It’s been about 40 years since I read Julian Jayne’s book about his bicameral mind hypothesis, so my memory is more than a little fuzzy. Don’t ask me about the details! So I appreciated this summary by someone who supports the theory.
Imagine a theoretical framework that solves a long list of mysteries: the origin of religion and its concomitant features—supernatural visitations, ancestor worship, monumental mortuary architecture, divination, oracles, spirit possession, and the vestiges of archaic spirituality still visible in churches, temples, and mosques. This approach also explains otherwise inexplicable phenomena, such as hallucinations, hypnosis, glossolalia, and children’s imaginary companions. Moreover, this theoretical approach has clinical value: its argument about the originally nonpathological, adaptive nature of hallucinations helped establish an intellectual climate conducive to the Hearing Voices Network, which regards voice-hearing as a meaningful experience. Moreover, this framework comes with hypotheses waiting to be tested.
Such a framework can be found in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) by Julian Jaynes (1920–1997). He theorized that until about three thousand years ago (with some geographic variation) humans possessed a “bicameral” (“two-chambered”) mentality in which the right hemisphere communicated with the left hemisphere using command hallucinations. These were interpreted as the voices of gods, ancestors, or godlike rulers. But population expansion and social complexity put pressure on this dual psychological system of supernatural superior and mortal subordinate. During the late second millennium BCE, this two-tier neurocultural arrangement collapsed. In response, languages—by developing metaphoric “mind words”—upgraded psychological processes. Jaynes identified the new mentality as “consciousness” (or in a wordier rendering, subjective introspectable self-awareness). Jaynesian consciousness is neither an innate, biologically fixed trait, nor something identified with sensation, thinking, or being awake. It is a learned cultural innovation.
That first paragraph claims the theory has explanatory power, but I fail to see how a hypothesis about the ancient duality of the mind explains a diverse and complex phenomenon like religion. I also don’t see the clinical value of a vague claim about hallucinations. I agree that hallucinations are real, and shouldn’t necessarily be pathologized, but where is the virtue in clinical practice to treating them as something more than a consequence of the problem of consciousness? I don’t think that splitting consciousness in two helps, because now you’ve created two equally big problems from a single problem.
You know, Wilhelm Fliess came up with an explanation of neurosis that involved a mysterious connection between the nose and the genitals, and even came up with surgical interventions to treat depression and psychosis. Did it work? No. I’m as convinced that the bicameral framework is effective in doing anything as I am about a hack chopping up turbinate bones.
The second paragraph is a silly claim about history — that there was a revolution in how the brain works 4,000 years ago, based on a hypothetical separation of mind functions before that transition, which Jaynes cannot demonstrate existed, except by his interpretation of old myths. Sure, people weren’t writing introspective psychological novels in the bronze age, but they were creating great works of art and building systems of laws and expressing themselves in poetry and music. They don’t seem fundamentally different from modern humans in that sense.
I dismissed it all as baseless fluff when I read it all those years ago, and that was before I started a research career looking at the development of cross-connections in the brains of fish and insects. The brain is full of commissures and decussations! Even your eyes split their output, with each eye sending information to both hemispheres, and the earliest neuronal pathways tend to innervate the contralateral side of the nervous system. Jaynes has to postulate that we had this massive cross-connection, but that people didn’t notice and incorporate into their ways of thinking until there was a “learned cultural innovation.”
I can well believe that there have been major cultural revolutions in our history. I just don’t see any evidence that somehow our minds were split into two chambers once upon a time.
These bozos have some really strange beliefs.
In Homer’s Iliad, we rarely encounter the Greek word for ‘I’ or much that refers to internal thought or decision-making. bit.ly/4C1lZgk
Cultural theorist Brian J. McVeigh agrees with Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes’ claim that the Homeric Greeks had no internal life or self-awareness.
I guess the ancient Greeks were all NPCs, then.
When I first heard about this back in the early 80s, my big question about it was, what is the mechanism for a universal switchover 4000 years ago? Surely even if the majority of people changed, there would be a substantial number of people who did not? Particularly people living on different continents than the one where the change occurred? I would expect that even today there would be a large enough number of people who were still in the original, “bicameral” state that they would be obvious. So what could conceivably produce effectively 100% switchover in a short period of time? I don’t think he answers that question at all.
@1: Sounds like it’s dipping into another quack idea I’ve heard of called the “500 monkey threshold” or something. A group of monkeys got into the habit of washing their potatoes and it spread culturally. Allegedly, once 500 monkeys adopted the habit, every monkey of the same species across the planet started doing the same.
Naturally, that was BS. It spread through the study group and eventually fell out of favor. The whole magical transmission thing was entirely made up.
There are so many arguments against the premise. Yet it was incredibly popular, and still is — it’s analogous to the Ancient Astronauts nonsense, which pandered to people’s preference for simple explanations for complex phenomena, no matter how wrong.
