The Bicameral Mind

It’s not often that a boardgame motivates me to read a book, especially one as strange as The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It’s an ambitious book. Very, very ambitious! I don’t recall when I last read something that aims of such all-encompassing flavour, and Jaynes is a flowery writer and knows how to turn a phrase.

 

Jaynes attempts to answer one of the deepest questions humans have of themselves: What is consciousness and how did it arise? His theory is that not too long ago, we didn’t have the consciousness we experience today. Instead we had bicameral minds, where the right-side of our brain housed a God-like voice that spoke with authority and engendered immediate obedience. Sounds crazy? It’s a fringe idea, but Jaynes does a masterful job in bringing together multiple threads to bolster his case. Neuroscience and psychology are presented as key witnesses, although this was the mid-1970s, and our knowledge in these areas was limited (it still is!) and heavily influenced by behaviourism. Jaynes also draws from ancient literature, archaeology, history, medicine, and the arts.

 

I don’t buy Jaynes’ theory, even though I enjoyed reading it and his book made me think hard about his thesis. But given my own interests in archaeology and history, and having read many of the “classical” works that you’d encounter in a Western Civ liberal arts curriculum, it feels like he creates a Kipling-esque “Just So” story. A marvelous story with many threads, no doubt, but it has the blinkered feel of interpreting one’s observations through the axiom that a bicameral mind was the precursor to present consciousness. And Jaynes does bring up some puzzles – the most interesting has to do with why the Incan empire collapsed with arrival of the Spaniards. This is “explained” as a bicameral empire not understanding deceit, meeting the conscious conquistadors and mistaking them for God-like authoritative voices.

 

Jaynes ties modern observations of hallucination, schizophrenia, hypnosis, Tourette’s syndrome, even dreaming, as clues to the bicameral age prior. Then of course, there’s religion. In the Origins boardgame, the Age of Instinct gives way to the Bicameral Age before proceeding to the Age of Faith, and finally the Age of Reason. This follows Jaynes’ theory that the flickers of consciousness, brought about by the tremendous stress of “losing the God-like auditory hallucinations” lead inexorably to a transfer of authority to what we now call religion. The major religions are also all-encompassing world-views. You see and interpret things differently through the eyes of faith. Heck, Jaynes even thinks that the ancients spoke in poetry, that the Iliad represents humans as bicameral, that language preceded consciousness, and that law-like codes mediated the transition out of bicamerality, softening its blow. He even has an explanation for why modern science arose from all of this. You might think this all sounds crazy, but looking at it through Jaynes’ eyes, it hangs together as its own system. There are problems, of course, but Jaynes mostly side-steps them for further study.

 

There are several things in Jaynes book that caught my attention. He uses the analogy of a map-maker versus a map-reader in relation to how consciousness “works” in generating a model of the world around us which we then “use”. Since I’ve been thinking about choices that one makes in a model, I particularly liked the map-maker analogy. The map-maker has to choose which features are being highlighted, which are being simplified, and how to represent them adequately depending on how they might be used. As an educator, I think of myself as a map-maker. Sometimes I ask students to generate “mind-maps”, but it made me wonder whether there should be a mixture of presenting and regenerating such maps in a more purposeful way.

 

Another point in the book is the distinction between recognition and recall. In my quizzes and exams, or when I’m posing questions, sometimes I’m testing for recognition and sometimes for recall. How our brains retrieve responses to these are, I think, slightly different. It made me consider how much of my final exam is aimed at recognition and how much at recall – and have I been preparing the students appropriately? Online homework self-graded systems are good at testing recognition, not so good at testing recall (or at least grading it). Whenever I read anything, my educator hat is always on!

 

Finally, two other quick things that caught my attention and that I’m likely to ponder more and maybe even explore in a future blog post: (1) Rolling dice or casting lots wasn’t about “chance” for the bicameral mind, it was invoking the fate of the gods. I should definitely think about that when playing boardgames – it might bring out an interesting element! (2) The chapter on hypnosis discusses the factors that make one more or less susceptible, and I started thinking about how the Imperius Curse works in the Harry Potter series (at least a non-ultrasonic version). That may be an easy spell to cast on a bicameral species to get them to do your bidding.

 

I had hoped that reading Jaynes book would excite me about playing more of the Origins boardgame, but that hasn’t been the case yet. Maybe it’s because I need to be preparing for the new semester and my mind is elsewhere.