The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness [Format Kindle]
Author: Jeff Warren | Language: English | ISBN: B0031TZC64 | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness
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Extrait
Introduction
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
–T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Here’s a curious phenomenon; maybe you’ve experienced it.
For several years in my mid-twenties I spent my summers tree planting in northern Ontario. It was a difficult job. Every morning at 5 a.m. some classic rock anthem would blare out across the makeshift camp and we’d drag ourselves from our warm tents and pile into the rusted yellow school buses idling on the logging road. Out on “the block,” we were assigned huge chunks of napalmed land, uneven mixes of charred duff, swamp, and scraggly brush. For eleven hours we’d plant little eight-inch saplings–kick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stompkick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stomp–little mechanical humans jerking along the horizon. Every seven feet, several hundred an hour, several thousand a day. It was fantastically tedious, made worse by bone-chilling drizzle, a fog of biting blackflies, hidden wasps’ nests, thickets of sharp sticks, and patrolling bears who’d ransack our lunches and terrorize the cooks.
Beginner planters spent their time in an agony of unhappiness and frustration. But as the weeks wore on the privations lessened, in part because we became habituated to the job, but also because of an odd recurring experience that some of us discussed among ourselves.
I remember the day it first happened to me. It was still early, a little after 9 a.m. I had just loaded up my bags with trees and stood gazing out over the denuded expanse of earth and rubble. I sighed, looked down at my shovel, and began planting. When I raised my head I noticed the sun was on the other side of the sky. Little green spruce dotted the landscape all around me, and on the road empty tree containers sat in a disorderly pile. My watch said 2 p.m. Five hours had passed and I remembered nothing. What happened?
I had no idea, but like other planters before me I welcomed the state. Now days alternated between time-crawling nowness, idle daydreams–another important consolation–and these strange absences, little wormholes in time where we dropped off the land and reappeared several hours later.
One day I experienced a new variation. I mounted a steep ridge and there, towering before me, was an enormous white pine with silver scales and a broad, knotted trunk. The tree was wrapped in a gauzy halo of needles, and in the late-afternoon sun they filled with golden light. I caught my breath and everything went suddenly very still. The background chatter of the forest faded, and I had the feeling that time had paused, except, in contrast to my wormhole experiences, “I” remained to witness the ellipsis. But it was not an “I” I recognized. As strange as it may sound, I felt as if I were somehow part of the tree. I stood transfixed, a large, unblinking eyeball. And then the feeling passed. In front of me was just a tree. I looked down and continued planting.1
The experience of tree planting didn’t end at night. As soon as our eyes closed, a slow-moving landscape flickered up on our retinas and we watched reruns of the day–kick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stomp, kick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stomp. I remember being struck by the photographic perfection of these images, bright visuals that were often accompanied by the physical sensation of movement, like that wobbly sea-legs feeling you get after a day of sailing. Once fully asleep, the activity seemed to rev up a notch. I dreamed of twisting in my sleep so I could plant my bedroll, or trying to slam my shovel through the asphalt of an endless dream highway. I often woke in the night protesting: it isn’t fair, this isn’t my workday, this is my time off. I shouldn’t have to plant now! When I struggled against the dream narrative I inevitably woke myself up, though several times I flickered into momentary self-consciousness in the dream itself, and stood there in the empty expanse of dream land with my dream shovel in my hand thinking this was a really weird situation, I’d have to remember to tell someone. Inevitably I woke exhausted, and on the bumpy ride out to the block, all of us muttered about our diabolically doubled workloads.
Tree planting got me thinking about consciousness because the unvarying sameness of the days provided a perfect backdrop for alterations. I noticed the differences, and they seemed to correspond to shifts more fundamental than those of mood or even alertness. In the previous few paragraphs I’ve described seven distinct states of consciousness that most of us have likely experienced at some time or another: general alertness, daydreaming, deep absorption, a heightened present, sleep-onset imagery, dreaming, and the very beginnings of a lucid dream. Some of these occur with strict regularity, others are more rare. And although a few of them may sound mystical, one of the main preoccupations of this book is how far science has come in shedding light on their character.
