The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [Paperback]

The book is basically an elegant and meticulously detailed theory about the historical appearance in humans of what we call consciousness. The tough sledding referred to by many of the other reviewers, I think, is in his explication of what precisely consciousness IS, and how that differs from our common misconceptions about it. This part, admittedly, is no page- turner: I had to stop and think frequently just to make sense of what he was saying and trying to relate that to my own experience.

But the definitional foundation pays off as Jaynes places the origin of human consciousness into the historical timeline, and starts applying it to the ancient literature of the Old Testament and the Iliad, and to several curiosities in idols observed throughout the prehistoric world. This is the portion of the book that I found breathtaking. In particular, reading the Old Testament has a resonance for me that it never had before. As a modern skeptic, many of these stories were difficult for me to think about: there seemed to be no middle ground between thinking of the stories as cultural fabrications or else having to confront the odd hypothesis that they are records of a completely implausible reality. Now the stories are revealing in ways that I never would have imagined.

I do wonder if the intervening years have been kind to Jaynes' suppositions on the mechanics of the mind - especially his reliance on the (historically recent) emergence of bicamerality. If he is ultimately proved wrong in this respect, I think it doesn't detract at all from his central intellectual achievement. Because if the ultimate test for any theory is that it should explain the most phenomena in the simplest way, Jaynes' theory is a towering one. By simply asking us to accept a few counter-intuitive principles on the nature of our own minds, he provides a beautifully simply paradigm for some of the most intriguing oddities that hover around the dawn of our literature, religions, and cultural historical record.

I also note that the author taught at Princeton University (he died in 1997), so his theories ought to have received a hearing. But apparently the follow-up book he intended was never published, and he was considered somewhat of a maverick, if not quite a crackpot. This website offers some perspective: http://www.julianjaynes.org

His theory, in simplest terms, is that until about 3000 years ago, all of humankind basically heard voices. The voices were actually coming from the other side of the brain, but because the two hemispheres were not in communication the way they are now for most of us, the voices seemed to be coming from outside. The seemed, in fact, to be coming from God or the gods.

So far, so good. That is certainly imaginable to most of us, because we know that schizophrenics and some others still hear voices in apparently this manner today.

But he also posits that many sophisticated civilizations were created by men and women who were all directed by these godlike voices. What is not very clearly explained (a serious gap in his theory) is how all the voices in these "bicameral civilizations," as he calls them, worked in harmony. But his theory is that ancient Greece, Babylon, Assyria, Egpyt, and less ancient but similar Mayan and Incan kingdoms were all built by people who were not "conscious" in our modern sense.

When one hears voices, whether then or now, the voices tend to be commanding and directive, and the need to obey them compelling. Free will is not possible. And so the people who built the pyramids were not self-aware as we are, did not feel self-pity, did not make plans, but simply obeyed the voices, which somehow were in agreement that the thing must be done.

Again, when he mentions that hypnosis may be triggering a reversion to a similar kind of consciousness, in which a voice, somehow channeled through the sub-conscious rather than the reasoning part of the brain, has an unusual compelling quality to it, and enables a person to do things that in their conscious analytic mind they are unable to do, we feel that we do have a glimmer that such a state of being is possible.

Of course, he connects these ideas to schizophrenia, seeing that as a throw-back to an earlier kind of mind-state, though now socially unacceptable and also unacceptable to its victim, who retains a remembrance of what it was to have control of his or her own mind.

He also sees prophets as remnants of the older mind, still able to hear the voices after most people had lost the ability. And he sees idol worship and modern religious behavior as both signs of a longing for the lost certainty and simplicity of a world in which decisions didn't have to be made, and all were of one accord as to what the gods wanted done.

I don't see much evidence for the pastoral simplicity which he thinks the bicameral mind lived in. But I do think that it is possible that not only ancient people but even many modern people have mind-experiences that are very different from our individualistic, introspective, self-determined ideas. In fact, I think relatively few human beings question and ponder and change belief systems as we might. The feeling of being adrift in a world that we can't understand, struggling with questions about everything, is far from universal, I think.

It is pertinent that he calls the shift from bicameral (two houses) to modern consciousness a "breakdown." He sees the shift as happening in response to crises and threats in the environment, but he doesn't present it as necessarily positive, and certainly not as pleasant to those living in its shadow. He sees the cries of the Jews and many other people for God to "rend the heavens and come down," to "not forsake them," as cried from people who no longer hear the "voices" that seemed to be the gods, and who desperately miss them.

In view of individuals such as Mother Teresa, who at one point had a clear inner sense of being directed by God (not necessarily actual auditory voices) and then lost that sense of presence and had to walk blindly thereafter (or silently would be a better metaphor), perhaps we would agree that the experience of the gods or God going silent not only happened at large in human history but is often recapitulated in individuals' personal history as well.

