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Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes
Does consciousness inevitably arise in any sufficiently complex brain? Although widely accepted, this view inherited from Darwin's theory of evolution is supported by surprisingly little evidence. Offering an alternate view of the history of the human mind, Julian Jaynes's ideas challenge our preconceptions of not only the origin of the modern mind, but the origin of gods and religion, the nature of mental illness, and the future potential of consciousness. The tremendous explanatory power of Jaynes's ideas force us to reevaluate much of what we thought we knew about human history.
Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind both explains Julian Jaynes's theory and explores a wide range of related topics such as the ancient Dark Age, the nature of dreams and the birth of Greek tragedy, poetic inspiration, the significance of hearing voices in both the ancient and modern world, the development of consciousness in children, vestiges of bicameralism and the transition to consciousness in early Tibet, the relationship of consciousness and metaphorical language, and how Jaynes's ideas compare to those of other thinkers.
Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind both explains Julian Jaynes's theory and explores a wide range of related topics such as the ancient Dark Age, the nature of dreams and the birth of Greek tragedy, poetic inspiration, the significance of hearing voices in both the ancient and modern world, the development of consciousness in children, vestiges of bicameralism and the transition to consciousness in early Tibet, the relationship of consciousness and metaphorical language, and how Jaynes's ideas compare to those of other thinkers.
322 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 27, 2019
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592 people want to read
About the author
Marcel Kuijsten
8 books321 followersMarcel Kuijsten is Founder and Executive Director of the Julian Jaynes Society. He has published four book on Julian Jaynes's theory of the origin of consciousness and the bicameral mind (recently featured on the HBO hit series Westworld):
Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind; Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind; The Julian Jaynes Collection; and Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness.
Join the Julian Jaynes Society or sign up for our mailing list at www.julianjaynes.org and connect on Facebook and Twitter.
Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind; Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind; The Julian Jaynes Collection; and Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness.
Join the Julian Jaynes Society or sign up for our mailing list at www.julianjaynes.org and connect on Facebook and Twitter.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 6, 2021
It is probably fair to say that the Theories of Julian Jaynes are not taken seriously by Science. He is all but ignored. The good and enthusiastic people of the Julian Jaynes Society list dozens of books where he is quoted but the truth is that if he is quoted than as a historical curiosity. And things are not better by quoting only what you want to hear. So, Dennett is quoted as saying that Jaynes was brilliant but what is left out is that he also says he is unreliable and quirky.
Having said that, I confess, or better I unashamedly pronounce, that I think that Jaynes is basically right. At least the weak version of his theory I hold to be true, that consciousness is a social construction based on metaphors (and thus on language).
Now, to read anything about Jaynes, you are more or less limited to the publications of the Julian Jaynes Society. I did not rush out to buy the book when it appeared since I was not expecting anything new. And the sad truth is, there is not. Most of the essays do not even try to expand or critically explore the theories. Or provide any evidence. Which is a pity. I do not have to read about a woman who hears voices. And the large section on Tibet does really add nothing. One of the contributors when summarising Jaynes’s theory has a circular definition of consciousness. This is something the editor should not have allowed.
There is one essay on the development of child consciousness that I hoped would present some new ideas of facts but it does not go deep enough into the subject to be of any real relevance.
Really the only interesting essays are the ones talking about kindred spirits. The ones about Walker Percy, I.A. Richards and Vico.
I had never heard of Percy before, but will definitely read him. So this is quite a success for this essay. The one about Vico was nice but not to the extent that I feel I need to read Vico now.
Richards I have not read but know of course. (And Jaynes did mention him). I agree with the author, Ted Remington, that Jaynes would have earned (should have earned) a position in the history of science if he had done nothing else but create his theory of Metaphors. And he nicely explains how Jaynes improved on Richards by his expanded terminology. (He did not catch though, what I think is the most important thing about Jaynes’ theory, namely that the metaphor itself gets changed by its being applied to some new concept.) I do not like the metaphor example used (nearly the same Jaynes used): Snow blankets the earth. "Blankets" is too similar to the ordinary "covers" (in fact in German we say "bedeckt" which includes the blanket). And covers is in fact a much richer and better metaphor when you think about it. (Of course, it is not recognised as a metaphor anymore, which is the fate of the successful ones.)
Remington talks a lot about a critic of Jaynes and tries to show where he is wrong. But how much better this book would have been if the critic’s review of Jaynes would have been reprinted. As it is this book is unfortunately targeted on the tiny crowd of Jaynes Believers who need not be converted.
