Bicameralism, Part 2: The Silent Pantheon

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you a Stuff to Blow Your Mind fan? Are
you a New Yorker? Do you plan to attend this
year's New York Comic Con. If so, then you've got
to check out our exclusive live show NYCC presents Stuff
to Blow Your Mind Live Stranger Science. Join all three
of us as we record a live podcast about the
exciting science and tantalizing pseudo science underlying the hit Netflix

(00:21):
show Stranger Things. It all goes down Friday, October six
from seven pm to eight thirty pm at the Hudson
Mercantile in Manhattan. Stuff You missed in History class has
a show right before us, so you can really double down,
learn more and buy your tickets today at New York
Comic Con dot com slash NYCC hyphen presents Welcome to

(00:46):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Into Day. This is
going to be part two of our two part series
on Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind and the origin

(01:07):
of consciousness in the Breakdown of the bi cameral Mind.
So as this is part two of a two part episode.
If you haven't heard part one yet, you should go
back and listen to that one first. Sometimes we say,
you know, if you feel like jumping right in and
go for it, This is one where I feel like
you're really going to have a hard time following us
if you haven't heard part one yet, because that's gonna
be where we explain what Julian james main hypothesis is

(01:29):
and how he arrived at it, and then in the
second episode we're gonna be talking about evidence for it
from the ancient world and from the modern world. Yeah,
this episode is going to be full of like falling
kingdoms and whispering statues and other great stuff, but you
need that first episode to understand it. Now, as with
the first episode, we want to make clear that we're
not necessarily endorsing this hypothesis. This is a very controversial hypothesis.

(01:52):
It's not something that is at all considered proven or
even necessarily very well attested by evidence. It's something that
is controversial but very fascinating and I think worth exploring
as a hypothetical. Yeah, it is a it is a
radical hypothesis, and if nothing else, it is just a
fascinating thought. Experiment. So as we discuss it again, you're

(02:13):
going to hear us Uh discussing it as if it
was fact, as if this is actually how ancient people thought.
But that is just a part of our exploration of
the hypothesis. Now to briefly recap the core of Julian
James theory, and we should say Julian James, when did
he live? Nine? Yeah? So seven. Julian James was an

(02:34):
American psychologist. He's primarily known for this book that was
published in nineteen seventy six called The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And the thrust
of that book is, until about three thousand years ago,
human beings were not conscious. They did not possess consciousness
in the way we do today. And around that time,

(02:56):
roughly three thousand years ago, modern human consciousness be and
as a cultural invention, probably in Mesopotamia that's spread around
the world over time. And before that time, for thousands
of years, almost all humans were not conscious in the
way we are, but instead we're unconscious beings commanded in
all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices that they called gods

(03:20):
or another way of putting it and uh, and James
himself put it this way, everybody was schizophrenic sort of. Yeah.
I mean, so schizophrenia, as James imagines, it is one
form or a modified version of a regression to this
bicameral mind state that used to be the norm for
how humans and ancient civilizations lived. And so this norm

(03:42):
would be that most of the time you would be
going around unconsciously behaving out of habit you know, you
have a stimulus response behaviors, and you would have habitual
behaviors that you would enact, and this would serve to
do most things that would be you know, recurrent repetitive
behaviors over the day. Whenever something new happened, whenever you
needed to make a decision and there was a stress

(04:05):
point induced by that decision, you would be told what
to do by a hallucinated auditory voice that you would
perceive as a god, and that you would enact that. Now,
this is, as you said, a radical hypothesis. Yeah, because
again the idea here is that everybody heard these voices,
that this was the universal human experience, this was the norm, right,

(04:26):
And so obviously I mean that that sounds kind of
crazy to us now, like, what really could could that
be true? So, if there is any truth to Jane's theory,
and as we said before, we're not necessarily endorsing it
is true, just entertaining it as an interesting hypothesis, we
should be able to find some evidence of that theory.
And so we can look at psychiatry, and we can

(04:47):
look at neuroscience, and we can look at evidence from
the ancient world. And today we're gonna start by looking
at evidence from the ancient world, from history, from archaeology,
from ancient literature. If there was a bicam moral mind state,
this divided mind state, where one half of the brain
spoke to the other as the voice of a god
and commanded the unconscious other half, we should be able

(05:08):
to see that in the behaviors of ancient people's and
the traces left of those behaviors. Right, So a lot
of this episode is going to be UH, Joe and
I discussing some of the examples that James brings up
in the book. We can't possibly touch on all of
the examples because much of the book, and much of
the real joy of the book is UH is him

