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 Queen's College.

In 1964 he was awarded a bachelor's degree in psychology at Queen's College, and went on to gain a Ph.D 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.

Books written

• On the Experience of Time (Penguin Books, 1969)
• The Psychology of Consciousness (Harcourt Brace, 1972)
• 4th rev. ed. (Penguin Books, 1986)
• On the Psychology of Meditation, coauthor to Claudio Naranjo (Allen & Unwin, 1973)
• The Mind Field (Viking Press, 1976)
• paperback (Malor Books, 1996)
• The Amazing Brain, with Richard F. Thompson (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984)
• Multimind (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986)
• The Healing Brain, with David Sobel (Simon & Schuster, 1987)
• New World, New Mind: Moving Towards Conscious Evolution, co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlich (Methuen, 1989)
• The Evolution of Consciousness, illustrated by Ted Dewan (Prentice-Hall US, 1991)
• The Roots of the Self, illustrated by Ted Dewan (HarperCollins US, 1993)
• The Axemaker’s Gift, with James Burke, illustrated by Ted Dewan (G. P. Putnam's Sons US, 1995)
• The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997)
• MindReal: How the Mind Creates its Own Virtual Reality illustrated by Ted Dewan (Malor Books, 2008)

Books edited

• (Hardcover)
• (Paperback)

Academic monographs

• Physiological Studies of Consciousness (Institute for Cultural Research, 1973)