov http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/RemoteViewing-WEB.jpg 450 337] Click the image to watch lurid trailer or right click here to download the video. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/tv-and-film/remote-viewing-supernatural-investigator Rogue scholar Erik Davis asked me to write something for a new magazine called Looking Glass - he was going to commandeer a whole section which was to have an old skool Omni vibe, a magazine both of us loved. But alas, the best laid plans ... Now it looks ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/two-tribes The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness. Toronto and New York, Random House Canada and USA, Oneworld in the UK, 2007. Also being translated into Korean and Italian. You can get an audio book too. This cover from the Canadian paperback edition. Buy it here My guide to all ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/books/the-head-trip Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction, edited by Moira Farr and Ian Pearson, Thomas Allen Publishers, 2009. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/books/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-whale-2 Frommer's Algonquin Provincial Park, 1st Edition. Toronto: CDG Books Canada, 2002. 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/books/frommers-algonquin-provincial-park-1st-edition-toronto-cdg-books-canada-2002 [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/Ocean-Mind-1-The-Fluid-Society.mp3|titles=Part One - The Fluid Society|autostart=yes] right click here to download [audio:http://www.jeffwarren.org/wp-content/uploads/Ocean-Mind-2-Into-the-Whale.mp3|titles=Part Two – Inside the Whale] 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/radio/ocean-mind Wrote this comic for a Canadian magazine called The Walrus - appeared in their Oct / Nov 2008 issue. Illustrator Paul Kim did an excellent job. Text inspired by Jules Verne's classic Journey to the Center of the Earth. [caption id="attachment_60" align="alignleft" width="975" caption="Journey to the Center of the Mind"][/caption] http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/journey-to-the-center-of-the-mind Original art work by Amedeo de Palma. Currently working on this piece for the Winter 2010 issue of Maisonneuve. http://www.jeffwarren.org/articles/the-tourists-of-consciousness Visit the Dream Director website here. Publishing a book is a bit like firing one of those emergency flares into the air. You never know who it’s going to attract. Most of the time nobody. You set the flare off in the Arctic tundra, get excited for some human contact, the ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/inventions/the-dream-director 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 ... http://www.jeffwarren.org/illustrations/the-wheel-of-consciousness