(05:31):
bringing up these various examples from from historical accounts, from archaeology,
from literature, and using that to support the idea of
the by bicameral mind. Yeah. And one of the pleasures
of the book is even if Jane's hypothesis does turn
out to be entirely incorrect, you know, if there never
was any bicameral mind, if consciousness is not a recent invention,

(05:54):
if he's wrong about all that, it's still a fascinating
book just because of the way he pulls in so
many different disciplines and ranges throughout history, incorporating evidence in
such an amazing and fascinating way. All right, well, let's
jump into it a bit here and start discussing some
of the evidence that James brought up in the book. Okay, Well,

(06:14):
one of the things that we probably should be able
to think about is if ancient people's perceived auditory hallucinations
that they regarded as gods, and these gods told them
what to do, there should be some evidence of this
in what traces they left of their relationship to the
gods they believed in, right, Yeah, And one of those examples,

(06:35):
James argues, is the positioning of the houses of the gods.
So this is the basic idea. Well, today, you travel
to a big city. Let's say you go to Washington,
d C. Okay, this is our example, not James. So
I'm in Washington, all right, and you seek out the grandest,
most centralized home, the one that just really stands out
from the rest, is the most protected. It has them,

(06:56):
you know that, the most central status of any other
um habitat. Okay, so I'm imagining it is the home
of an extremely tall, thin person that stands looking out
over the water. Yeah, that's that's one one interpretation. No way,
that thing isn't a home, is it. No, well, it's
not a home, But I mean that is an example
of a of a building of prominence with a with

(07:18):
a statue in it, which kind of gets into some
additional arguments that we're going to make here. But no,
no, no no, you'd expect to find the home of a king, right, Yeah, yeah,
you would. That's the thing, right, you would want to
you would expect a right, this is the center of
the town. The whole town is built around this. It
occupies a spatial center as well as just the center
of meaning and purpose. Or maybe sorry that that was

(07:38):
probably my sexism talking to a king or a queen.
In any case, you would expect the ruling person to
live there. But what have you entered into this grand
building at the center of the city and you found
that it was home only to a quote hallucinated presence,
perhaps the statue of that presence in the case of
Abraham Lincoln, if you will, but still you for our

(08:00):
purposes here an unreal entity, a god, a goddess. Um.
You can also look to to cities in which a
church still occupies the central ground, and James argues that
this is an perhaps an echo of the bicameral past.
So why would that why would that be evidence of
a bicameral past, to find churches or temples at the
center of a city as opposed to the house of

(08:22):
a king. Well, the idea here is that the voice
occupied the center of our thoughts, and so to it
occupied the center of the town or the city, and
that the house of the God or the house of
the gods was quite literally the house of the gods. Yeah, yeah,
this is true. So if I remember hearing when I
was a kid people saying, you know, be be respectful
when you're in church because it's God's house. But the

(08:42):
churches I was going to didn't literally believe that the
God they worshiped lived in the church. That was just
where humans congregated to worship. That's not so much the
case in ancient religions. It really does seem like in
many ancient religions, the place of worship or the the
you know, the sacred building was literally where the God inhabited. Yeah,

(09:03):
where the God inhabited, and then his things sort of
go on the place where God may visit, the place
where God may be contacted. So he draws on examples
from the God houses at Jericho, uh the ziggarat of
r which we discussed in our Tower of Babel episode,
as well as the city of Hatasus, the Bronze Age

(09:24):
capital of the Hittite Empire, and in the Ladder this
was actually a mountain shrine with images of the overwatching
gods rather than a city center, but he said it's
kind of an exception that that also lines up with
the argument. He also looks to the Old mec and
Mayan empires as Bicameral Mesoamerican empires due to the presence

(09:47):
of quote huge, otherwise useless, centrally located buildings in chief
among these the pyramid of TiO Tiwakan in modern Mexico.
And I love how he mentioned, you know, otherwise useless buildings,
because is this touches on on our discussions in the
Tower of Battle episode regarding the ziggurats. A lot of
our our study of the past has been us trying

(10:08):
to figure out what was this for what purpose? And
a lot of times we try and figure out a
practical purpose. You know, what purpose did this structure have? Absolutely?
I mean these building projects consumed vast resources. I mean
to build the most prominent and highest and well defended
building in the middle of of an inhabited space. That

(10:30):
just seems like, why would you waste that on being
there for a being that is not that does not
physically need a house. Yeah, unless you are a people
for whom the voice of God is real. Again, this
is just the wonder of this theory is that it
turns so much of ancient history on its head. Uh.
And and then also you know, more recent history, as