Having said that, I confess, or better I unashamedly pronounce, that I think that Jaynes is basically right. At least the weak version of his theory I hold to be true, that consciousness is a social construction based on metaphors (and thus on language).
Now, to read anything about Jaynes, you are more or less limited to the publications of the Julian Jaynes Society. I did not rush out to buy the book when it appeared since I was not expecting anything new. And the sad truth is, there is not. Most of the essays do not even try to expand or critically explore the theories. Or provide any evidence. Which is a pity. I do not have to read about a woman who hears voices. And the large section on Tibet does really add nothing. One of the contributors when summarising Jaynes’s theory has a circular definition of consciousness. This is something the editor should not have allowed.
There is one essay on the development of child consciousness that I hoped would present some new ideas of facts but it does not go deep enough into the subject to be of any real relevance.
Really the only interesting essays are the ones talking about kindred spirits. The ones about Walker Percy, I.A. Richards and Vico.
I had never heard of Percy before, but will definitely read him. So this is quite a success for this essay. The one about Vico was nice but not to the extent that I feel I need to read Vico now.
Richards I have not read but know of course. (And Jaynes did mention him). I agree with the author, Ted Remington, that Jaynes would have earned (should have earned) a position in the history of science if he had done nothing else but create his theory of Metaphors. And he nicely explains how Jaynes improved on Richards by his expanded terminology. (He did not catch though, what I think is the most important thing about Jaynes’ theory, namely that the metaphor itself gets changed by its being applied to some new concept.) I do not like the metaphor example used (nearly the same Jaynes used): Snow blankets the earth. "Blankets" is too similar to the ordinary "covers" (in fact in German we say "bedeckt" which includes the blanket). And covers is in fact a much richer and better metaphor when you think about it. (Of course, it is not recognised as a metaphor anymore, which is the fate of the successful ones.)
Remington talks a lot about a critic of Jaynes and tries to show where he is wrong. But how much better this book would have been if the critic’s review of Jaynes would have been reprinted. As it is this book is unfortunately targeted on the tiny crowd of Jaynes Believers who need not be converted.
September 19, 2016
Thought provoking new evidence for and discussion of Julian Jaynes' theory on the origin of consciousness and the bicameral mind. Highly recommend for both those familiar with and new to Jaynes' fascinating ideas!
March 3, 2017
Review of “Gods, Voices and the Bicameral Mind, the theories of Julian Jaynes”, first edition, 2016, 312 pages, edited by Marcel Kuijsten
February 16th 2017 Reviewed by Roland Sassen (sassen@thinsia.com)
From voices to choices
Sometimes in history a theory emerges which is widely ignored by academics. Such an incredible theory about consciousness or conscious interiority, was proposed by Julian Jaynes in 1977.
Bicameral Mind
Bicameral means two chambers, the left and right hemispheres of our brain.
What is the breakdown of the bicameral mind?
Julian Jaynes wrote in 1976 the book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.
Until 1000 BCE (in Greece) verbal hallucinations (voices) from the right hemisphere told people what to do. As communities became larger and interactions between communities happened more often, the voices (gods) were not capable anymore to deal with new situations, hence they “broke down”. The human brain became aware of the voices, and thereby of itself. As people started to write things down, the dependency on voices for decisions further diminished. The left hemisphere, language, took over and started to make its “own” decisions.
You can see a breakdown of the bicameral mind in several places at different times on this planet. That means that modern consciousness developed several times as well. For example in Greece approx.500 BCE, and with the Incas 1200 CE.
In Greece, approx. 500 BCE, the voices stopped talking, the gods went silent, and it was here that people invented many religions, as a substitute for the lost voices.
Consciousness, what it is and what not
Consciousness is (a mental process creating) an introspectable mind-space. Non-conscious mental processes are cognition, learning, and sense and perception.
14 scientists write essays about Jaynes‘s theories
Kuijsten, in his 2016 book, has collected essays from 14 different scientists on the Julian Jaynes theory. Evidence for Jaynes‘s theory has been found in, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Israel, early China and India. This book provides us with a wealth of stunning viewpoints, showing us the support from different doctrines for Jaynes‘s theories after nearly 40 years of dormancy, and adds Tibet as a country where the development of religion and language follows Jaynes’s theory.
Kuijsten states: “Consciousness is learned, not innate. It is that which is introspectable. Consciousness operating on human emotions causes shame to become guilt, fear to become anxiety, anger to become hatred and mating behavior to give rise to sexual fantasy.”
