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Dr Ornstein began his research career on the problem of how we experience time. His theory, which has been used in hundreds of experiments, is that we judge intervals by the size of the information in storage about that interval. This means that judged time can collapse and expand due to future events. His PhD thesis was made into a book, On The Experience Of Time, which outlines the theory and several experiments.
Next was an analysis of some of the "psychologies" of the East, and he pointed out many similarities between the two kinds of psychology. Both, for instance, emphasize that the world of perception of a representation of the real world is in some senses an illusion. Techniques for overcoming some of these illusions are the subject of the books On The Psychology of Meditation, The Psychology of Consciousness and The Evolution of Consciousness.
Robert Ornstein is best known, however, for his research and theorizing on the two sides of the brain. Following Roger Sperry's pioneering demonstrations of the split-brain, he devised a way to show that normal people, doing normal things like writing a letter and visualizing in space, selectively turn on and off their two sides of the brain. The experiments involved putting electrodes on both halves of the scalp and comparing the power of the alpha waves during these tasks. Once done, this unleashed literally thousands of studies using this technique and, then, newer devices such as PET Scans and MRI. Some of this work is presented in The Psychology of Consciousness, The Evolution of Consciousness and The Nature of Human Consciousness.
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