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Four foundations of the bicameral hypothesis

Four sets of ideas, in the following sequence, inspired and justified the hypothesis of the bicameral mind: 1) consciousness as a product of language; 2) ancient texts indicating an older, non-conscious mentality; 3) the problem of verbal hallucinations; 4) mid-20th-century discoveries about the cerebral hemispheres. (Unless specified otherwise, all quotations in this section are from the original 1976 edition of Julian Jaynes’s book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.)

1. The Jaynesian approach to consciousness

Jaynes introduces the problem of explaining the nature and origin of consciousness, by which he means what most people think of as their private 'inner world' of self-reflection, that which is "more myself than anything I can find in a mirror … that is everything, and yet nothing at all[.]" The matter has been problematic for philosophers, psychologists, and biologists since at least the time of Charles Darwin. Most people probably take it for granted that consciousness — the 'inner life' that is linked with ideas of the 'soul' or 'mind' — seems quite familiar, simply 'human nature', "the most self-evident thing imaginable[.]"

For 19th-century psychology, the nature of consciousness was studied in the subjective phenomena traditionally analyzed by introspection, but the methods that introspectionists used were problematic, and were rejected in the early 20th century by behaviorists who sometimes "suggested" that consciousness does not even exist. Jaynes reviews eight solutions proposed since Darwin's time and explains why each failed. He then discusses the various ways that consciousness is not at all what it seems to be. First of all, the term is commonly, and imprecisely, confused with wakefulness or any general "reactivity" of the nervous system in response to external stimuli (i.e. sensation and perception). For Jaynes, the term is correctly associated with "inwardness", or "what is introspectable", something which seems to be innate and ever-present. However, "consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not." Contrary to commonplace assumptions, 20th-century experimental psychology has shown that consciousness is neither involved with nor even necessary for most behavioral and cognitive processes such as recall of memories, basic learning, problem-solving, decision-making, reasoning and judging.

We have been brought to the conclusion that consciousness is not what we generally think it is. [It] does not make all that much difference to a lot of our activities. If our reasonings have been correct, it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all.

Metaphors

Jaynes observes that the history of trying to understand consciousness is one of "failed metaphors", and the problem resides in the "metaphor language of mind". He explains that metaphors are necessary for people to feel that they understand anything at all. People speak, for example, of the mind as if it were a 'container' or a 'space' inside the head, which of course it is not — except metaphorically; yet it is impossible to speak of the mind or describe it without using metaphors and analogies based on the world of physical behavior. It is impossible even to introspect (i.e. to 'look into' the mind) except metaphorically. Images and ideas do not exist 'in' a mind because a mind and its 'contents' occupy no physical space at all.

Jaynes develops a theory of metaphor that explains how metaphors "literally create new objects" such that "language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication." It is through language that people "invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others," with an invented "structure of consciousness" that echoes "the structure of the world[.]" Jaynes identifies several features of consciousness by which it becomes like a map or model that represents both how a person experiences the world and how the person acts in it, and later functions as the means by which people understand their world.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or a repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.

Consciousness is thus "embedded in language"; children learn, through socialization and language acquisition, after they acquire the appropriate conceptual metaphors, to attribute it to others and to themselves. Once learned, it allows people to explain their own and others' behavior in terms of personal agency and responsibility, and it can vary between individuals, across cultures, and over time.

2. Re-reading the Iliad in Homeric Greek

Looking for 'the mind' in ancient literature requires a certain amount of caution. Historically, the learning of consciousness could only have occurred after the origin of language, and the invention of writing happened very late in the history of language, around 3000 BCE. The oldest known written texts are written in hieroglyphics (the "writing of the gods"), hieratic and cuneiform. When those symbols are not explicitly concrete in meaning, their translation requires considerable guesswork. Jaynes asserts that much translation has been done by "modern scholars [who] project their own subjectivity with little awareness of the importance of their distortion."

In searching for evidence of consciousness, the "first writing in human history in a language of which we have enough certainty of translation to consider it […] is the Iliad." This epic poem was set down in writing sometime around 850 BCE but its oldest components derive from around 1230 BCE, the period of the Greek Heroic Age. The mythic account of Greek heroes and gods had been passed down over the centuries by oral tradition, and like all such texts, its newer components mixed new ideas in with the old.