According to Charles Hampden-Turner, hearing and obeying voices, which we all did before being conscious, was much easier than living with consciousness. “Greek tragedy stressed the price of consciousness, that the hubris of the analogue “I” on the screen of consciousness could find itself in agonizing contradiction with real events.”
James E. Morriss on Jaynes‘s theory: “It is a theory of monumental dimension, that can alter our view of consciousness, revise our conception of the history of mankind and lay bare the human dilemma in all its existential wonder”.
Brian J. McVeigh is beautifully poetic in describing Jaynes: “Conscience is waiting for a heavenly voice to tell us what to do before we realize we are that voice”.
He refers to Nørretranders: “People experience far more than what they consciously register, and the control of actions that consciousness feels it exercises is an illusion”.
McVeigh lists seven characteristics of consciousness, and reminds us that conscious interiority is not necessary for complex thought processes. He shows five intellectual barriers to deal with consciousness, the most difficult to discuss is the lack of amazement at the very existence of interiority.
Bill Rowe tells us about the evidence, from Jaynes and others, that the gods came from the dead. He examined the time frame between 1200 and 800 BCE, which saw the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations. He compared 11 theories that tried to explain how it came about that nearly 50 cities were destroyed during this time. The collapse of the bicameral mind, belonging to the theory of Jaynes, seems to be the most plausible at the moment, according to Rowe.
From visiting voices to visiting visions: dreams
Robert Atwan describes the connection between dreams and interiorization, alias consciousness. In the third millennium BCE people lost the direct guidance of gods, prophetic possession started to be used for divination. Oracles preceded dreams as conduits of divine communications. Penelope’s dream includes its own interpretation, her dream becomes Odysseus‘s oracle. From then on, dreams are not auditory anymore but visual, thereby changing the structure of human consciousness. He cites Jaynes: “The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind”. As the dream begins to move inside the mind of the dreamer, around 500 BC, and the dreamer begins to move inside her dream, interiorization can be observed for the first time.
Judith Weissman knows about poets hearing commanding voices. Poems inspired by such voices retain their power over readers. She tells us: “Jaynes suggests that after the invention of language, auditory hallucinations developed to enable tribal people to remember the commands of their leaders”. The source of these voices changed over time, kings, god-kings, idols, Olympian gods, Yahweh. And they always spoke in poetry, in verse, associated with rhythm, not with reason. Poetry and sermons are closer to the special language of auditory hallucinations than philosophy and history are.
Edward Proffitt. From voices to the mundane language of human speech. More poets.
Because poets in recent history (Romantic poetry, 1800-1850) were conscious, they had no choice but to switch from singing to writing. They had to “give up the magic of verbal music for the musicality of speech”. Fortunately we have the work of Jaynes to be able to follow the transition from sung rhymes (Homer, Iliad and the Odyssey) to written poems. The loss of voices to obey, the loss of bicameral authorization, is a result of the evolution of consciousness, leading to the development of science in the last five hundred years. In the past two hundred years this loss has become most overt.
“The self, still unprepared, must now take everything on itself, for the gods and the Muses alike have disappeared into the air.” With Sappho (Lesbos, c. 630 – c. 570 BC), (self-)consciousness starts to emerge. Octavio Paz (1914-1989 Mexico) gave us a concept of poetry that involves self-creation as a concept: the self can accept its own authorization. Proffitt sees Coleridge (UK 1772-1834) as an example of a poet in transition: he (Coleridge) wrote two kinds of poems: the conversational (left hemisphere) versus the incantatory (right hemisphere). Coleridge could not commit to human speech, to conscious reason. He longed for the impossible: to be a shaman, to be a vessel of the gods. The poet in the modern world must learn through singing not to sing. The phrase of Arnold (UK 1822-1888) “we are still between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born”, has been used in the television series Westworld recently (Nov 2016).
Most people mistrust voices. The poet William Blake was an exception, together with the genius Emanuel Swedenborg. John Sappington and John Hamilton discovered that hearing voices is much more common than most people assume and should not be treated as an illness. Many quadriplegic victims of cerebral palsy, who cannot gesture or speak, were classified as retarded, but they are able to answer to yes and no questions. Not only are they quite intelligent, they also routinely hear voices.
Russell T. Hurlburt has more than 30 years’ experience with his DES method: Descriptive Experience Sampling. At random times patients hear a beep and write down their thoughts. He describes in detail a schizophrenic woman who heard voices of the gods. He could distil several striking characteristics of her auditory and visual hallucinations.