Until that summer, my conception of consciousness was little more than a crude on/off switch in my head. We were awake, and then we were asleep. Sure, there were dreams, but these sort of happened off the record. Unless you wanted eye rolls and public derision, you only told your bed-partner about them (“I opened the umbrella and out flopped a half-dozen pale cow udders–can you believe that?”). Clearly there was more to consciousness than these two options–how many variations were there, exactly?
The answer, of course, is billions–as many variations as there are individuals to experience them, and within each individual a succession of seemingly unique moments. This disorienting plentitude seems all but impossible to quantify, for the one thing we can say with certainty about consciousness is that it is an ineffably private and subjective affair.
Except that isn’t the full story. Because underneath our shifting tides of awareness are specific–and regular–physiological changes occurring in the brain. The most elemental of these are the circadian processes that govern our sleep-wake cycle. These undulating rhythms form the basic contours of subjective consciousness; they guide changing levels of alertness through each day and, in concert with their chemical emissaries, move us through the various stages of sleep at night.
The notion that sleep is not a single monolithic state is perhaps not fully appreciated by most people. We cycle through stages, of which slow-wave and rem sleep are the most distinct. Each of these two states is as different from the other as they are from waking. This is the case regarding: 1) their specific functions; 2) the physical processes that form them; and 3)–crucially, for the purposes of this book–what they feel like to experience. These three states of consciousness–slow-wave sleep, rem sleep, and waking–form the primary compass of human experience.
This psychological and neuroscientific and experiential story of how consciousness changes over twenty-four hours is the first story I want to tell, and it forms the loose skeleton of this book. But there is a larger, more important story, one that involves some of consciousness’s more dramatic variations, because overtop and between these three primary states, the mind is capable of visiting some very strange destinations. Since I can’t reliably talk about the shifting experience of consciousness without test-driving some of those changes myself, I have gone on six adventures, six major head trips that ended up challenging everything I thought I knew about the expanse of consciousness and how our minds relate to our brains.
The trips themselves were far-ranging in both a geographic and a psychological sense. From Montreal to Hawaii, London to New York, Scotland to northern Ontario, my body moved and my mind moved with it, propelled through the visionary logic of the hypnagogic, the mysterious mid-night awakening known as the Watch, that astonishing challenger to waking consciousness, the lucid dream, the plunging well of attention known as the trance, the sublimely alert high-resolution smr (captured on a computer’s monitor), and the quasi-mystical substratum of awareness itself known as the Pure Conscious Event. Along the way I discovered other states–some familiar, some less so: the parasomnias, the slow wave, the rem dream, the hypnopompic, the daydream, and the athlete’s Zone. That these various states are not better known–at least in the West2–or more clearly understood has to do with the interrelated histories of the scientific study of consciousness in general and the study of sleep in particular.
Things started well enough in the late nineteenth century, with psychologists like William James championing a new scientific field. “A science of the relations of the mind and brain,” wrote James, “must show how the elementary ingredients of the former correspond to the elementary functions of the latter.”
First-person approaches to consciousness were deemed essential, and indeed they took off in philosophy under the banner of phenomenology–the study of consciousness and its immediate objects–and in psychology, in a school of thin...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
–T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Here’s a curious phenomenon; maybe you’ve experienced it.
For several years in my mid-twenties I spent my summers tree planting in northern Ontario. It was a difficult job. Every morning at 5 a.m. some classic rock anthem would blare out across the makeshift camp and we’d drag ourselves from our warm tents and pile into the rusted yellow school buses idling on the logging road. Out on “the block,” we were assigned huge chunks of napalmed land, uneven mixes of charred duff, swamp, and scraggly brush. For eleven hours we’d plant little eight-inch saplings–kick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stompkick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stomp–little mechanical humans jerking along the horizon. Every seven feet, several hundred an hour, several thousand a day. It was fantastically tedious, made worse by bone-chilling drizzle, a fog of biting blackflies, hidden wasps’ nests, thickets of sharp sticks, and patrolling bears who’d ransack our lunches and terrorize the cooks.
