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The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

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There has over the past few decades been an increasing interest in something which we all take for granted: consciousness. Just how the inert molecules in the brain manage to make us conscious, or just what consciousness is, or what the different states of consciousness are, hits on huge questions within philosophy and neurology, questions that remain mysterious. To heck with all the mystery; let's just have some fun! That seems to be the attitude of Jeff Warren, a writer and broadcaster who specializes in science themes, in _The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness_ (Random House). Not to be too grandiose: in the illustrations in the book, that's the "Wheel O' Consciousness". Warren sets out to pursue consciousness, not just the waking, sleeping, and dreaming that we all go through (although his nocturnal adventures are among the most interesting), but also hypnosis and meditation and more. He does have fun throughout, and doesn't mind telling us about it in jocular, enthusiastic prose (and his own cartoon illustrations), although anyone who thinks about consciousness for a long time will wind up, well, thinking about it for a long time. There is thus a lot here to chuckle over and to contemplate.

Just dreaming is not enough. Warren has to pursue different types of dreaming, like hypnagogic dreams, the ones that last a few minutes just as you are falling into sleep. Warren writes about how to use hypnagogia for problem solving, and it produced the idea of this book, but some of the ideas he had were real lemons ("... this isn't magic, it's still your fallible human brain operating.") In a lucid dream, you know you are dreaming and you can play around in the dream world, pushing it to do what you want. But Warren himself has some difficulty with manipulating a character in a specific dream; conjuring up a dream meeting with a long-ago crush, he scoops her into his arms to find, "It was like kissing a zombie. Her head lolled to the side and her eyes were blank. Man, my characters were terrible, what the hell was wrong with me? I was disgusted with myself. No wonder I wrote nonfiction." Warren goes to investigate "The Watch", a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night that might be the natural pattern of sleeping given to us by our tribal days. He tries hypnosis, he investigates daydreaming (yes, some scientific research has been done on daydreaming), and of course he gets hooked up to a biofeedback (or more specifically neurofeedback) machine. He goes to a seven-day Buddhist meditation retreat, and reports on all the paradoxes he finds in "the experience of no experience".

Warren doesn't do drugs. Or at least none of the chapters here is devoted to any sort of illicit experimentation, but during his neurofeedback phase, "One friend remarked that I seemed more relaxed, but that may have been because I was drunk at the time." Almost all the conscious states here are available to anyone, although like Warren you might have to invest time and money to find the particular expert to bring the state on. The appeal of this funny and informative book is best when it throws light on states like sleep and dreams and daydreams, states which all of us go though and to which few of us pay as much obsessive attention as Warren has. "We can learn to direct our own states of consciousness," he insists, and he has demonstrated the truth of this astonishing fact in his researches. We might not all learn to do so, but we would be wise to attend and celebrate states with the jubilation and delight that Warren presents to us.

This one was fun; and it really changed the way I think about consciousness. The author is very entertaining, and the style and delivery of the content is unique. The fact that he did all of these things himself (experimentally) added a whole new level to this book's importance. If it had just been a dry documentary, it wouldn't have been the same.

I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who's willing to take a wild journey into themselves, and who isn't afraid to change the way they see the world around them (or dream it!).

Jeff Warren moves through the latest thinking on consciousness, mind, and sleep, with ease and zany wit and humour. Written from the perspective of a culture vulture trying to figure out what's going on inside his own head, he effortlessly synthesizes much of the latest thinking about the brain in fields as diverse as psychology, neuro-biology, immunology and others. Thomas Kuhn, Sigmund Freud, Steven Johnson, and many other great thinkers show up in this bold, adventurous journey through the mind.

The concepts here may not be new for those who've gone of the way to get experienced with their consciousness, but the level of detail (dig that bibliography!) and attention to recent developments in various fields -- sleep science, neurofeedback, even hypnosis -- is enough to inspire all sorts of new inquiry.

For the "layperson," however, or "non-freak," this condenses what it took your average freak ten years of living to explore and confirm on his own. Read it and save yourself the time!

This is a remarkable and interesting book about human consciousness. Really - it is much more interesting than it sounds like it would be. This is not a New Age-y manifesto but a amusing trip through sleep and waking life.

It is written by a journalist, not a scientist or doctor, and it has a fun, quirky style with a lot of humorous comic book style diagrams.

The first, most interesting, half is about sleep. Different stages of sleep and types of dreams. The best parts are the sections about lucid dreaming and the watch. I am a person who strives to achieve lucid dreams and I liked the stories about people who are tremendously successful lucid dreamers, and ways to improve the chances of having lucid dreams.

The section on "the watch" changed the way I looked at sleep. Our modern expectation is that we will have an Ambien night - go to bet, konk out, and wake up in the morning remembering nothing of the night while we were asleep. Historically, the author tells s, people fully expected to lie awake for a while in the middle of the night. It turns out that this is, to quote the Talking Heads, a "good place to get some thinking done."