(10:52):
this is all an echo of the past. Now, in
the previous episode, we pointed out that you know, the
by the voice of the bicameral mind, it is it's
coming in to help you deal with novel experiences that
pop up, and how it might be helpful but it
might also be destructive. Well, in the same way that
a conscious person can make good decisions or can make
bad decisions, the god guiding the behaviors of the unconscious

(11:16):
bicameral person, if this person ever existed, could be giving
good advice or bad advice. I mean, it's based on
the integrated powers of the brain. In both cases, it's
just that is it consciously happening or is it being
delivered to you as a command that must be obeyed? Yeah.
And and along these lines, he attributes the construction of
ancient meso American cities that are located in inhospitable areas,

(11:40):
such as you on top of a mountain or uh,
in the middle of a swamp on the you know,
on the side of a cliff. He says that, uh,
these are areas that again we're inhospitable, and they may
have been abandoned at some point later on. Uh. And
this is because they were linked to the commands of
quote hallucinations, which in certain periods could be not only

(12:01):
irrational but downright punishing. Now that's possible, but it's also
possible that we in the modern world are just not
seeing correctly what the benefits of these spaces were. That's right,
I mean, we're always working with imperfect data. Um. He
does not reference this, but I couldn't help but think
of Montezuma Castle in modern Arizona. These were cliff side
dwellings of the Senegua culture that were abandoned around four

(12:25):
s after centuries of occupation. Now now, various explanations for
the abandonment of Montezuma Castle include a drought, resource depletion,
tribal conflict, and interestingly enough, just religious inclination to move. Now,
you can get into a discussion of of how that
would possibly line up with james timeline for the bicameral mind.

(12:48):
But he does uh point out that by the time
the Incans encountered Europeans in the fifteenth century. Uh, there
was perhaps a combination of things bicameral and things protosubjective, subjective. Yeah,
and that is one feature of his theory that for
a long period of time it wasn't just like everyone
was bicameral and then everyone was conscious. You had a
long period of the slow death of bicameral society turning

(13:13):
into being taken over by conscious people. You know, this
makes me think of shows like Game of Thrones and
other fantasy worlds where magic slowly bleeds out of the world,
because that's essentially the argument here is that over time,
fewer and fewer people are hearing the voice voices of
the gods, Fewer people are hearing the voices of the
spirits of the departed loved ones, etcetera. And yet they're

(13:37):
surrounded by the cultural memory of people who did hear
the voices of the gods, or people who still hear
the voices of the gods today even though they can't.
So you have this society in which there are conscious
people who are are constantly being reminded that they could
be in contact with the gods, but they're not, and this,
I imagine is very distressing and frustrating to these people.

(13:58):
And you know, this is also interesting in that you
eventually have this clash between the Inca Empire and the
Spanish Empire. And he says that this was as close,
too close to anything in our history as to a
meeting of these two different minds, of the bicameral mind
and the conscious mind, like two different cultures, uh, encountering
each other. Um. And and yet he points to a

(14:21):
number of different arguments for and against the Inca Empire
at being a bicameral empire. Well, it could have been
an empire in transition, as many of these others were
for so long. Yeah, I think Basically, he says that
he believes that if there was a transition from a
bicameral society to a conscious society, that it began in

(14:41):
Mesopotamia about you know, roughly one thousand BC. Uh, you know,
a few hundred years on each side. It was a
slow transition and spread around the world from there. Yes.
So with the Inca in particularly, he um he points
out that on one hand, uh, the administrative demands and politics,
we're probably beyond something that a purely bicameral culture could handle.

(15:04):
Yet they had a god king who was the Inca
among them, and there were you know, other aspects of
bi cameral culture as well. Uh. And then these may
have been again to your point, mere traditional echoes of
the past. But he points out that, uh that you
you had these gold and jeweled spools that members of
the top of Inca hierarchy they wore in their ears,

(15:24):
and sometimes with images of the sun on them that
these may have indicated that those same ears we're hearing
the voice of the sun, since the Sun was a god. Yeah. Yeah,
So he spends a lot of time with various examples
discussing the importance of eye symbolism, ear symbolism, as uh
as showing that that the individual or the statue is

(15:45):
somehow involved in speech or hearing. Now, one of the
things I wanted to revisit from our last episode is
just the idea that James is not necessarily saying that,
for example, the bicameral mind is not as good as
the conscious mind. I know, we our conscious bias, uh,
you know, would naturally kind of feel that way, But
it's not necessarily that conscious minds are better or more

(16:08):
valuable or even smarter. I mean, that's not just that's
just not necessarily the case. It's that they have different
adaptive strengths, and so having different strengths a a sudden
clash of a conscious culture against a bicameral culture could
be very disastrous for one or the other. Yeah, I mean,
this is this is basically the the the key example
of an outside context problem in our world and Uh,

