Posted by: Jeff Warren - Author of The Head Trip

In keeping with the associative spirit of my last blog entry, I would like to make some wild generalizations about science journalism. I would say that most science journalism is inherently conservative. That is to say, science journalists want to get it right, so they often ground their arguments in consensus. Like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything or Jay Ingram’s Theatre of the Mind, they do chart the disputes, but the knowledge they deal in is essentially consolidated knowledge. It’s the hard foundational matter on which the sturdy edifice of workaday science is built. This is terrific and important science writing, the kind I love to gobble up, but it is not really the kind of science writing that I do.

I prefer to play around at the more dangerous leading edge of science. This, too, is where science happens. But it’s fraught with peril here because there’s a lot less consensus. This is especially true when it comes to the mind, which can be looked at through so many lenses—philosophical, neurological, psychological, phenomenological. Here everything is in flux. It’s a rowdy scrimmage of vague experiments, stirring anecdotes, wild speculation, emotional ego wars, new theories, old evidence, new evidence, old theories, and looming over at all, the dreaded “paradigm.”

Do we need a new so-called “paradigm” to understand the mind, or is that just New Age balderdash, relativistic Kuhnian wunder-fiddling, the kind that makes the Richard Dawkinses and Steven Weinbergs and Patricia Churchlands of the world reach for their guns? It’s too early to say. But it’s great fun for me as a writer to throw myself into this scrimmage and try to piece together a calm and coherent narrative. For me the best tools for writing this way are creative, and have to do with a book’s form and structure and tone. Which doesn’t mean you have to abandon all reason and sense—you don’t. There’s still a certain journalistic responsibility to point out the controversies and be transparent when transitioning from sober analysis to woolly speculation. But, as I say, it is more fun out here on the leading edge. This is where the Big Game graze—the freaks and the fights and the eerie sights. This is where to come to fire your imagination. Because—and this is the crucial point—scientists come here too. For many of them the leading edge may even be what drew them to science in the first place.

Posted by: Jeff Warren - author of The Head Trip

It’s a strange thing to be a first-time author, about to make the world’s acquaintance. You spend years toiling in anonymity—particularly if, like me, your subject matter is hard to summarize in one sentence at a dinner party (let me try: “The Head Trip is a first-person adventure romp through all the wild variations of waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness”—not bad, been practising). And then suddenly for a few brief moments the world turns its gaze to you, and your hair stands on end. It’s like being electroshocked. The world (OK, one local radio host and a friend of your Mom’s) says, “Show me your wares, kid.” You squeak back: “Ah! I’m having a bit of trouble thinking since I’m being electroshocked!” Luckily, I’ve studied the mind, so I know how to handle the situation: shift into automatic, what athletes call “the Zone,” where I can move and speak without frontal lobe encumbrance. I am then able to spiel. Because at this point I know my stuff. Believe me. During the writing and editing process I read my own crazy book about a dozen times—I never want to read the thing again.

So what anxieties do I have right now? Well so far the automatic spiel-impulse has helped me hold my own in the live radio interviews (that and imagining it’s the ’70s and everyone is naked, suffering the chilly draft in the studio). My biggest concern is with the book reviews. You really can’t control them. So far I’ve had one—a good one—but I worry about the ones coming up. I especially worry about the Globe and Mail. If they do one (they may not, which in a way would be a relief), a lot of discriminating Canadian book consumers will read it. And what if the reviewer for that august publication is one of those types who thinks in logical scientific ways, but who may not appreciate that this is a different kind of science book: plenty rational but also a bit creative and weird?

Because that is what happens when you look at the mind from the inside. It doesn’t stay demurely in its assigned seat. Instead it races out in front of the bleachers, buck-naked (apparently everything is naked in my metaphor world), singing sports anthems like a streaker at half-time. Neurology can’t catch up. All it can do is hold out a pathetic little towel and hope the children’s eyes are covered—hell-LO!