If Jaynes is on to something (and I think he is, though I think he may have pushed his "theory of everything" too far and lost scientific credibility), his theory does help us understand why there is a widespread belief that in Biblical times, God interacted with people in a very different way than He does now. The Bible, and other holy books as well, are remnants of a time when human beings own inner sense of right and wrong, clean and unclean, enemy and neighbor, were experienced as coming from outside of them, from disembodied voices that commanded great power. As the mind (or brain) developed, this split healed (or this mind broke down?) and this knowing become a still small voice in many people, and in others a resounding silence.

The question remains: should we take the reductionist view, and look at all religious ideas as merely misunderstandings based on schizophrenic-like delusions and hallucinations? Or should we take the view that God, who in times past spoke to us in fire and plague and audible voices (and later in dreams and visions) has now become one with humanity and speaks to us in the silence of our own hearts?

A fascinating book, raising as many questions as it answers, but well worth the reading.

I'm not certain that I agree with all of what Julian Jaynes wrote in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but it's still a fascinating volume. It definitely gives one a lot to consider. The main problem with the work is it's dated material(the book itself was composed in 1976), most of it drawn from secondary sources. Julian Jaynes, who died at the age of 77 in the Fall of '97, was a professor of psychology at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990, and held numerous positions as a visiting lecturer or scholar in residence in departments of philosophy, English, and archeology and in numerous medical schools; he was, therefore, a man of many parts. Certainly the book itself reveals the diversity of his interests. From this point in time, however, one must acknowledge that much of the archaeology, history and linguistics he included in this effort is very dated, and far from being fixed, is highly controversial. History is rewritten with a new perspective with almost every generation of historians trying to make an name for themselves. Archaeology has gone through a recent revolution and has broken away from the major digs, colorful personalities, and subjective interpretations for which it was renown in the past, and is now given over to statistics, scientific method, multiple disciplinary techniques and process theory, bringing much of the data and "givens" of past workers in the field into question. Ancient languages and literature are constantly being reinterpreted. Having taken Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Greek myself as a student, I can honestly say that learning the vocabulary and grammar was difficult enough, let alone interpreting the thoughts and motivations of the authors from this distance. Nailing down the denotation of words, even nouns where a concrete object is the referent, is difficult; understanding the connotation of words can be an effort at mind reading.

Nevertheless this having been made clear, I do think that there are some very cogent arguments in the volume, particularly the physiological and the literary. I think the author's main concept of a gradual evolution of consciousness in human beings is probably correct. Putting that event into the context of human evolution is more difficult. I'm not entirely convinced that it occurred quite so late in human history (about 800 B.C. to 700 A.D.) as the author proposes. The idea has appeared in recent works of anthropology and evolution dealing with the issue of the appearance of "fully modern" as opposed to "anatomically modern" humans possibly during the neolithic, probably about the time that cave art first arose, about 20,000-40,000 years ago.

The author's notion of a bicameral mind is in essence a brain the physiology of which is two part: the "man part" of the brain (on the left) was reactive with its environment, like an automaton, dealing with the patterned and everyday survival behavior, like any animal. The novelty or "god" portion (on the right) kicked in to interpret unexpected situations and provide "advice" from a stored set of cultural wisdom presumably provided by parents, elders and other authority figures, and all of it unconscious. Jaynes suggests that this half of the brain spoke to the person like a voice in his head, and was accessible only by means of hormonal biofeedback during stress. Since research into the brain injured over the past several years has suggested that in fact the mind does have multiple parts that become the "I" by a mutual interaction and that the brain injured can exhibit a bipartite personality, Jaynes' thesis is not entirely impossible. (See Mapping the Mind, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Phantoms of the Brain, etc.). His discussions of Tourette's syndrome and schizophrenia are also suggestive.

Interesting, although very speculative and subject to variable interpretations, is the author's discussion of early world literature. I think he has something in the issue of the narratization of experience and the concept of time as linear. Throughout most of early literate society, time was viewed as cyclical: the procession of the seasons, of human life experiences, etc. made linear time less obvious. Even the introduction of king lists and chronology by event, the issue was probably prediction of the future by omen. The poetry of the Iliad is examined by the author who looks for evidence of the concept of an internal reality, an "I", an internal space in which consciousness might be perceived as existing, and finds nothing. By the time of the Odeyssy the author believes there appears more of what one would consider subjective experience of reality. By the time of Solon of Athens, he finds a fully fledged "self." He analyzes the Biblical and other Near Eastern literature by means of the same criteria, and finds much the same results.

A thoroughly intriguing work, well worth reading even now, and full of concepts that would still make an interesting paper.