Beginner planters spent their time in an agony of unhappiness and frustration. But as the weeks wore on the privations lessened, in part because we became habituated to the job, but also because of an odd recurring experience that some of us discussed among ourselves.
I remember the day it first happened to me. It was still early, a little after 9 a.m. I had just loaded up my bags with trees and stood gazing out over the denuded expanse of earth and rubble. I sighed, looked down at my shovel, and began planting. When I raised my head I noticed the sun was on the other side of the sky. Little green spruce dotted the landscape all around me, and on the road empty tree containers sat in a disorderly pile. My watch said 2 p.m. Five hours had passed and I remembered nothing. What happened?
I had no idea, but like other planters before me I welcomed the state. Now days alternated between time-crawling nowness, idle daydreams–another important consolation–and these strange absences, little wormholes in time where we dropped off the land and reappeared several hours later.
One day I experienced a new variation. I mounted a steep ridge and there, towering before me, was an enormous white pine with silver scales and a broad, knotted trunk. The tree was wrapped in a gauzy halo of needles, and in the late-afternoon sun they filled with golden light. I caught my breath and everything went suddenly very still. The background chatter of the forest faded, and I had the feeling that time had paused, except, in contrast to my wormhole experiences, “I” remained to witness the ellipsis. But it was not an “I” I recognized. As strange as it may sound, I felt as if I were somehow part of the tree. I stood transfixed, a large, unblinking eyeball. And then the feeling passed. In front of me was just a tree. I looked down and continued planting.1
The experience of tree planting didn’t end at night. As soon as our eyes closed, a slow-moving landscape flickered up on our retinas and we watched reruns of the day–kick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stomp, kick-shovel-draw-bend-insert-stomp. I remember being struck by the photographic perfection of these images, bright visuals that were often accompanied by the physical sensation of movement, like that wobbly sea-legs feeling you get after a day of sailing. Once fully asleep, the activity seemed to rev up a notch. I dreamed of twisting in my sleep so I could plant my bedroll, or trying to slam my shovel through the asphalt of an endless dream highway. I often woke in the night protesting: it isn’t fair, this isn’t my workday, this is my time off. I shouldn’t have to plant now! When I struggled against the dream narrative I inevitably woke myself up, though several times I flickered into momentary self-consciousness in the dream itself, and stood there in the empty expanse of dream land with my dream shovel in my hand thinking this was a really weird situation, I’d have to remember to tell someone. Inevitably I woke exhausted, and on the bumpy ride out to the block, all of us muttered about our diabolically doubled workloads.
Tree planting got me thinking about consciousness because the unvarying sameness of the days provided a perfect backdrop for alterations. I noticed the differences, and they seemed to correspond to shifts more fundamental than those of mood or even alertness. In the previous few paragraphs I’ve described seven distinct states of consciousness that most of us have likely experienced at some time or another: general alertness, daydreaming, deep absorption, a heightened present, sleep-onset imagery, dreaming, and the very beginnings of a lucid dream. Some of these occur with strict regularity, others are more rare. And although a few of them may sound mystical, one of the main preoccupations of this book is how far science has come in shedding light on their character.
Until that summer, my conception of consciousness was little more than a crude on/off switch in my head. We were awake, and then we were asleep. Sure, there were dreams, but these sort of happened off the record. Unless you wanted eye rolls and public derision, you only told your bed-partner about them (“I opened the umbrella and out flopped a half-dozen pale cow udders–can you believe that?”). Clearly there was more to consciousness than these two options–how many variations were there, exactly?
The answer, of course, is billions–as many variations as there are individuals to experience them, and within each individual a succession of seemingly unique moments. This disorienting plentitude seems all but impossible to quantify, for the one thing we can say with certainty about consciousness is that it is an ineffably private and subjective affair.