In his second essay in this book Bill Rowe agrees with Jaynes that you can see the development of consciousness in two ways: from the history -- Bronze Age people had perfect executive functions, but were not conscious -- and from development in children. Around 500 BC, when consciousness developed, almost all world religions came into being. For children, Rowe describes five milestones to consciousness. If children missed participating in interpersonal affect attunements in the first year of life, they could develop the same inability with social interactions as autistic people have. Bicameral people, like autistic people, do have language, but they do not have a Theory of Mind.
Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intentions, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own.
You are not alone
Laura Mooneyham White shows us that Julian Jaynes is not alone with his theory of the bicameral mind and the origin of consciousness: Walker Percey published “The Message in a Bottle” in 1975, two years after Jaynes published his book. Both Percey and Jaynes see consciousness as a product of language. Language, 50,000 years old, gave rise to consciousness, for example in Greece about 500 BCE.
This “sudden” coming into existence of consciousness, in just a few hundred years, is difficult to grasp for many scientists. But when you examine the concepts and words used in the languages across the world, it becomes clear what kind of mindset people had.
Jaynes and Percey have a different view of the world after consciousness evolved: Jaynes sees people longing for the lost voices of the gods, whereas Percey believes that consciousness, not having to obey auditory hallucinations, paves the way for a new search for divinity. Neither Jaynes nor Percey would prefer to be without consciousness. Bob Comeaux managed to suppress consciousness by letting people drink water with heavy sodium content. As a consequence, these people lost familiar anxieties, terrors, panics, phobias and exhibited a curious flatness of tone. They lost all sense of shame, as we need consciousness for the emotions of guilt, shame and desire. Sex is just mildly entertaining for these drugged people. Without consciousness there is no fantasy. Also their language changed to using just two-word sentences, like three year old children or gorillas that were taught sign language —they have no sense of context or complex ideas; they are reduced to simple wants and needs. Maybe we can learn here that the absence of depression or anxiety does not constitute true wellness.
Consciousness is metaphor
Ted Remington shows us how modern Jaynes‘s theory is seeing consciousness as a metaphorical use of language. Jaynes‘s approach is to describe consciousness from many different views, and right here from the standpoint of rhetoric. He extends the theories of contemporary cognitive linguists. He develops the theories of Ivor Armstrong Richards (UK 1893-1979), who suggested two different uses of language: a scientific use, where references should be correct and relation of references should be logical, and emotional use, where reference to truth or logical arrangement are not necessary and may even constitute an obstacle. In these times of facts and alternative facts this approach might be useful. According to Remington, Jaynes has moved us closer to realizing Richard’s dream of consilience between psychology and rhetoric.
Todd Gibson sees the history of religious imagery in Asia as stunningly varied. In this essay he looks at Tibet, starting with a close examination of words and the evolution of their meaning. The language today in Tibet is largely inherited from the Indian Buddhist tradition. Buddhism, which arrived in Tibet about 800 CE, largely agrees with Jaynes. Gibson re-examines the language and development of religion in ancient Tibet through the lens provided by Jaynes‘s bicameral theory. Also, in more recent versions of Tibetan religion, he finds support for Jaynes‘s theory, for example the setting of the State Oracle of Tibet is similar to the description of the Delphic oracle in its final state.
Robert E. Haskell, in the last essay of this extraordinary book, brings Vico (Naples, 1668-1744) to life: like Julian Jaynes, Giambattista Vico sees the beginning of language in singing, in poetry.
Haskell: “Vico and Jaynes describe similar conditions that lead to the initiation of imagined and hallucinated gods. Both Vico and Jaynes see metaphor as a fundamental cognitive operation, it is not a mere extra trick of language, but the basic constructive ground of language”. In Jaynes‘s words: “Consciousness is the work of lexical metaphor”; consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story.
Read and enjoy
Maybe just a couple of times a day we realize that we are thinking about things, ourselves included. Some say only the absence of thinking allows us to be creative. Other say that in the flow of automatic movements we can choose a new strategy, consciousness at work. The theories of Jaynes are guiding us to an understanding of consciousness. Perhaps after reading this book, we can “include the knower in the known”. It is a joy to read “Gods, Voices and the Bicameral Mind, the Theories of Julian Jaynes“, and we are indebted to Marcel Kuijsten for this most intriguing collection of essays.
