Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes outlines his fascinating theory of the bicameral mind in this essay entitled Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind. Jaynes’ theory is that humans were not always conscious in the way we think of being conscious. Jaynes defines consciousness as the “mind space” we use as an analog of the real world and says we use metaphors to describe our introspection of what this inner model of the world is like. But Jaynes also says this has not always been the case. He cites early written works and cultural artifacts that indicate that as recently as 3000 years ago, humans experienced the world through what Jaynes calls a “bicameral mind”. Whereas today, we introspect our thoughts and see them as thoughts, to these early cultures those thoughts would appear as auditory hallucinations which they would attribute to the voices of gods speaking to them.
Jaynes says that in the bicameral mind the right hemisphere acts as the “god” part which issues commands and the left hemisphere follows the commands without introspection. Jaynes says our modern way of thinking and introspection is a learned process, derived from language like “I see the solution” and “I’m feeling down”. Our sense of “I” comes along with this language as the subject that is doing the seeing and the feeling.
This theory, although somewhat controversial, just makes me realize how much I take for granted and assume must have always been the way minds work. Even in our own lifetime we may even go through this same process of mental evolution. Jaynes compares the “imaginary friends” of some children to the personal gods of the bicameral mind and it does make sense that a lot of our own self-talk seems to be commands and judgements we are giving to ourselves.
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