Except that isn’t the full story. Because underneath our shifting tides of awareness are specific–and regular–physiological changes occurring in the brain. The most elemental of these are the circadian processes that govern our sleep-wake cycle. These undulating rhythms form the basic contours of subjective consciousness; they guide changing levels of alertness through each day and, in concert with their chemical emissaries, move us through the various stages of sleep at night.
The notion that sleep is not a single monolithic state is perhaps not fully appreciated by most people. We cycle through stages, of which slow-wave and rem sleep are the most distinct. Each of these two states is as different from the other as they are from waking. This is the case regarding: 1) their specific functions; 2) the physical processes that form them; and 3)–crucially, for the purposes of this book–what they feel like to experience. These three states of consciousness–slow-wave sleep, rem sleep, and waking–form the primary compass of human experience.
This psychological and neuroscientific and experiential story of how consciousness changes over twenty-four hours is the first story I want to tell, and it forms the loose skeleton of this book. But there is a larger, more important story, one that involves some of consciousness’s more dramatic variations, because overtop and between these three primary states, the mind is capable of visiting some very strange destinations. Since I can’t reliably talk about the shifting experience of consciousness without test-driving some of those changes myself, I have gone on six adventures, six major head trips that ended up challenging everything I thought I knew about the expanse of consciousness and how our minds relate to our brains.
The trips themselves were far-ranging in both a geographic and a psychological sense. From Montreal to Hawaii, London to New York, Scotland to northern Ontario, my body moved and my mind moved with it, propelled through the visionary logic of the hypnagogic, the mysterious mid-night awakening known as the Watch, that astonishing challenger to waking consciousness, the lucid dream, the plunging well of attention known as the trance, the sublimely alert high-resolution smr (captured on a computer’s monitor), and the quasi-mystical substratum of awareness itself known as the Pure Conscious Event. Along the way I discovered other states–some familiar, some less so: the parasomnias, the slow wave, the rem dream, the hypnopompic, the daydream, and the athlete’s Zone. That these various states are not better known–at least in the West2–or more clearly understood has to do with the interrelated histories of the scientific study of consciousness in general and the study of sleep in particular.
Things started well enough in the late nineteenth century, with psychologists like William James championing a new scientific field. “A science of the relations of the mind and brain,” wrote James, “must show how the elementary ingredients of the former correspond to the elementary functions of the latter.”
First-person approaches to consciousness were deemed essential, and indeed they took off in philosophy under the banner of phenomenology–the study of consciousness and its immediate objects–and in psychology, in a school of thin...
From Publishers Weekly
Warren, a Canadian science journalist, combines the rigorous self-experimentation of Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open with the wacky self-experimentation of A.J. Jacobs's The Know-It-All in this entertaining field guide to the varying levels of mental awareness. Beginning with the mild hallucinogenic state that comes just before true sleep, he tries to hone his skills at lucid dreaming, subjects himself to hypnosis and joins a Buddhist meditation retreat, among other adventures. Along the way, he begins to realize that dreaming and waking are equivalent states, and that we can learn how to induce the subtle gradations of consciousness within ourselves. This could come off as New Age psychobabble, but Warren is well versed in the scientific literature, and he provides detailed accounts of his own research. (During one three-week period, for example, he goes to bed at sundown to recreate a period of wakefulness before returning to sleep that used to be common before electric light reconfigured our sleep schedules.) His self-mocking attitude toward his inability to achieve instant nirvana, along with a steady stream of cartoon illustrations, ensures that his ideas remain accessible. 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. B&w illus. (Nov. 27)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Détails sur le produit
- Format : Format Kindle
- Taille du fichier : 2687 KB
- Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée : 387 pages
- Editeur : Vintage Canada (18 mars 2009)
- Vendu par : Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
- Langue : Anglais
- ASIN: B0031TZC64
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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.Par R. Hardy
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.
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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.Par Alexandra Shimo
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