Rabbit Hole

It’s fascinating to think about how the various mystical states all relate to one another. Former religious studies professor Robert Forman sees it as a progression outward. I tried to capture this in my comic panel.

“We will all be neurobiologists to some degree in the new millennium””James Austin.

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.

“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. I spent 2 years building an impressionist encyclopaedia of cities. Read about it here.

Around the Wheel … each state of consciousness animated by changes in global brain activation, from the Hypnagogic state at sleep onset through to the mysterious depths of Pure Awareness. Watch the 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.

A summary of much of what I learned while writing and researching The Head Trip. Via expectations, suggestion and possibly even intention, we can learn to remix consciousness. We live in special-effects studios of the mind …

Can we know what it’s like to be a non-human animal? Most scientists and philosophers say we cannot. Others disagree. A talk on whales, kinship in nature, and the limits of human empathy and imagination.

How well do you know your own mind? The Wheel of Consciousness is an audio-visual journey through twelve distinct states of waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness. The idea is to use moving image and music and narration to provoke each state of consciousness in the audience – that is, if they don’t nod off during the tedious bits.

For fun here is 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.

Neurofeedback shows us we can learn to self-regulate our own mental processes using nothing but a few EEG leads and a computer program. It’s the late 20th century version of something meditators have been practicing for centuries…

Epigenetics has profound implications for what it means to be human. Not only are genes are not fate, it also seems as though their expression in life is shaped by the experience of our ancestors, who continue on inside us, their lived decisions echoing through the genome. Features interviews with McGill University’s Moshe Szyf, and Tel Aviv University’s Eva Jablonka.

Two CBC Ideas documentaries on sleep and dreaming. We spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deeply mysterious. The more you examine them, the stranger and more variegated they get.

An animated tour through waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness, made by the Discovery channel. Features a fire-breathing dragon, a magical tennis ball, a lot of hand waving and an embarrassing pimp roll.

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 water. These two docs are about the mind that returned to the water. How did the ocean shape the brains, the societies, and the sensory worlds of whales and dolphins?

By the end of the twentieth century, scientists had scoured the far reaches of the material world. It was then that a few brave travelers turned in a different direction: inward!

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 light dims, cold sets in, and you die of exposure. But once in awhile someone comes by to take a look. And once and a while they bring with them something really cool.