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What is human consciousness, where did
it come from, and what is its place in the material world?
These are questions that have puzzled mankind for centuries,
and here presented is an entirely new, yet still
soberly scientific way to look at human nature -- one that
demands a revolutionary reinterpretation of human history
and human behavior.
Based on recent laboratory studies of the
brain and a close reading of the archaeological evidence,
psychologist Julian Jaynes shows us how ancient peoples
from Mesopotamia to Peru could not :think" as we do
today, and were therefore not conscious. Unable to introspect,
they experienced auditory hallucinations -- voices of gods,
actually heard as in the Old Testament or the Iliad -- which,
coming from the brain's right hemisphere, told a person
what to do in circumstances of novelty or stress. This ancient
mentality is called the bicameral mind.
Only catastrophe and cataclysm forced mankind
to learn consciousness, and that happened only 3000
years ago. Jaynes shows us how and why.
Not a product of animal evolution, but of
human history and culture, consciousness is ultimately grounded
in the physiology of the brain's right and left hemispheres.
Julian Jaynes examines three forms of human
awareness -- the bicameral or god-run man; the modern or
problem-solving man; and contemporary forms of throwbacks
to bicamerality: hypnotism, schizophrenia, poetic and religious
frenzy, among other phenomena. No scientist in recent time
has proposed a theory so bold and encompassing. In the words
of one reviewer, it is "a humbling text, the kind that
reminds most of us who make our livings from thinking, how
much thinking there is left to do."
The ideas here set forth will challenge
basic assumptions in fields as diverse as classics and psychiatry,
as well as those of science itself. The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is an arresting
and ingeniously powerful achievement.
Julian Jaynes teaches psychology at Princeton
University. He lectures widely and has written numerous
scientific articles.
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