February 16th 2017 Reviewed by Roland Sassen (sassen@thinsia.com)
From voices to choices
Sometimes in history a theory emerges which is widely ignored by academics. Such an incredible theory about consciousness or conscious interiority, was proposed by Julian Jaynes in 1977.
Bicameral Mind
Bicameral means two chambers, the left and right hemispheres of our brain.
What is the breakdown of the bicameral mind?
Julian Jaynes wrote in 1976 the book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.
Until 1000 BCE (in Greece) verbal hallucinations (voices) from the right hemisphere told people what to do. As communities became larger and interactions between communities happened more often, the voices (gods) were not capable anymore to deal with new situations, hence they “broke down”. The human brain became aware of the voices, and thereby of itself. As people started to write things down, the dependency on voices for decisions further diminished. The left hemisphere, language, took over and started to make its “own” decisions.
You can see a breakdown of the bicameral mind in several places at different times on this planet. That means that modern consciousness developed several times as well. For example in Greece approx.500 BCE, and with the Incas 1200 CE.
In Greece, approx. 500 BCE, the voices stopped talking, the gods went silent, and it was here that people invented many religions, as a substitute for the lost voices.
Consciousness, what it is and what not
Consciousness is (a mental process creating) an introspectable mind-space. Non-conscious mental processes are cognition, learning, and sense and perception.
14 scientists write essays about Jaynes‘s theories
Kuijsten, in his 2016 book, has collected essays from 14 different scientists on the Julian Jaynes theory. Evidence for Jaynes‘s theory has been found in, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Israel, early China and India. This book provides us with a wealth of stunning viewpoints, showing us the support from different doctrines for Jaynes‘s theories after nearly 40 years of dormancy, and adds Tibet as a country where the development of religion and language follows Jaynes’s theory.
Kuijsten states: “Consciousness is learned, not innate. It is that which is introspectable. Consciousness operating on human emotions causes shame to become guilt, fear to become anxiety, anger to become hatred and mating behavior to give rise to sexual fantasy.”
According to Charles Hampden-Turner, hearing and obeying voices, which we all did before being conscious, was much easier than living with consciousness. “Greek tragedy stressed the price of consciousness, that the hubris of the analogue “I” on the screen of consciousness could find itself in agonizing contradiction with real events.”
James E. Morriss on Jaynes‘s theory: “It is a theory of monumental dimension, that can alter our view of consciousness, revise our conception of the history of mankind and lay bare the human dilemma in all its existential wonder”.
Brian J. McVeigh is beautifully poetic in describing Jaynes: “Conscience is waiting for a heavenly voice to tell us what to do before we realize we are that voice”.
He refers to Nørretranders: “People experience far more than what they consciously register, and the control of actions that consciousness feels it exercises is an illusion”.
McVeigh lists seven characteristics of consciousness, and reminds us that conscious interiority is not necessary for complex thought processes. He shows five intellectual barriers to deal with consciousness, the most difficult to discuss is the lack of amazement at the very existence of interiority.
Bill Rowe tells us about the evidence, from Jaynes and others, that the gods came from the dead. He examined the time frame between 1200 and 800 BCE, which saw the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations. He compared 11 theories that tried to explain how it came about that nearly 50 cities were destroyed during this time. The collapse of the bicameral mind, belonging to the theory of Jaynes, seems to be the most plausible at the moment, according to Rowe.
From visiting voices to visiting visions: dreams
Robert Atwan describes the connection between dreams and interiorization, alias consciousness. In the third millennium BCE people lost the direct guidance of gods, prophetic possession started to be used for divination. Oracles preceded dreams as conduits of divine communications. Penelope’s dream includes its own interpretation, her dream becomes Odysseus‘s oracle. From then on, dreams are not auditory anymore but visual, thereby changing the structure of human consciousness. He cites Jaynes: “The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind”. As the dream begins to move inside the mind of the dreamer, around 500 BC, and the dreamer begins to move inside her dream, interiorization can be observed for the first time.
Judith Weissman knows about poets hearing commanding voices. Poems inspired by such voices retain their power over readers. She tells us: “Jaynes suggests that after the invention of language, auditory hallucinations developed to enable tribal people to remember the commands of their leaders”. The source of these voices changed over time, kings, god-kings, idols, Olympian gods, Yahweh. And they always spoke in poetry, in verse, associated with rhythm, not with reason. Poetry and sermons are closer to the special language of auditory hallucinations than philosophy and history are.
Edward Proffitt. From voices to the mundane language of human speech. More poets.
