Customer Reviews

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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First of all the book was copyrighted in 1976 and apparently first published in 1982. That is eons ago in the science of cognition and brain imaging. So I would like to know how the past 2 and a half decades have affected the theories in this book.

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.

Why is it that the characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the oldest books of the Bible behave in a manner that seems utterly alien to modern readers, but by the time of the New Testament and the classic Greek dramatists charcters seem to have the same feelings and motivations of modern man? Jaynes addresses this question, among others, in one of the most thought provoking books I've read.

Basically, he posits that lacking full consciousness (yet having language), prehistoric man's actions were often governed by voices, which are in many ways similar to certain forms of schizophrenia. His full argument is much deeper and far more subtle than I can deliver in a one-line synopsis.

The book is not a drum-beating New Age manual for making peace with our proto-selves, although many readers seem to have taken just that away from his discussion on the origins of religion.

The thesis is, of course, utterly unproveable, and both orthodox classicists and anthropologists are at odds with it. But it is remarkable in its originality. One needn't be convinced by the book to enjoy it; read it purely for Jayne's breadth of knowledge and his originality of thought and it will be well worth your time.

It's hard to describe exactly what this book did to me. Suffice it to say that my views on history, religion, language and consciousness seem to be permanently altered, and my reading and thinking have broadened as a result. Jaynes defines conscousness too narrowly for some philosophers and psychologists, who seem to want it to include all of perception, but for me, his focus on interior dialogue, conceptual space, the notion of self, the ability to narratize and project this self into theoretical situations, is right on target. These are the kinds of things that create our notions of ourselves as human. Considerable space is devoted to anatomy, and split-brain studies, but the bulk of the book relies on archaeology, ancient art, ancient texts, and their use of language. This is the thrust of Jaynes' argument: consciousness arose only relatively late in human development, appearing first in the Middle East at the end of the second millenium BCE., and this consciousness was dependent on language. He theorizes that the right hemisphere of the brain was specialized to recall longterm information, as the left was (and still is, in most people) specialized for language. Pre-conscious people, he contends, hallucinated instructions of a super-ego-like nature generated in the right brain. In the simplest, small scale, early societies, these hallucinations were attributed to ancestors, chiefs, or kings. Eventually they were attributed to gods. As societies became increasingly complex, personal hallucination as a guiding force in life declined in value, and modern consciousness was born. To make his case, Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod, and the Bible are examined, ancient carvings and burial practices are considered, and the evolution of religious practices involving idols, sacrifices, prophecy, omens and divination are all looked at. They give support to Jaynes' contentions and open the mind of the reader. This is a book that keeps on giving.

Explores the notion that human consciousness is a recent development, from an earlier stage when "bicameral" people acted on the instructions from hallucinated voices. These voices are the origin of gods, and were created by the right hemisphere of the brain which "told" the left hemisphere what to do.

Difficult to see how this thought can be developed much beyond its presentation in the book, as the archaeological record is unlikely to contribute much more. I's also hard to know how selective the author is being with his sources.

A few points strike me: one is that bicameralism--hearing voices-when it appears today normally presents itself as a debilitating mental illness, rather than a valid alternative mental structure. Secondly, although jaynes rightly points out that we carry out many actions unconsciously, this unconscious master is often preceded by a period of conscious control and learning. Finally, that the human love affair with consciousness--freely attributing it to trees, cars, weather, animals, cuddly toys appears too deep=seated to be of recent origin.

Jaynes does succeed in shaking the assumption that consciousness is a temporal and cultural constant. And he does leave you wondering why it was that all the previously loquacious gods, from Yahweh downwards, suddenly shut up and never speak again...

I read this book about 20 years ago and consider it the most influential book I have ever read.

I found it very challenging to get through. For example, I remember spending an entire commute (about an hour) considering the thoughts presented on one page. I initially rejected Jaynes' contention on that page. It took me an hour of consideration to conclude that he was entirely correct.

Considering the amount of thought required though, this book is really a page turner of a sort.

Jaynes' main thesis, that consciousness evolved due to changes in civilization that caused the brain to evolve, around 2 thousand years ago, is fascinating, and, in my opinion, well supported by the evidence he presents. However, I have not concluded that it is entirely true.