The story of the Iliad (1911): "The Gods Descending to Battle"

Jaynes's etymological analysis of the Iliad's Homeric Greek reveals that there are "in the older layers . . . no words in the original text for conscious operations, such as think, feel, experience, imagine, remember, regret, etc." The story lacks "mental language"; meanwhile, its human characters engage in "action . . . constant action"; however, ". . . the initiation of action [is] by the gods." (Jaynes's italics) And the gods directly participate in the action as well. Jaynes's re-reading of the Iliad's familiar mythology provides a dramatically succinct description of "the mentality of the Myceneans" that Jaynes calls a bicameral mind:

The preposterous hypothesis we have come to [. . .] is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious.

Jaynes asserts that the case for the bicameral hypothesis is "not meant to rest solely on the Iliad[.]" Nevertheless, its oldest content, in Homeric Greek, contains almost nothing to indicate the presence of introspection - but a very different mentality is clearly indicated. The poem, all about action, has a great deal of concrete vocabulary and a nearly total absence of mental vocabulary. All the words "that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete." For example, psyche is 'blood' or 'breath', but not 'mind'. When the text uses the word soma as the opposite of psyche it never means a living or whole 'body', only 'dead limbs' or 'corpse'.

Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. It comes from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus "holds Odysseus in his noos." He keeps watch over him.

In addition, the characters of the Iliad…

. . . do not sit down and think out what to do. [. . .] The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. To another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But not to the man himself.

The Iliadic gods behaved like humans and were bound by natural laws, but the heroes whose lives they directed were "pushed about like robots[.]" The heroes' world, full of dominating god-figures who speak, and full of feelings acted out without a second thought, "is one of strangeness and heartlessness and emptiness."

Was the Iliad merely a fable and were the 'gods' merely poetic devices? Everyone in the Iliad took the gods for granted, and so did the poet-singers (the aoidoi) who transmitted the epic poem down several centuries; according to tradition, each of the aoidoi chanted the song, with its hypnotically steady rhythms of hexameter verse, as "the entranced bard 'heard' [it]" from his muse. Jaynes acknowledges that the historicity of the Homeric epics is debatable, but for understanding the early history of the human mind he concludes that the Iliad is "a psychological document of immense importance" carrying clues to the historically recent existence of "a very different mentality from our own." And as gods, temples, and mythology were central to pre-classical Greek culture, they were central to contemporaneous non-Greek cultures as well.

3. Using 'heard voices' as evidence

Can the character of Iliadic gods and their speeches be compared to the 'voices' that are today called hallucinations? By mid-20th century, the little that was scientifically known about hallucinations had been learned mostly during the medical treatment of psychosis and schizophrenia. Voices have been generally feared as a sign of insanity requiring psychological or neurological treatment, although in some cases they "may be helpful to the healing process"; and they may have been the source of inspiration to "those who have in the past claimed such special selection" as to hear voices of prophecy. Hallucinated 'voices' may be "heard by completely normal people to varying degrees […] often in times of stress [or] on a more continuing basis." Voices occur in all age-groups, come from any location and from every direction, and even "profoundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some kind of communication."

The voices in schizophrenia take any and every relationship to the individual. They converse, threaten, curse, criticize, consult, often in short sentences. They admonish, console, mock, command, or sometimes simply announce everything that's happening. They yell, whine, sneer, and vary from the slightest whisper to a thunderous shout. Often the voices take on some special peculiarity, such as speaking very slowly, scanning, rhyming, or in rhythms, or even in foreign languages. There may be one particular voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally many. [They] are recognized as gods, angels, devils, enemies, or a particular person or relative. Or occasionally they are ascribed to some kind of apparatus reminiscent of the statuary which we will see was important in this regard in bicameral kingdoms.

Medical cases differ in degrees of severity. But why are voices at all "believed, why obeyed"? Because "the voices a patient hears are more real than the doctor's voice." Sound is a modality that cannot be shut out. Voices that have been characterized as command hallucinations cannot be silenced by force of will and if they can be resisted it is only with struggle, even if they command harmful or self-destructive behavior. In less severe cases, some patients "learn to be objective toward them and to attenuate their authority […though at first there is always] unquestioning submission […] to the commands of the voices."

It is normal for healthy, conscious humans to be highly attentive and compliant to 'real' voices of those in recognized authority, especially when the voices are located nearby. For the ancient bicameral human with no conscious self-identity, disobedience to the messages from his or her 'voices' would be literally unthinkable.