Because poets in recent history (Romantic poetry, 1800-1850) were conscious, they had no choice but to switch from singing to writing. They had to “give up the magic of verbal music for the musicality of speech”. Fortunately we have the work of Jaynes to be able to follow the transition from sung rhymes (Homer, Iliad and the Odyssey) to written poems. The loss of voices to obey, the loss of bicameral authorization, is a result of the evolution of consciousness, leading to the development of science in the last five hundred years. In the past two hundred years this loss has become most overt.
“The self, still unprepared, must now take everything on itself, for the gods and the Muses alike have disappeared into the air.” With Sappho (Lesbos, c. 630 – c. 570 BC), (self-)consciousness starts to emerge. Octavio Paz (1914-1989 Mexico) gave us a concept of poetry that involves self-creation as a concept: the self can accept its own authorization. Proffitt sees Coleridge (UK 1772-1834) as an example of a poet in transition: he (Coleridge) wrote two kinds of poems: the conversational (left hemisphere) versus the incantatory (right hemisphere). Coleridge could not commit to human speech, to conscious reason. He longed for the impossible: to be a shaman, to be a vessel of the gods. The poet in the modern world must learn through singing not to sing. The phrase of Arnold (UK 1822-1888) “we are still between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born”, has been used in the television series Westworld recently (Nov 2016).
Most people mistrust voices. The poet William Blake was an exception, together with the genius Emanuel Swedenborg. John Sappington and John Hamilton discovered that hearing voices is much more common than most people assume and should not be treated as an illness. Many quadriplegic victims of cerebral palsy, who cannot gesture or speak, were classified as retarded, but they are able to answer to yes and no questions. Not only are they quite intelligent, they also routinely hear voices.
Russell T. Hurlburt has more than 30 years’ experience with his DES method: Descriptive Experience Sampling. At random times patients hear a beep and write down their thoughts. He describes in detail a schizophrenic woman who heard voices of the gods. He could distil several striking characteristics of her auditory and visual hallucinations.
In his second essay in this book Bill Rowe agrees with Jaynes that you can see the development of consciousness in two ways: from the history -- Bronze Age people had perfect executive functions, but were not conscious -- and from development in children. Around 500 BC, when consciousness developed, almost all world religions came into being. For children, Rowe describes five milestones to consciousness. If children missed participating in interpersonal affect attunements in the first year of life, they could develop the same inability with social interactions as autistic people have. Bicameral people, like autistic people, do have language, but they do not have a Theory of Mind.
Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intentions, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own.
You are not alone
Laura Mooneyham White shows us that Julian Jaynes is not alone with his theory of the bicameral mind and the origin of consciousness: Walker Percey published “The Message in a Bottle” in 1975, two years after Jaynes published his book. Both Percey and Jaynes see consciousness as a product of language. Language, 50,000 years old, gave rise to consciousness, for example in Greece about 500 BCE.
This “sudden” coming into existence of consciousness, in just a few hundred years, is difficult to grasp for many scientists. But when you examine the concepts and words used in the languages across the world, it becomes clear what kind of mindset people had.
Jaynes and Percey have a different view of the world after consciousness evolved: Jaynes sees people longing for the lost voices of the gods, whereas Percey believes that consciousness, not having to obey auditory hallucinations, paves the way for a new search for divinity. Neither Jaynes nor Percey would prefer to be without consciousness. Bob Comeaux managed to suppress consciousness by letting people drink water with heavy sodium content. As a consequence, these people lost familiar anxieties, terrors, panics, phobias and exhibited a curious flatness of tone. They lost all sense of shame, as we need consciousness for the emotions of guilt, shame and desire. Sex is just mildly entertaining for these drugged people. Without consciousness there is no fantasy. Also their language changed to using just two-word sentences, like three year old children or gorillas that were taught sign language —they have no sense of context or complex ideas; they are reduced to simple wants and needs. Maybe we can learn here that the absence of depression or anxiety does not constitute true wellness.
Consciousness is metaphor
Ted Remington shows us how modern Jaynes‘s theory is seeing consciousness as a metaphorical use of language. Jaynes‘s approach is to describe consciousness from many different views, and right here from the standpoint of rhetoric. He extends the theories of contemporary cognitive linguists. He develops the theories of Ivor Armstrong Richards (UK 1893-1979), who suggested two different uses of language: a scientific use, where references should be correct and relation of references should be logical, and emotional use, where reference to truth or logical arrangement are not necessary and may even constitute an obstacle. In these times of facts and alternative facts this approach might be useful. According to Remington, Jaynes has moved us closer to realizing Richard’s dream of consilience between psychology and rhetoric.