Nevertheless, this book is a must read for intelligent, curious people regardless of whether his theory is eventually proven true.

Specifically, I have received the following benefits from reading this book:

I understand why some activities are much easier to learn by visual observation and why oral instruction is often detrimental in learning to perform physical activities. This helped me teach my children how to ride their bicycles.

I understand the significance of Christ in western culture, and why our calendar is divided into pre and post christ eras.

I understand my feelings concerning the loss of my parents.

Less specifically, I understand many things about people.

I owe Jaynes credit for teaching me these things.

What must thought have been like when it was brand new? What was it like when mankind first experienced its incredible chatter? One minute, we are sitting under a tree, completely absorbed in the environment, and the next moment we notice that there is some running commentary happening regarding the environment that we are becoming distinctly aware of as something in itself. The tree is now "tree," and its shade is now "shade." What must this experience have been like!? Further, was this experienced as an internal commentary or an external commentary? Julian Jaynes tackles this question with such genius that many jaws have probably injured themselves falling open, and perhaps remain so.
When thought first appeared to mankind, it must have been so much more than novel. One wakes up from a nap- so to speak- and the next thing he or she knows is that something is incredibly different. The world is now alive with this new dimension of detail. Still, the question remains: How exactly did they perceive it? We assume so many things about our own experience of attention, thought, and inner dialogue, but it would be a huge mistake to assume that ancient man came even remotely to the same conclusions about their own experience. Imagine waking up with the ability to see entirely new spectrums of light, or hear hundreds of sonic octaves. What if our sense of touch suddenly became so sensitive we could feel in America or Europe the gentle movements through a Chinese garden the number of Tai Chi practioners, noticing their relative skill levels, the shifting of their weight? Amazing as this imaginary experience would be, still this might pale in comparison to ancient man's actual experience.
Julian Jaynes implies such questions. If thought, something once not noticed as there, is now here, why we would we necessarily assume that it wasn't coming from outside as some voice, some vision? I don't think we would. It is entirely possible that thought was seen as voices of the gods. Surely thoughts come from somewhere, and we observe them flit across the screen of our awareness just as we observe birds fly and hear them sing. I can imagine that thought when it was new was also just as equally impossible to "control" as a bird's flight or song. It was a new force and could easily have seemed to have a life of its own to the new man... thus we see them attributed to these "gods."
Another interesting thought is that man, having come from the relatively pure pre-conscious state, was completely enmeshed in nature's cycles. Nature was a type of second hand. The sun and the moon and the stars all affected him in subtly thorough ways that modern man can only dream of. Perhaps their thoughts- these voices- reflected some of this purity? Is it then not interesting to note that these ancient peoples also built some of the most impossibly brilliant architecture the world has ever seen(i.e. the Great Pyramid, Machu Pichu, etc.)? Is it not possible that they saw something in their relative innocence that we have grown blind to? Evolutionary "kids" playing with giant divinely inspired blocks? The thoughts came to them and spoke of intuitive symmetries, subtle laws of a planet and universe that was their mother and father ("...out of the mouths of babes..."). Perhaps so. Perhaps not. And the possible reason why we lost that skill set was simply due to the evolution of consciousness, as man realized that he can gain leverage over his thoughts- that they are his thoughts! No longer some combating set of gods speaking disembodied "truths"reflecting an unsullied view of the cosmos, but an insistent fluxuating internal process. Perhaps this interiorization of consciousness is the origin of so many people's feelings of alienation. Consciousness now been reduced to being just "in here." Or perhaps the flood of consciousness never stopped and only grew, so that mankind became overwhelmed and started to tune them out, and ceased listening to the gods and to themselves?
Right or wrong, the questions alone are interesting to me, and I thank Julian Jaynes to write what he wrote- stimulating so many of us to think in new ways!

What high standards we have for Julian Jaynes. We ask that he be more revolutionary than Copernicus, whose heliocentric theory was wrong in almost every particular except the one that matters; more consistent than Darwin, who advocated many of the Lamarckian principles that are now considered anathemic to his theory; more positivist than Freud, who despite being just as "unfalsifiable" today as he was 100 years ago is universally considered to have redefined our understanding of the self.

