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Many of Ornstein's ideas are spelled out in a book, The Psychology of Consciousness, published in 1972 and adopted for classroom use by more than 300 colleges and universities in twelve different departments ranging from biology to religion. Says Robert Livingston, professor of neuroscience at the University of California in San Diego: "Ornstein does an outstanding job of communicating ideas and giving a degree of legitimatization in areas which would be considered a little bizarre from the point of view of classical psychology." Says Assistant Professor of Psychology Louise Ludwig of Los Angeles City College: "Ideas about consciousness, creativity, even E.S.P., have been creeping back into psychology over the past five years. I use some of Ornstein's points in class to stimulate students' creativity about themselves."
Born in Brooklyn, Ornstein was a two-time citywide high school math champion and wavered between physics and poetry before compromising on psychology at Queens College. He got his doctorate at Stanford, writing his thesis on the perception of time; later he collaborated with Psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo on a book called On the Psychology of Meditation. Ornstein is currently at work on seven more books. He is also teaching at the U.C. Medical Center in San Francisco, lecturing, traveling and organizing symposia on the nature of consciousness. A bachelor, he tools around in a hot orange Porsche 914 and lives on a Los Altos mini-estate complete with sun deck and swimming pool. He takes no time out for meditation. "I'm not convinced it's good for you, or more personally, that it's good for me," he says. He is far more interested in pursuing his electronic studies of brain activity, the kind of work well suited to the "very linear, left-hemisphere person" he believes himself to be.