. . . if one belonged to a bicameral culture, where the voices were recognized as at the utmost top of the hierarchy, taught you as gods, kings, majesties that owned you, head, heart, and foot, the omniscient, omnipotent voices that could not be categorized as beneath you, how obedient to them the bicameral man!

Regardless how they are experienced, whether by conscious people today or by bicameral people 4000 years ago, hallucinated voices "must have some innate structure in the nervous system underlying them."

4. The double brain

By the mid-20th century, more was known about the left hemisphere (LH) of the brain than about the right hemisphere (RH), and the LH was called "dominant" because of its seemingly singular responsibility for language. Jaynes accepted the established but rudimentary facts of the day, that language processes are localized in the primary 'speech areas' (Broca's and Wernicke's) and the supplementary motor area, which are normally lateralized to one hemisphere only, typically the LH, but as a research psychologist he was also aware that the importance of the so-called non-dominant RH was only beginning to be discovered.. The fifth chapter of Jaynes's book, titled The Double Brain, presented some of the issues and Jaynes's speculations.

Jaynes reported that the usually speechless RH, under certain conditions, can assume some or all the language functions. Thus, a major question that he raised about the normal brain is…

. . . why language function should be represented in only one hemisphere. Most other important functions are bilaterally represented. This redundancy in everything else is a biological advantage to the animal, since, if one side is injured, the other side can compensate. Why then was not language? […] Why was not this without-which-nothing of human culture represented on both hemispheres? [...] Could it be that these silent 'speech' areas on the right hemisphere had some function at an earlier stage in man's history that now they do not have?

The bicameral hypothesis implies a positive "if tentative" answer, that the evolution of language originally involved both sides of the brain, and that the RH must have had some important function that precluded or restricted its role in normal communicative speech processing: the "language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of gods." Jaynes notes and comments on a number of mid-century discoveries about the cerebral hemispheres:

1. Both hemispheres have speech comprehension, but only the left can usually produce speech;
2. Wilder Penfield pioneered in electrically stimulating the brain, sometimes causing patients to hear voices which were experienced, in Jaynes's words, with an "otherness" and "opposition from the self, rather than the self's own actions or own words";
3. Researching the after-effects of the "so-called split-brain operation" to treat epileptics, Joseph Bogen, Roger Sperry, and Michael Gazzaniga found that the two hemispheres could function after surgical separation with apparent independence, creating bizarre behaviors seemingly attributable to "two persons in one head", while in every situation the 'self' of the patient was always identified with the language-dominant hemisphere only;
4. Hemispheric differences of cognitive function at least "echo the differences of god and man." The right-side is better at categorizing and in "synthetic and spatial-constructive tasks while the left hemisphere is more analytic and verbal." "Recognition of both faces and facial expression is […] primarily a right hemisphere function. And to tell friend from non-friend in novel situations was one of the functions of a god."

Jaynes advocates for the newly developing conception of brain plasticity to account for the hypothetical transition of mentality required by his theory:

. . . the brain is more capable of being organized by the environment than we have hitherto supposed, and therefore could have undergone such a change as from bicameral to conscious man mostly on the basis of learning and culture. [... The] increasing tide of research has eroded any rigid concept of the brain, [...] the function of brain tissue is not inevitable, and […] perhaps different organizations, given different developmental programs, may be possible."

Status of Jaynes's theory

Radical, speculative and complex

Richard Rhodes commented in 1978: "Jaynes's theories…are radical, though well within the traditions of science — he is no Velikovsky or von Daniken bending the facts to sweeten preconception." In 1986, Daniel Dennett argued in defense of Jaynes that he had sought to maintain "plausibility" acceptable to scientific standards, even though his project was a necessarily "bold" and "speculative exercise" to fill unavoidable gaps in the historical data. It risked the "dangers" of making huge mistakes because it combined an "amalgam of […] thinking about how it had to be, historical sleuthing [for relevant facts], and inspired guesswork[.]"(Dennett's italics)

