When I read the January issue of Discover Magazine, I found
a fascinating article about an author’s journey to discover the familiar and
less familiar states of consciousness. The article was titled “How
To Sleep Like a Hunter-Gatherer”, with the intriguing subtitle of “Not all
people sleep in ‘giant sleep machines,’ like we do.” It was an excerpt from the book The Head
Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren
It was a provocative article and I had read it shortly
before Dwayne asked me if I’d be
interested in writing a book review. I
had planned on reading The Head Trip
anyway, so I told him yes.
Started Having Second Thoughts
The book seemed so interesting from the beginning. However, I was starting to have second
thoughts when I still hadn’t finished the first chapter after almost a
month. Quite honestly, I was starting to
consider choosing a different book. However, I’m so glad I kept reading. By the middle of the book, I was convinced that The Head
Trip may be one of the best ten books I’ve read in the last year. By the end of the book, I was convinced that this
book is among the ten most interesting books I’ve ever read.
Let me put this into some context: When I look at my list of favorite books,
they typically deal with one of two topics: 1) The spiritual aspects of how we live and work, both from the
cognitive brain hardware aspects, but also the thinking software perspective. Most of these books have inspired me to
actually do something different. 2) Books
that talk about big, big ideas: ideas so big that they take the reader on an
almost psychedelic journey of ideas. (I
include my list of top ten books at the bottom of this article.)
The Head Trip spans
both of these favorite categories of mine. In this book, the author takes us along on his journey to personally discover,
experience and chronicle all the known states of consciousness. He starts with the sleeping states (the
hypnagogic, the slow wave, the Watch, the REM dream, the lucid dream, and the
hypnopompic) and then goes into the waking states (the trance, the daydream,
the SMR, the Zone, the pure consciousness event).
The first thing that I noticed while reading the book is the
author’s sense of burning curiosity that propels this incredible (and not easy)
journey. Furthermore, he has an
astounding ability to record his perceptions along the way. Upon reflection, this is quite a feat: how
can someone writing about what it feels like to fall asleep actually be
interesting? After reading his
chronicle, I was not only interested, but riveted!
During most of the chapters, I felt like I was being pulled
into this incredible adventure, with the author serving as a tour guide on a frontier
that we’re only vaguely aware of. And I felt that to even be on this frontier requires
the help of someone like the author, to bring the sights into visibility and focus.
By the time I completed the second chapter, I found myself riveted
by his descriptions of sleeping and dreaming. By the fourth chapter, I became dazzled, and started to share his sense
of wonder and adventure, already starting to make plans of how I could
replicate his journey. By the tenth
chapter, I had dog-eared almost twenty pages so I could go back and generate a
proper TODO list. By the end of the
book, I had already called a neurobiologist to see if I could get training on
controlling my theta and SRB waves, and find out how much insurance will cover
(the answer in my case, it turns out, is 70%).
I believe that it is appropriate that the author used the
metaphor of a journey to frame his book, complete with a passport stamp at the
end of each chapter. It is an effective
metaphor, because as a reader, I am already starting to prepare my own
itinerary.
I've decided to on the “Top Ten List” format to structure
this review. I’ve listed the top five
surprises and revelations I had while reading his book.
Surprise 1: The real value of sleeping enough, and the strange segmented
sleep
Sleep researchers have found that amazing things happen when
people get enough sleep. In a series of
experiments where people are deprived of artificial light for long periods of
time, researchers found that people will first tend to catch up on sleep, as if
to pay back any sleep deficit. And then
they settle into a pattern where they are sleeping 7-9 hours per night.
What I found astonishing was how the subjects described
their sense of well-being. They
typically reported feelings that their days becoming more intense: “colors were
more vivid, the air more crisp, their consciousness was crystal clear. Their
testimony was so compelling, said Wehr, it made him wonder whether ‘any of us
know what it is like to be truly awake.”
But, even more amazing, sleep researchers have found that another
strange state of consciousness emerges after several weeks. After 2-3 weeks without artificial lighting,
subjects’ sleep will divide into two periods, divided by a state called the
Watch, a state of semi-wakeful contemplation.
Interestingly, hundreds of descriptions of this state can be
found in literature written before the invention of artificial lighting (e.g., Homer’s
Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Robert Louis Stevenson,
etc.) It was often described as a period
of reflection and relaxed alertness (and also, apparently, a common time to
have sex).
The author describes his experiences with segmented sleep,
and describes his hyper-alert state during waking hours, like a “plucked guitar
string.”
Holy cow! There is a
whole level of awareness and energy that we can derive just from sleeping
more. Talk about a something that seems
worthwhile to experience!
Surprise 2: The lab experiments behind lucid dreaming
Lucid dreaming describes the state when the dreamer is not
only aware that he or she is in a dream, and but can then, to some extent,
control their actions and surroundings in the dream. The experimental breakthrough that
legitimized research in this area was when Dr. Stephen LaBerge in 1978, in
controlled laboratory conditions, was able to repeatedly enter the REM dreaming
state.
In the experiment, he was able to recognize that he was in a
dream (i.e., “Oh, I just woke up in the lab. No, I’m not! I’m actually only
dreaming that I’m back in the lab!”), and then while remaining in the dream
state, deliberately signal to his research partner in the lab through up/down
eye-motions (i.e., “I am dreaming. So, I
will signal my research collaborator by moving my eyeballs three times, which
he will be able to detect.”)
Through these experiments, he and his collaborator (Lynn Nagel) were able to
confirm the existence of this special type of consciousness and awareness while
dreaming. Since then, there has emerged
a group of practitioners who practice lucid dreaming. One of the appeals is that for the dreamer,
experiences are perceived similarly by the brain, whether they occur in a dream
or in reality. Feelings reported often
include heightened states of mindfulness, as well as being vivid and exultant.