This also seems to be a misunderstanding of ancient religions, at least what we know of it, which is admittedly splotchy. But the idea of gods speaking personally to the average person just isn’t something we see them discussing. These aren’t gnostic religions rooted in personal experience, so much as they are about propitiation to chaotic forces in the world. Generally you didn’t have the gods themselves talking to you, so much as you leaving the right sacrifices for the local river so that it didn’t flood its banks and kill your crops.
That’s not to say that there aren’t ancient religions which do fall into the more gnostic category, but as you say PZ, religion is a big and complicated behavior. “Hearing voices” is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain religion.
I remember reading that when it first came out. What struck me was what timothyeisele said, “what is the mechanism for a universal switchover 4000 years ago?”
The only other thing I really remember from Jayne’s theory of 4000 years, was the intimation that some people had still not developed “consciousness”.
I think of that every time I walk into Walmart…
Certainly real. Many Boomers who lived through the 1960s and 1970s personally experienced them, albeit with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs.
These days, most people or at least Boomers who are experiencing hallucinations are ones derived from pathological processes. Hallucinations are common in dementia patients.
One of my old friends has Parkinsons. He now lives in an elaborate fantasy world with around 20 new people living in his house. I’ve had to remove (imaginary) people from a chair so he could sit down.
When necessary, we tell them they aren’t real and that works for about 15 minutes.
@6: Are your friend’s hallucinations caused by the Parkinson itself, or by their meds? My mother had Parkinson, and her problem was that as the disease progressed they had to up her dose of levodopa, and past a certain point that starts causing delusions. The last several years of her life involved continuous juggling of dosages of levodopa vs. anti-psychotics to give her mobility while keeping her in touch with reality, with only marginal success (it didn’t help that she also had cerebral atrophy which caused cognitive issues). Once when she was in hospital, she told me an, um, fascinating story about some sinister conspiracy among the staff, and how the patients were organizing to oppose it. I managed to talk her out of it enough to get her to accept her meds from the nurses.
It was not a happy time for, well, anyone. The distress probably helped kill my father.
Yeah, I think this has a root in the existing evidence that, if you split the two halves, you get two brains that can act independent of each other, and even counter each other’s actions. So, there isn’t “no” basis of this. However, it is likely something, if it happened, that took place vastly far back in time (I mean, seriously, almost every animal known has a two hemisphere structure, at least mammals, or am I incorrect in this?), its plausible that the early species that formed two separate sides, and didn’t have them talking to each other from the start, was overtaken by a subspecies that started to form integration between them, very quickly, because coordination of these things would have been far more beneficial than the mere division of labor, for specific tasks, and a confusing self contradicting control that would have existed before it. Not some “recent” event, that just happened in humans. So, yeah, vaguely based on some facts, maybe, based on anything that makes sense in the vast history of biology in general – give me a break.
Good question.
It could be both.
There is no way to separate the two causes because he has a severe, atypical form of Parkinsons. If they reduce his medications, he freezes up and becomes comatose.
His case is so atypical that I suspect it is one of the rare genetic based types. These are harder to treat and can progress much faster.
This is distressing for everyone around him, of course.
And, it isn’t going to end well.
Parkinsons is one of those diseases that we can’t really treat well enough.
There is an urgent need for better drugs and therapies.
The Trump regime has responded to the challenge by attacking and defunding US medical research. That isn’t going to help at all.
Indeed. It is entirely unsafe to presume that ancient literature from the late Bronze Age is lacking in anything like modern psychological conceptions of the self and the mind’s introspective ability. True, epic poems like the Iliad and Odyssey do sometimes have scenes where a god puts thoughts in someone’s mind (such as Athena giving Nausicaa a dream that makes her go down to the riverbank to do the washing) or stops them in their tracks to reconsider something (such as Athena with Achilles in the Iliad when he is about to retire to his tent to sulk), but there are just as many examples of where characters turn over ideas in their own mind (think Odysseus consulting his heart on what to do during the shipwreck in book five) or comment on the psychological impact of bodily functions (his speech on the tyranny of the belly at the Phaeacian court).
The entire Jensen hypothesis is based on a knowingly corrupted database. Each of the following makes the database from which he draws his conclusions so flawed that I have no words:
• Linguistic (and cultural) barriers to understanding the underlying material, especially in the form of unstated cultural assumptions in the referenced material
• Transition from oral tradition to documentary preservation with little understanding of the difference (really, really obvious example: compare any of the adaptations of Hamlet — even just in audio)
• Perhaps most egregiously, whose particular versions of particular tales were preserved for present analysis (and, I should add, a quasiliterary analysis done during the excessive fashionability of Saussure and Derrida, which should raise eyebrows all by itself)
• Mixture of overtly secular and overtly religious source material as if there’s no difference in understanding it
One cannot draw too many valid large-perspective theoretical inquiries from a knowingly — even intentionally — warped data set that contains no material originating outside of the contemporaneous social elites… which never stops people with their own agendas (and egos) from trying. But then, “a little humility” has seldom been a feature of Continental philosophy.
cartomancer @10: Jaynes considered the Odyssey to be showing early indications of consciousness, unlike the Iliad.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_Homer_and_the_Homeric_Age#Colour_controversy
Recursive Rabbit @ # 2: … the “500 monkey threshold” or something.