Whatever Jaynes may have gotten wrong, his insights into the problems posed by consciousness, the self, and political evolution seem more giant each time I revisit this book. Too few scholars are willing to look at the darker chambers of the human psyche through history, especially the vulnerability of the mind to the "power of suggestion" found in hypnosis and schizophrenia, and the recurring, prominent role of trance in religious ritual. Like Freud, Jaynes reminds us we aren't half as rational and autonomous as we tell ourselves we are (ironically it is the "faith-based" philosophies that seem most threatened by this idea.)

150 years ago we bristled at the suggestion that our distant ancestors were apes. Even the "intelligent design" crowd doesn't take issue with this fact today. But to suggest that our ancestors of just 200 generations ago were, by our modern standards, just plain nuts raises all the old hackles. Why? Are we each afraid, at such a small remove, that we might personally revert to our quasi-schizophrenic, bicameral origins? If Jaynes had postulated an origin of consciousness 10 millenia ago instead of 3 would be breathe more easily?

Despite some reviewers' uncharitable comparisons to von Daniken, this book does not make any attempt to introduce a deus ex machina into human history. Jaynes works only with the elements we know to be in play. No neurologist would quarrel with any of the altered states Jaynes presents as "bicameral" and the clinical literature is well documented. We don't need UFOs or ESP, or orgone rays to understand bicamerality, just an open mind, and a willingness to understand how consciousness developed, and why our brains appear to be wired for an auditory command structure our species no longer seems to employ under normal circumstances.

Rather than engage Jaynes on the essential questions, most critics seem content to quibble over details, or reject the thesis out of hand as just too weird, which in my book is a sign Jaynes was onto something. Who argues with the root contentions of Jaynes work: that authoritarian gods and trance states tend to aggreate together culturally, that thier role and influence has waned in human culture roughly in inverse proportion to the emergence of a narratized "self" in the literary record, that religious trance, schizophrenia and hypnosis all bear the same quality of overriding conscious analysis and decision-making. Just the "before-and-after" comparison of the Iliad and Odyssey alone (or of Amos and Ecclesiates, the oldest and newest books of the old Testament) is worth the cover price.

The simple, revolutionary fact of this thesis is that we are still mere infants when it comes to using the analytical contextualizing power of consciousness to understand ourselves and each other. This may be a blow to our pride, but it seems a lot more hopeful than the alternative, that we've been in the consciousness business for much longer, and this is the best world we could make to live in.

"The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear the true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering -- are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?"[pp. 8-9]

If nothing else, for a psychologist, Jaynes knows how to turn a phrase. The introductory chapter from which this quote is taken sets up his broad hypothesis about the origin of human consciousness which, if true, would place evolutionary biology and the evolution of human consciousness on widely different tracks.

The book is in three parts: the first explains the psychology behind the hypothesis; the second tests this hypothesis in the various ancient cultures in the Middle East, as depicted through their writings; the third tests the hypothesis against a variety of different psychological phenomena (from music and poetry to possession and hypnosis). In his afterword, written in 1990, Jaynes summarizes the main points of his hypothesis:

1) Consciousness is based on language -- By use of metaphors, metaphiers, paraphrands and paraphriers, human perceptivity increases by incorporating new phenomena into ideas already learned. While one can learn a number of tasks, learning is not equivalent to consciousness. Like a surfer riding the crest of a wave, human consciousness dances around, but is never completely submerged in, the sense data fed into the brain. From my own personal experience, after seeing a toddler, without any prompting, call a bicycle the "mama" and a tricycle next to it the "baby", or saying that a rust spot on a car is a "boo-boo", the ability to expand understanding via the metaphor from what is already learned has at least some anecdotal evidence to me.

2) The bicameral mind -- This gets into the more controversial part of his theory. Human civilization, Jaynes says, began with citizens who were not "conscious" as we would understand it today. Rather, the brain of the "bicameral" man was orientated in such a way that one half of the brain (the right side for right-handed people) was dictating auditory (and sometimes visual) hallucinations while the left side could do nothing but obey. The characters in the Iliad are the example of such unconsciousness. Jaynes goes on to propose how whole societies could be (and, based on the archaeological record, were) organized and could still function. While it may seem implausible for an unconscious, non-self-reflecting society to be able to do anything with coordination, many people even today spend a great deal of their lives doing what they think they're supposed to do without self-reflection, until something forces them outside this direction in life. Consciousness is an exercise, not something that can rolls along of its own biological momentum.