This book has actually changed my life, in a sense, because I now no longer dread lying awake for a while in the middle of the night, but see it as a positive thing. Plus, f you no longer fear "the watch" it doesn't last as long. If I'm not afraid of being awake for a while I get back to sleep much more quickly.
The second half on waking consciousness, regrettably, was not nearly as interesting.

But seriously, I would highly recommend this book to anybody who ever sleeps (or is awake). Ha ha - sleep is a huge part of our lives, but how much do we even know about it?

I truly enjoyed reading The Head Trip. I've always had a fascination with consciousness, yet much of the material on this topic is often very "new-agey". This book, however focuses on the scientific perspective (though some of the experiments are pretty far out there!). Unlike textbook scientific literature, however, the author uses personal anecdotes strung together with facts to present a great overview of present and historical consciousness research. The author's smart prose and use of engaging stories makes it a pleasure to read. I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in a scientific understanding of alternate states of consciousness (sleep, dreaming, trance, etc). I'd also recommend this book to fans of Mary Roach's work, as it has similar style and wit.

Jeff Warren is an interesting dude. The Head Trip is a book about states of consciousness. The difference between this and other books is the author's style and the amount of new objective research data now available. Warren himself is the traveler and this is an account of his trip through experiences of personal research in each of the states.

Consciousness, the focus of the hippy era in the 70's, has come full circle and is now a serious study. Warren recreates the atmosphere of the classic film `Easy Rider' with his metaphors and language. He even looks like Art Garfunkle from that era.

His wheel of consciousness is the easiest way for us to understand an incredible complex topic. It gives the reader a linear, tangible series of states that we can grasp. It is illusory; a metaphor that Warren admits towards the end; all states are capable of `bleeding' into the others and capable of being `re-mixed' like music.

This book is not easy to understand unless you have some existing knowledge. Thankfully each chapter ends with a summary in the form of a passport with the words `Thank you for visiting the SMR state'.
This book combines of psychology, neurobiology and spirituality with offbeat humour. If you are wondering if this book is for you, I advise checking out his You Tube video `The Head Trip - a tour through your mind'.

Jeff Warren takes an interesting approach as he journeys into consciousness, mind, and sleep. His wit and humor create an entertaining book on a topic that could be dry and boring. Anyone looking to broaden their horizons on the theories of consciousness will find this book fascinating. I really enjoyed the book and I look forward to reading more from Jeff Warren.

The Head Trip is a fascinating, absorbing and illuminating yet fun read about that multi-layered onion we all know as our consciousness - covering sleep, wakefulness and everything in between and beyond, including dreaming, lucid dreaming, hypnotism, The Zone, daydreaming, and meditation among others. At the core of the book is a question: what is consciousness? and while it is an impossible question to answer, it is worth asking and the book sheds light on just how large and multilayered the onion is and outlines (without attempting to completely explain) the vegetable that is us. While the book isn't perfect (I think Warren loses his objectivity and gets a bit spacey towards the end) I can honestly say that I feel like a different person after reading The Head Trip - if the book didn't alter my consciousness, it definitely altered my perception of it! Deserves to be a cult classic and on the same shelf as Fast Food Nation and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Recommended

The Head Trip is an excellent survey of consciousness exploration, and it reads well as both thoughtful introduction and detailed analysis. Jeff Warren approaches these interrelated subjects with a carefully balanced blend of engaging subjectivity, open scientific inquiry, honest skepticism and playful humor. The book has much to offer both to those who are new to thinking about the nature of the mind, and to those long experienced in investigating the various states of consciousness available to all of us. With roots in a long literary tradition and continuous reference to current scientific study, Warren embarks on an admirable attempt to get his head around his own head, and his thoroughly researched journeys are rich with insight and provocative potential.

The book's trajectory extends through hypnagogia, circadian rhythms, sleep and dreams, trance, hypnosis, biofeedback and meditation. Warren entertains many of the tangled philosophical quandaries that naturally arise without ever drifting into the new age fru-fru with which these subjects are so often embraced. In fact he is distinctly aware of this tendency and circumvents it by consistently introducing fresh approaches to thinking, yet at one point still manages to have an engaging conversation with an imaginary Rastafarian Buddha in the process. This book is like a user's manual for your mind, and it's a lot of fun to read. Warren writes of his own experiences with the self-effacing candor of a skilled journalist, and his personal successes and failures will be immediately and empathetically recognizable to anyone who's ever attempted to explore the mind, which, in one way or another, is all of us.

The chapters on sleep and circadian rhythms are unexpectedly insightful. The later chapters on biofeedback and meditative absorption are more technical and demand the attention of the reader, but The Head Trip is well organized, consistently grounded and totally readable from start to finish. Warren's journey carries him eventually to a confrontation with his own suffering --perhaps the deepest motivation for consciousness exploration afterall-- and one hopes that his trials are ultimately as beneficial for him as they promise to be for the reader. As the Buddha, speaking in a tranquil Rastafarian droll, might encourage, Take this trip, mon. `Tis a mighty good one, jah yes...