That idea (dubbed the “100th monkey”) spread around during the late 70s-early ’80s, IIRC, and I dug into it a little bit. It started from observations of monkeys on some minor Japanese island, where one female monkey started washing (either yams or sweet) potatoes, and the practice spread across the island, then was supposedly reported on another island too distant from the first one for any monkey to have transferred without help.
This story made it to a “new age” writer named Lyall Watson, who packed it into one of his books (I think Supernature, but maybe that’s just the only title of his I can recollect), and was taken up by mystical peace activists who wished it could magically spread the concepts of non-violence by reaching some critical threshold of telepathy (apparently suggested by a book entitled The Hundredth Monkey). It did cross the tipping point of best-sellerdom – but even Lyall Watson made it clear that he literally heard about it from some stranger in a bar.
I heard of 100th monkey via online Sheldrake fanbois decades ago, though the only connection to his ideas would be morphic resonance serving as a pseudo-explanation of another phenomenon that didn’t itself exist. The macaques learning to wash sweet potatoes may have been legit, but something like that hitting critical mass to spread by a mystery psi phenomenon seems quite sus.
Sheldrake himself went from legit botany to wild speculation loosely based on developmental theories like the morphogenetic field, which is quite localized in cells and tissues, to….wait for it…psychic pets who anticipate their owners coming home. His early books were kinda fun and did put a biased spin on developmental biology that led nowhere useful. Jaynes might serve a similar purpose, something fun to read, but to be taken with huge grains of salt.
The online Sheldrake community I used to haunt as a nascent skeptic were all mostly nice enough folks, especially the webmaster who was also into Jungian beliefs, my forte at the time. Jung is a gateway drug to Sheldrake. I presume many into Sheldrake were probably into various other recreational substances with psychedelic qualities.
Julian Jayne’s “bicameral mind” hypothesis of visual and verbal modes of thinking is useful – or was, anyhow – as the guiding inspiration that led to the GUI (Graphic User Interface) which gave us Mac and Windows software.
I have a copy on my bookshelf. I read it twice when it came out.
It is 491 pages which I won’t be reading again.
If the ancient Greeks were color blind, were their forebears also? I would sure like to know how colorblind artists created the frescoes of Akrotiri.
I have Jaynes’ book and started reading it years ago but had other priorities. Dennett was well aware of him.
Could we say he’s more a culturalist than an ev psych genetic determinist? Was his shift a spandrel thing however wrong-headed?
There are collectivist vs individualist sorts of cultures. Egoism as an extreme ain’t great. Maybe there is shame versus guilt as a dichotomy? But his dichotomy seems to rest more on the attribution of where self-talk comes from? I know my inner voice, however critical or supportive, is me and not a god. Did earlier humans have a problem with that distinction? A form of schizophrenia may stem from misattribution of self-talk, but is that worthy of a culture shift thingy?
Pierce @16, you are incorrect.
GUI development came first.
The foundational ideas of the GUI (overlapping windows, icons, menus, and the mouse) were developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s (1972–1973), building on Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos” and Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 Sketchpad, but The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was not published until late 1976.
John Morales @20
I think you are right going back to Xerox PARC on the GUI. But there are analogies to computers vs the mind to be had still even if Jaynes wasn’t an inspiration but his fans were inspired. Dennett was on it:
https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf
I’m more with Ned Block:
Read it in it’s entirety but Dennett has sympathy for Jaynes such as (maybe a stretch):
There’s more to it, Hemidactylus. I did check before posting, so I may as well add it here:
Alan Kay (the Xerox PARC computer scientist who designed the desktop GUI later adopted by Apple and Microsoft) explicitly documented the cognitive psychologists who inspired his work, who were Jerome Bruner’s three stages of cognitive representation, Jean Piaget & Seymour Papert (intuitive constructivism, simple enough for children), and Tim Gallwey’s The inner game of tennis, 1974, which contrasted ‘Self 1’ (the verbal, judgmental, conscious ego) with ‘Self 2’ (the intuitive, visual, muscle-memory side).
I suspect Gallwey was who Pierce confused with Jayne, since the two aspects are present there too.
Clearly, the idea was floating around at the time, and Jayne’s take was but one.