[.ca] The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (ISBN 1400064848)

The book I was waiting for.:
An excellent review of current work on the brain asleep and awake and some of the variations in between. A very personal account at times and makes good use of humour. Eminently readable with some very good drawings by the author, Jeff Warren.

Bold, daring and laugh out loud funny:
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.

Sleep will never be the same - A Thoroughly Compelling Read:
Having received The Head Trip as a Christmas gift, I began reading straight away and quickly found myself well into double-digit pages. Warren describes a journey through our conscious mind as if the mind was a game wheel with different states of consciousness throughout the day and night. Depending where you land on the wheel, unexpected (and exciting!) experiences may take place. By exploring the details of our sleeping patterns, readers will discover that sleep as we know it today, may not be what was initially intended by nature. A very compelling read for anyone who would like to understand how our brains, dreams, and conscious experiences are interwoven to make us the incredible species that we are.

A distillation of disciplines:
Books on dreams and dreaming seem to fall into one of two types. Either it's an academic study with white-coated researchers measuring brain waves and chemistry, or it's personal accounts with perhaps a bit of counselling thrown in to establish credibility. Jeff Warren has made a sincere effort to combine these two methods. He's interviewed a number of brain/consciousness researchers as well as undergoing their testing procedures. The result is a highly personalised account of dreaming research as it stands today. Don't be put off by the "pop-psych" title. Warren makes a serious attempt to bring to the lay reader some of the issues in consciousness studies. Except that much of this work involves the periods when we're not "conscious". His mechanism is to provide readers with a breakdown of consciousness, which he depicts as a wheel. A neat dozen segments are portrayed representing the chapter subjects to follow. The topics are enhanced with images of "passports" to explain where you are going and something of what you will learn. The passport gives the name of the topic, how to go there, what you might find and a personal example. "Passport" may be misleading - it's not a trip to a physical segment of the brain you are undertaking, but a tour of a condition. The conditions have been the subject of many studies in recent years. Although much of the narrative is a list of Warren's personal experiences, those events have been done with the assistance of brain scientists. Warren carefully recounts the various theses proposed about what the brain is doing during sleep, dreaming, in "trance" state and other periods when it's more-or-less operating on automatic pilot. Many researchers are delving into these conditions from various perspectives, offering fresh insights and conclusions, although definitive theories remain elusive. It takes a book such as this to begin synthesizing the wide spectrum of ideas and proposals to begin formulating meaningful answers. Active conscious states are a different topic, well covered, as Warren notes, elsewhere. There is also the issue of recording "events" or impressions gained during the various sleep or semi-conscious states. "Subjective science" becomes the knee-jerk response by some, who are generally attempting to dismiss this sort of research. As Warren reminds us, however, "subjective" accounts of what goes on in the brain during sleep is all we have. Measuring brain waves and neurochemistry tells us something of where in the brain changes occur and how intense those changes are, but only the subject can tell us what they perceive. Inadequate or not, we must use the tools available, and the subject of the experiment is the best one we have. Warren, in order to demonstrate that fact, puts himself as the subject of many experiments related here. It is hoped the reader can at least identify with his concerns and disappointments, but clearly not all of the "tests" are likely to be repeated by a single individual. It's also apparent that the "ground state" of each reader will differ from every other, something Warren touches on too lightly to suit this reviewer. One topic that eludes him entirely is the non-dreamer. As one who has had no more than a dozen remembered dreams since childhood, much of this book remained elusive. I simply had no idea what the author, or even many of his scientific contributors were talking about. The chapter on "lucid dreaming" - dreams in which you are conscious of dreaming - seemed the height of fantasy. What is the state of research into brains that don't appear to dream, or fail to remember any that take place? In a couple of chapters in the book, Warren delves into a "mind-body problem". However, the "problem" is one of his own devising - how do unconscious but impressionable states cause physiological changes in the body? The chapter on hypnosis is one of these, in which the author claims that women in the US have enlarged their breasts by a "group average of 1.37 inches \o3.47 centimetres\c". While there have been many researchers looking into brain-body interactive pathways, Warren either ignores them or hasn't heard of them \oi.e., Antonio Damasio is mentioned because one of Warren's interviewees had a copy on a shelf, but V.S. Ramachandran isn't present anywhere here\c. Nonetheless, like so many works on related topics available today, Warren's book raises many issues that demand attention. Neither his book nor the work of those he relates can be ignored nor dismissed as "soft science". These are the plans and bricks needed to build the edifice we call the "mind". Understanding that is essential to our comprehension of what we are as a species. \ostephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada\c