Todd Gibson sees the history of religious imagery in Asia as stunningly varied. In this essay he looks at Tibet, starting with a close examination of words and the evolution of their meaning. The language today in Tibet is largely inherited from the Indian Buddhist tradition. Buddhism, which arrived in Tibet about 800 CE, largely agrees with Jaynes. Gibson re-examines the language and development of religion in ancient Tibet through the lens provided by Jaynes‘s bicameral theory. Also, in more recent versions of Tibetan religion, he finds support for Jaynes‘s theory, for example the setting of the State Oracle of Tibet is similar to the description of the Delphic oracle in its final state.
Robert E. Haskell, in the last essay of this extraordinary book, brings Vico (Naples, 1668-1744) to life: like Julian Jaynes, Giambattista Vico sees the beginning of language in singing, in poetry.
Haskell: “Vico and Jaynes describe similar conditions that lead to the initiation of imagined and hallucinated gods. Both Vico and Jaynes see metaphor as a fundamental cognitive operation, it is not a mere extra trick of language, but the basic constructive ground of language”. In Jaynes‘s words: “Consciousness is the work of lexical metaphor”; consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story.
Read and enjoy
Maybe just a couple of times a day we realize that we are thinking about things, ourselves included. Some say only the absence of thinking allows us to be creative. Other say that in the flow of automatic movements we can choose a new strategy, consciousness at work. The theories of Jaynes are guiding us to an understanding of consciousness. Perhaps after reading this book, we can “include the knower in the known”. It is a joy to read “Gods, Voices and the Bicameral Mind, the Theories of Julian Jaynes“, and we are indebted to Marcel Kuijsten for this most intriguing collection of essays.
February 15, 2018
This was a follow-up to the Jaynes book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I nearly read this one first, but I'm glad I didn't. This is a collection of essays around topics relating to Jaynes' theory about when consciousness came to be in humans and how early man's was much different than ours. Many of the essays didn't really draw my interest and there was a lot of repetition. I didn't get much out of this. If the topic is of interest, I'd skip this one and read the Jaynes book.
March 31, 2017
I have not read The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but I had read Snow Crash (which uses the theory in its plot). I had hoped that this book would be an easier introduction to the theory than the original book. It may have been. I have no way of knowing.
I am writing a series of novels dealing with consciousness, specifically about machine consciousness, so I was very interested in the subject matter.
The theory basically says that until a few thousands of years ago humans did not have consciousness as we understand it. They did no introspection, were incapable of deceit, and under stress they heard voices that came from a currently unused speech center of the brain that they interpreted to be the voices of departed ancestors or even gods. These voices give orders that must be obeyed.
At some point in history humans developed metaphorical language and the ability to do introspection and the gods stopped giving orders.
The theory is supported by the study of schizophrenic patients, children with imaginary friends, and ancient literature. In particular, the Illiad and the Odyssey are considered examples of bicameral thinking and modern consciousness respectively. They were apparently not written by one person named Homer, but by different authors hundreds of years apart in time.
This book considers all of these things, and parts of the book are more interesting than other parts. That's really about all I can say about it.
The theory is not widely accepted, but it is interesting. I don't think there is any question that the authors of the Old Testament had a different way of thinking than we do today, for example.
I am writing a series of novels dealing with consciousness, specifically about machine consciousness, so I was very interested in the subject matter.
The theory basically says that until a few thousands of years ago humans did not have consciousness as we understand it. They did no introspection, were incapable of deceit, and under stress they heard voices that came from a currently unused speech center of the brain that they interpreted to be the voices of departed ancestors or even gods. These voices give orders that must be obeyed.
At some point in history humans developed metaphorical language and the ability to do introspection and the gods stopped giving orders.
The theory is supported by the study of schizophrenic patients, children with imaginary friends, and ancient literature. In particular, the Illiad and the Odyssey are considered examples of bicameral thinking and modern consciousness respectively. They were apparently not written by one person named Homer, but by different authors hundreds of years apart in time.
This book considers all of these things, and parts of the book are more interesting than other parts. That's really about all I can say about it.
The theory is not widely accepted, but it is interesting. I don't think there is any question that the authors of the Old Testament had a different way of thinking than we do today, for example.
July 4, 2022
This is a collection of essays by scholars in several different fields, discussing the theory of consciousness proposed by Julian Jaynes in his 1977 book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The collection is fascinating, and valuable as a window on Jaynes's impact over the past 50 years.
