Videos and More
/ Video Talks / Radio Docs / Websites / Illustrations / Inventions /
Video Talks
Here are an assortment of talks / explorations from over the years, many with immersive sound and graphics.
Why Meditate
Maybe meditation is something you want to pursue, maybe it isn't. In this ten minute clip, I lay out my own reasons for practice, and discuss an experience I had on retreat that brought the whole thing home.
Mansion of The Mind
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.Radio Docs
I’m one of the founding producers of CBC Radio’s The Current, and have done pieces for Ideas and Tapestry . Here are a few highlights.
Ocean Mind
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... more
While You Were Out
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.
The Real World of Dreams
Dreamy radio. Thirty minutes of craven lusty anguished interiority and writer Rodger Kamenetz' "authentic self."
The Head Trip
Made this site when The Head Trip - came out. If you click on each wheel segment you can read a little blurb about each different state of consciousness. Also excerpts the entire introduction of the book, and has some other stuff too.
Urbantherapy
“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.Illustrations
The comic panel is to the scientific fig what subjective experience is to objective brain science: sloppy expressionist truant vs anal materialist authority. My book, The Head Trip was an attempt to bridge these two worlds.
How to use the Hypnagogic for Creative Problem Solving
The hypnagogic state is perfect for problem solving. The question is: how do you retrieve solutions when you are charging into sleep, the notorious memory-obliterator? Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali each had one answer
The Author’s Hypnagogic Wakeup
Where exactly do these hypnagogic images come from, and is there any logic to their appearance? Are they a species of dream, and if so, do they appear suddenly, as fully developed dramas, or do they evolve more gradually, as part of some furtive and mysterious psychic progression? The dramatic tension is almost unbearable.
Mavromatis’ Four Stages of Hypnagogia
The mysterious psychologist Andreas Mavromatis – another obsessive classifier – spent a lot of time trying to work out the exact progression of hypnagogic experiences. Hypnagogia: the Everyman’s Trip.
Wheel of Consciousness Animation
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
The Consciousness Mixing Board
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