Marcel Kuijsten, a student of Jaynes's and founder of the Julian Jaynes Society wrote in 2006: "To support his theory, Jaynes [drew on] evidence from a wide range of fields, including neuroscience, psychology, archeology, ancient history, and the analysis of ancient texts." For example, Jaynes analyzed 1950's research by Wilder Penfield, who had applied electrical stimulation to patients' brains and produced 'voices', as well as the ground-breaking research by Roger Sperry on the effects of so-called "split-brain" surgery. Jaynes analyzed the history and theory of hypnosis based on his and others' clinical research. He similarly discussed his own and others' studies on the character of psychotic hallucinations, both auditory and visual, that were poorly understood and were typically targeted by psychiatrists for elimination rather than study. Jaynes extensively discussed schizophrenia, covering its complexities, its history as a disease and its relationship to consciousness. Aside from clinical research, Jaynes drew on the accounts of 'gods' recorded in ancient epic poetry, including the Homeric epics and the Akkadian literature from Ancient Mesopotamia, and on the analysis of Ancient Egyptian religion as interpreted by modern scholars, as well as on the accounts of prophecy as described in the Hebrew Bible. He explored the history and psychology of oracles and of spiritual possession as well as music and poetry, in light of the bicameral hypothesis.

Some commentators have noted that the complex arguments for bicamerality are difficult to summarize and explain without "distorting" Jaynes's theory or making it "difficult to take seriously." The broad "scope" of Jaynes's argument, evidence and conclusions has also been a reason for academic caution and reservation of judgement as well as a possible reason for hostility from scientists. Jaynes's use of ancient texts as evidence was another reason for academic caution or skepticism.

Are Jaynes's ideas influential?

The matter of Jaynes's influence is a separate source of controversy signified by the wide range of opinions about Jaynes's theories. Mike Holderness, a freelance popular science writer, asked in 1993 "How many students of cognitive science have read [Jaynes's] deeply unfashionable book under, as it were, the bed covers?" Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) put it sharply by stating that Jaynes's book "... is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius; Nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."

Philosophers have been divided in the extreme in their attitude to Jaynes and his ideas. Cavanna et.al. (2007) wrote: "Overall, the attitude of philosophers of mind towards the plausibility of a bicameral mind has been controversial." In 2006, philosopher Jan Sleutels remarked, in a footnote, that: "Jaynes's established repute is now such that the merest association with his views causes suspicion." Sleutels wrote:

In philosophy [Jaynes] is rarely mentioned and almost never taken seriously. The only notable exception is Daniel Dennett who appreciates Jaynes as a fellow social constructivist with regard to consciousness. Most outspoken in his criticism is Ned Block, who rejects Jaynes's claim as patently absurd.

Ned Block had reviewed Jaynes's book in 1977, writing: "These claims are, of course, preposterous [and] the book contains many confusions . . . juxtaposed in bizarre and stimulating ways . . . to support Jaynes's crackpot claim, but the result is a book that is never boring." Daniel Dennett argued in 1986 that he took "very seriously" what he called "Jaynes' project" while commenting that "as a whole…on the face of it, [the theory] is preposterous, and I have found that in talking with other philosophers my main task is to convince them to take it seriously when they are very reluctant to do this." In 2016, Marcel Kuijsten argued that Jaynes’s theorizing "continues to be ahead of much of the current thinking in consciousness studies" and that "the vast majority of critiques of the theory are based on misconceptions about what Jaynes actually said[.]" The complexity of Jaynes's "multi-disciplinary" theorizing has been offered as a "reason" that his work has been more ignored than tested or refuted. If some have indeed ignored Jaynes, the bicameral hypothesis has nevertheless been described as "undoubtedly influential" by Daniel B. Smith in his 2007 book on "rethinking" auditory hallucinations, where he commented that "... perhaps the only thing that [Jaynes's] boosters and critics agree upon is that [bicamerality] can't be proved." Smith argued that Jaynes's theory matters, whether it is correct or not, because "the problem of voice-hearing is in large part indistinguishable from the problem of consciousness, and that the relationship between the two has been fruitful in determining the attributes of each." Others acknowledged Jaynes's "pioneering work in the field of consciousness studies" and that his bicameral hypothesis has had "widespread influence". Over the years Jaynes's ideas have attracted continuous public attention and occasional academic "reappraisal" or "defense".

The Julian Jaynes Society was founded in 1997, after Jaynes's death, to promote awareness of his work and theories. They maintain a website with a collection of relevant research, and have published collections of essays on related topics.

In 2006, biographers Woodward and Tower reported that Jaynes "felt he had not truly succeeded" in his lifelong work because, in their words, "He was right" about his feeling that "there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it." Psycholinguist John Limber concurred, writing "When OC was published, critics had a field day — everyone could find a topic or conjecture that they disagreed with… [Jaynes's ideas were] intriguing, imaginative, preposterous, crazy… In retrospect, most of these critics — myself included — just ignored Jaynes's early chapters [about] what consciousness is not."