I attended graduate school at Princeton from 1972 to 1976, the year before OC was published. Julian was not a regular faculty member in the Psychology department; his title was Senior Scientist, as I recall - a fairly permanent adjunct professor I guess you would say.
I took a course with him on the history of psychology - one of the most memorable experiences of my whole education. One of his essays, on Animate Motion as a precursor to our concept of behavior, was particularly memorable for Julian's opinions and judgments about the success or failure of different thinkers' ideas. We students would often go pubbing with him after class. He was a different kind of mentor, partly because he did not have to "play the game" like tenure-track folk, and partly because he was just a refreshingly different thinker - disciplined but joyously free. He was joined at the hip to empirical and logical thinking, but unimpressed with most quantitatively-oriented experimentation. His career advice to us was to keep one foot firmly rooted in what was worthwhile from the body of received wisdom, but to let the other foot "dance" and remain open to new ideas. Toward the end of my time at Princeton, and as a prelude to the publication of OC, he gave a talk in the old Langfeld Lounge in Green Hall on his theory of consciousness. It blew us away. Some of us immediately started digging in to the other fields where Julian had been working, to confirm or disconfirm what he was saying. Others dismissed him as crazy, and wouldn't take his ideas seriously. Such was the beginning of "Jaynes studies" in the larger world.
I attended graduate school at Princeton from 1972 to 1976, the year before OC was published. Julian was not a regular faculty member in the Psychology department; his title was Senior Scientist, as I recall - a fairly permanent adjunct professor I guess you would say.
I took a course with him on the history of psychology - one of the most memorable experiences of my whole education. One of his essays, on Animate Motion as a precursor to our concept of behavior, was particularly memorable for Julian's opinions and judgments about the success or failure of different thinkers' ideas. We students would often go pubbing with him after class. He was a different kind of mentor, partly because he did not have to "play the game" like tenure-track folk, and partly because he was just a refreshingly different thinker - disciplined but joyously free. He was joined at the hip to empirical and logical thinking, but unimpressed with most quantitatively-oriented experimentation. His career advice to us was to keep one foot firmly rooted in what was worthwhile from the body of received wisdom, but to let the other foot "dance" and remain open to new ideas. Toward the end of my time at Princeton, and as a prelude to the publication of OC, he gave a talk in the old Langfeld Lounge in Green Hall on his theory of consciousness. It blew us away. Some of us immediately started digging in to the other fields where Julian had been working, to confirm or disconfirm what he was saying. Others dismissed him as crazy, and wouldn't take his ideas seriously. Such was the beginning of "Jaynes studies" in the larger world.
December 15, 2019
The debate raised by Jaynes’ hypothesis seems to support some contemporary attempts to deconstruct the concept of a unitary Self – a coherent centre of consciousness and engine of human actions. Converging evidence suggests that our common sense-based intuition of the unitary Self could be considered an illusion created by Western cultural and social paradigms, developed after the Homeric ages and philosophically enhanced by Plato’s thought in terms of mind-body dualism.
Very interesting book.
Very interesting book.
February 4, 2023
More accessible and interesting than "Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness," though I could have lived without the boring (to me) piece trying to Jaynesianize the study of 18th- and 19th-century English poetry, while the first essay on Tibet (about how the development of the Tibetan terms for "mentation" over the centuries may parallel changes in Greek between the Iliad and the Odyssey) should have a warning label: "You will not understand this." And here's hoping they get a neurologist for the next collection to explain how Jaynes' model of the brain has fared since the 1970s.
March 19, 2020
This essay collection builds on Jaynes's theory of consciousness, exploring its implications across many fields including psychology, archeology, anthropology, literature, and philosophy. You'll get more out of it if you're already familiar with Jaynes's book "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" but if not you'll be okay, as its key points are recapped here.
April 25, 2021
Clarity for Jaynesian Theories
Spoken from the perspective of many diligent researchers and thinkers, Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind is elucidated and somewhat refined and provided with more evidence.
Spoken from the perspective of many diligent researchers and thinkers, Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind is elucidated and somewhat refined and provided with more evidence.
March 7, 2021
The book is insightful detailing recent scientific research and providing more evidence from many different perspectives, to further Jaynes’ theory. It was interesting and enjoyable to read.
December 5, 2022
The og theory is interesting and worth reading about. There are some truly painful essays here though, academia was a mistake
November 8, 2025
Extremely uneven collection of articles. The Tibet-focused entries are an absolute snore.
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