What I found astonishing is that practitioners find that
they often catch themselves being tricked by the brain into thinking they are
in reality, when in fact they are dreaming. Lucid dreamers learn to constantly question, “Is this reality, or am I
only just dreaming?” To question
reality, the dreamer must always test reality, looking for key giveaways, such
as light switches not working when toggled quickly, or digital clocks not
advancing. Why? The dream state seem unable to replicates
mechanical actions correctly.
What? Perceived
reality not always being what it seems? It’s
like The Matrix, but in real life!
Surprise 3: The extent to which the brain programs the mind
Studies have repeatedly shown how much influence cognition
can have on the body. But, the author
gives an example that I have personally experienced. Certain people have a tendency to wake up
right before their alarm clock goes off. What is strange is that this holds true even on those days when they
have to wake up at an unusually early time. In other words, they set their alarm clock for 3:30am, and they still
wake up at 3:27am! In other words, the
cognition that we need to wake up early seems to preprogram a set of chemical
release that makes us wake up early.
Amazing! Even when we
don’t consciously intend to pre-program our body, such as to wake up early, our
bodies often chemically pre-program our bodies for us!
Surprise 4: There are tools to help
increase focus
There is an increasingly accepted field called neurofeedback
that is used for children diagnosed with ADD. It is predicated on the observation that certain brainwaves are critical
for focusing, such as the lowered theta and elevated SMR levels. Researchers confirmed that these levels are
reversed in ADD patients, and is coincident with impulsiveness, leaping from
task to task, and hyperactivity.
Amazingly, simple operant training (like how Pavlov trained
the dog to drool by ringing a bell) can be used to create more focused
states. The author actually goes through
40 training sessions – although he makes little progress in the first 30
sessions, he finally makes a breakthrough that resulted in a friend commenting
that he seemed more relaxed. He cites
other people expressing far greater effects, such as feeling like “a changed
man,” “becoming aware of things outside her own head: she could hear more
sounds, feel sensation she hadn’t noticed before, feeling more alert and
upbeat.”
The author describes his struggle to achieve his
breakthrough in the allotted 40 sessions, but quotes Martin Seligman, former
president of the American Psychological Association, on the “dirty little
secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psycho-pharmacopia
is palliative. That is, all of them are
symptom suppressors, and when you stop taking them, you’re back at square one.”
What I found so intriguing is that there are the curative
approaches, such as antibiotics or trained self-regulation such as
neurofeedback, which make a lasting impact on how we feel and how we think.
Surprise 5: Milestones to the Pure
Consciousness Event, and strange utterances from skeptics
As an occasional meditation practitioner, I was aware of the
amount of research that has been done on Buddhist meditation, but was astounded
by the amount of research that has been adapted from Visuddhimagga (“the Path
of Purification”), as it serves as a rigorously objective chronicle of
thousands of years of meditation practice. Considerable work has been done confirming and replicating the path of
meditation practitioners to achieve the PCE state.
Combine this with the fact that the brain is incredibly
adaptable: the visual areas of the brain in blind people get taken over by
tactile processing, and London taxi drivers increase the size of their hippocampus the longer they work.
In the same way, meditation changes the mind, to the extent
that the author suggests that meditation not only helps achieve altered states,
but altered traits! The author describes
the levels of progression that many meditation practitioners and scientists
have been able to repeatedly confirm of achieving mindfulness, to equanimity,
to a cessation of consciousness.
I’ve read books on this topic before, the author presents
the background and path better than any I’ve read. And it includes some very surprising sources,
including Daniel
Goleman (Mr. Emotional Intelligence) and Paul
Ekman (famous for his groundbreaking research on facial expressions and
emotion).
He describes Paul Ekman’s (a very distinguished and
skeptical scientist) surprising experience: “He was so impressed by his short private session he and his daughter
with the Dalai Lama that afterward he started up something called the
Extraordinary Persons Project to investigate ‘the transformative quality of
interactions with extraordinary beings.’.. The encounter, Ekman explained later, was what ‘some people would call a
mystical, transforming experience… I was
inexplicably suffused with physical warmth during those five to ten
minutes… I felt a goodness I’d never
felt before in my life, all the time I sat there…” He then describes that after a lifetime of
erupting anger, after his meeting, his flare-ups ceased. “I believe that physical contact with that
kind of goodness can have a transformative effect.” (!!!)
This borders on the woo-woo, as are some other books on my
favorite list. But given this kind of
substantiation, it reinforced to me that there is something in this journey
that makes it worthwhile destination!
In summary
In writing this book review, I found myself dusting off some
of my favorite books I’ve read and recommitting myself to increasing my
mindfulness and meditation practices. The
book reinforced the value of some very pragmatic steps we can take to increase
our awareness of the world we live in, and be more cognizant of how the brain
(hardware and software) affects how we think.
Even if I never achieve the Post Consciousness Event, even
reading about others achieving it inspires me with a sense of awe and
wonder. And to me, that has very
spiritual aspects, as well as being inherently a joyful and jubilant learning
experience.
Some of my favorite books in this area
Brain hardware and software (from scientifically rigorous to
increasingly woo-woo):
Mind expanding ideas:
About Gene Kim;
Gene loves the idea of joyful and jubilant learning,
especially about the software and hardware aspects of cognition, and the biological
basis of elevated states of awareness. You can read about his journey of becoming trained as a Theory of
Constraints Jonah at http://tocjourney.typepad.com.
I am sorry to be so terribly late with this! 
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