3) The dating of the breakdown of the bicameral mind -- While certain developments such as writing helped to deteriorate the lockstep bicameral order, the main impetus for the breakdown (in the Middle East, which is the only arena he's concerned with) occurs around the end of the second millennium B.C. with a series of cataclysmic events that externally caused a migration of peoples, and internally cause a diminishing of the bicameral voice. And from this regional catastrophe, Jaynes proposes, the conscious "I" began to be mapped out in the human mind for lack of the bicameral voice, in which Jaynes sees the Odyssey as an example of this developed consciousness. It also sparked the age in which prophecy, myth, and superstitions were developed as part of the religious quest to regain that lost authoritative voice.

It's a well-detailed hypothesis, and some of the details might be blurred with the ordinary creative process, but the similarities between the internal model of the brain mapped out by Jaynes, and some of the more obscure details of archaeology, can't be easily dismissed. Moreover, the pliability of the brain functions make such rapid adaptations all the more possible. As Jaynes states in one of his later chapters [p.403]:

"Those who through what theologians call the "gift of faith" can center and surround their lives in religious belief do indeed have different collective cognitive imperatives. They can indeed change themselves through prayer and its expectancies much as in post-hypnotic suggestion. It is a fact that belief, political or religious, or simply belief in oneself through some earlier cognitive imperative, works in wondrous ways. Anyone who has experienced the sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows that both mental and physical survival is often held carefully in such untouchable hands."

"But for the rest of us, who must scuttle along on conscious models and skeptical ethics, we have to accept our lessened control. We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us. And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization that 'we' do not have."

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.

I first read this book in the late `70s. I am writing about it almost 25 years later because it remains, after numerous readings, one of the more interesting and thought provoking books I have read. Still today, if I could only choose a handful of books to have on a deserted island, this would be one of the few.

I remember picking the book up after reading a condescending review of Jaynes and his theories in the pop-psychology rag, Psychology Today. I figured that if he offended them enough to warrant such a dismissal, it might be worth a read! I also liked his style - he came up with the stark, unappealing black and white cover with the convoluted title just to keep pop-psychology aficionados from reading it! He was hoping for serious consideration. Unfortunately, he didn't get it.

Jaynes rankled so many groups with his book because, in great part, he had the audacity to try and bring together so many disparate areas into a huge macro theory about how consciousness came about. He pulls from many well-known studies in psychology, including fascinating research that I had studied on the way to my degrees in psychology. He pulls from ancient literature. He pulls from anthropology and archaeology. And he has the audacity to try and weave a theory that, in the end, is probably not provable scientifically. Then he goes on to propose how this theory could also explain the origin of things like poetry, music and (oh, oh!) religion.

This is not a book to read quickly or glibly. Like trying to figure out a jigsaw puzzle without an idea of what it will be, he forces you to work in order to juggle all of the divergent pieces he attempts to weave together. But like a puzzle that suddenly snaps into focus, there are simply wonderful `ah-ha!' moments during the second half of the book where the floating pieces suddenly resolve into clarity, making sense of things that you may never have even wondered about before. In this regard, even if he is wrong in a number of things, the book is profoundly worthwhile reading. He makes you consider life from perspectives you have probably never envisioned.

Julian Jaynes only wrote one book. His second planned work was not completed and who knows if it would have even been published after the dismissal of the experts. The `experts' ridiculed his ideas and, therefore, pushed them off to the side as not being worthy of study, testing, changing or improving. They were content to `throw the baby out with the bath', so to speak. Too bad. For within the ideas he presents and disciplines he weaves together, there are undoubtedly many that are worthy of further research and consideration. For some, it is simply easier and more convenient to trash the whole thing. But maybe the 'experts' should reconsider. After all, this book was first published almost 30 years ago now and the ideas still have that 'ring of truth' about them.

If you like to challenge preconceptions and are willing to work through the book objectively, I think you will find this a book you might well keep on a desert island, too.