Language English Role Psychologist Name Robert Ornstein | Genre Psychology Nationality American | |
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Pen name Robert E. Ornstein, Robert Ornstein Occupation Psychologist, researcher and author Alma mater Queens College, City University of New York, USA Education City University of New York, Stanford University, Queens College, City University of New York Books Healthy pleasures, New world new mind, Multimind, The healing brain, The amazing brain | ||
Robert Evan Ornstein (born 1942) is an American psychologist, researcher and author.
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He has taught at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, based at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, and has been professor at Stanford University and chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK).
Early life and education
Robert Evan Ornstein was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and grew up in the city. He was twice high school math champion in a city-wide contest, and "wavered between physics and poetry before compromising on psychology" at the City University of New York's Queens College.
In 1964 he was awarded a bachelor's degree in psychology at Queens College, and went on to gain a PhD at Stanford University, California in 1968. His doctoral thesis was On the Experience of Time.
Psychology career
Ornstein has been involved in reconciling the scientific understanding of mind and consciousness with other scientific and cultural traditions. His work has been featured in a 1974 Time magazine article entitled Hemispheric Thinker.
He has written on the brain's role in health in The Healing Brain with David Sobel of Kaiser Permanente; the way in which human consciousness is unable to understand the fast paced modern world in New World New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution with Paul Ehrlich; and the way in which our current consciousness has developed in The Axemaker’s Gift, with James Burke. He worked to reconcile the wisdom traditions of the east and science in The Psychology of Consciousness and is interested in promoting the modern Sufism of Idries Shah. Shah and Ornstein met in the 1960s. Realizing that Ornstein could be an ideal partner in propagating his teachings, translating them into the idiom of psychotherapy, Shah made him his deputy in the United States. Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness (1972) was enthusiastically received by the academic psychology community, as it coincided with new interests in the field, such as the study of biofeedback and other techniques designed to achieve shifts in mood and awareness. Ornstein's book The Right Mind deals with split-brain studies and other experiments or clinical evidence revealing the abilities of the right cerebral hemisphere.