The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Paperback – Aug 1 2003

incredible read very comprehensively researched and well presented. This is a formative read that will shift your understanding and empower you too see how our minds have evolved.

Nice book. I was conscious of being conscious, but not to that extent :)

This is a classic in its field. However, like the writings of Freud, it's core ideas are almost all wrong in detail. What makes it worth reading is the penetrating analysis of the subject, especially the role of language and the social nature of "mind". Jaynes asks a lot of good questions and should not be faulted for getting many of the answers wrong. For example, almost all of what we now know about the brain has been learned after Jaynes' death.

Impressive. (THOSE WHO ARE WRITING PAPERS IN HISTORY OR CLASSICS OR ENGLISH COMP/LIT TAKE NOTE: there are some good quotes and some interesting and useful concepts in this author's material).
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.

Let me begin by stating that I enjoyed Jaynes' book tremendously on the basis of Jaynes' evidently encyclopedic scholarship; as witnessed by his liberal use of information from a wide variety of academic disciplines. My criticism (i.e. three out of five stars) stems from Jaynes' failure to convince me of the plausibility of his thesis that human consciousness as we "understand" it evolved relatively recently from a state that we now only experience the vestiges of; the "bicameral" mind. It was my impression in reading the book that Jaynes felt compelled to demonstrate that his thesis was consistent with our "knowledge", and/or "understanding" of localization of brain function on an anatomic basis. He parades a fascinating array of experimental and case study data in support of his contentions, but the very validity of our "understanding" of this data is open to dispute. Simply put; the observation that a lesion in, or stimulation to certain anatomic neural structures may reliably provoke certain behaviors, or eliminate or modulate them, does not prove that that those behaviors "reside" in those anatomic structures. So-called "split-brain" research and issues related to anatomic localization of neural function enjoyed great popularity during Jaynes' academic career, and are still the subject of experimental scrutiny. This information remains too poorly understood, however, to be employed as support for Jaynes' hypothesis in the manner that he does. Similarly, Jaynes invokes equally fascinating data from archeologic studies and the literature of antiquity to support his hypothesis. He cites, for example, the absence of certain types of written language from ancient texts. Our failure to discover evidence of language usage that implies a certain type of "consciousness" does not prove it never existed, only that we can recover no evidence of its existence. For example; we have no evidence of the Inca civilization having a written language, despite their many astonishing accomplishments. This does not mean that they did not have one; only that we can uncover no record of it. Maybe they did, maybe they did not. So here again, in my opinion, Jaynes' observations fail to promote the plausibility of his thesis. Finally, I have an uncomfortable feeling regarding the semantic difficulty of dealing with words like "voices" and "of the Gods" in this type of discussion. Jaynes makes brilliant observations regarding the use of metaphor in language (metaphiers and metaphrands), but then falls prey to the inherent limitations of descriptive metaphor in promoting his thesis; employing language that is too vague and non-specific, after elucidating a very specific hypothesis.