(16:32):
and James has a just a beautiful little description of
how this would have gone down. Assuming that this is
a meeting of a bicameral or partially bicameral culture in
the Inca and a conscious culture and that of the Spaniards,
he says, quote, it is possible that it was one
of the few confrontations between subjective and bicameral minds, that

(16:53):
for things as unfamiliar as Inca at a Wappa was
confronted with these rough, milk skinned men with hair drooling
from their chins instead of from their scalps, so that
their heads looked upside down, clothed in metal, with avertive
eyes writing strange lama like creatures with silver hoofs having

(17:14):
arrived like gods in gigantic quampas uh teared like mockagan
temples over the sea, which to the Inca was unsailable
that for all this there were no bicameral voices coming
from the sun or from the golden statues of Cuzco
in their dazzling towers. Not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive

(17:34):
or to nar narrat a rise out the deception of others,
the Inca and his lords were captured like helpless automatons.
It's a horrible thing to imagine, as I mean, reading
anything about the European conquest Americans is always like a
horrible thing to Yeah, you don't have told have to
imagine a separate state of mind for it to be

(17:55):
a rather horrific, uh encounter. But yeah, that is of
the features of his hypothesis. Is so one of the
things that consciousness gives us is a capability for treachery. Yes,
that really, the bicameral person is not very much capable
of treachery. I mean, they can't prolong a deceptive behavior,

(18:17):
right because they can't run this internal narrative of how
they should behave if they were to believe one thing
versus how they you know, really what goal they'll be
working towards secretly, It just doesn't seem like that works
out very well. But these conscious people are capable of
extreme deception and treachery and the ability to just be

(18:40):
jerks all right. Now. Another area that that he brings
up is that of essentially the loved dead. He points
to the burial of the dead as if they were
still alive as being a key evidence for by the
bicameral mind. So we've covered a number of different momification
practices on the show over the year. So I think
everyone here knows the drill the corpse as an astronaut

(19:02):
on a cosmic journey to the other side. You know,
there's some sort of an elaborate tomb. Maybe you fill
that tomb with items that that individual loved in life
and therefore might continue to need on a trip. And
then beyond that, you may even supply them, as we
see in the case of Egyptian tombs, with food stuffs,
with with perishable goods to uh to aid them in

(19:24):
the journey. And the idea here is that if this
goes beyond the mere idea that oh, well, they like
to cheeseburger, so let's put a cheeseburger in there as
a you know, a token is some sort of uh,
just at tribute to them. It's the idea that that no,
I still hear their voice, they are still speaking to me,
even though the body has stopped moving, I will put

(19:45):
a cheeseburger in there for them to eat, exactly. Yeah,
So we think of tokens to the dead today primarily
as uh it's something representing the way the living feel Yeah,
but no, the belief here was that the dead person
still need at that. Yeah. And he says that this
spills over to the treatment of ordinary dead as well

(20:05):
as royal dead and many of these ancient cultures. But
the concept of bearing the dead and massive tombs preserving
their bodies, providing them with physical luxuries and even food, uh,
this is key. And and and and in cases where there
was no food, such as the graves at Larsa and
Mesopotamia from around the uh. He says there these areas

(20:26):
were foodless because the tombs were beneath human habitation, so
that the dead essentially still lived among the living, so
that they would wander up into the house and you
would literally hallucinate them doing so and telling you what
to do. Yeah. Now, James admits that grief could have
been the core motivation and most of these rights. And certainly,
I think that's the way we think about it when

(20:47):
we're trying to put ourselves in the shoes of ancient people, right.
I Mean, another very plausible and perhaps the more probable
answer is just that people wished their loved ones were
still alive and wanted to behave as if they could now. Yeah, now,
he argues that grief alone wouldn't be able to account
for all of these practices. I mean, I think it

(21:08):
depends on your example and uh and you know what
your experience with bereavement is. I think that a lot
of this can a test that. Yeah, that that the
loss of a loved one, or even the loss of
just a you know, I loved celebrity in many cases
can can have a big impact, a huge impact on
your life. So uh, yeah, I don't know to what
extent I completely agree with that assessment, but I still

(21:31):
think it's a it's an interesting case to be Yeah,
I mean, in a bicameral culture, you could imagine that
when Prince died, everybody would still be hearing him sing
into their ear. Yeah, because what is prince but a
you know, royal of the modern age. All Right, we're
gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we will keep looking at evidence from the ancient world
that may indicate a bicameral past. Okay, we're back. You know, Joe,

(21:55):
you mentioned uh uh Statue of Lincoln to the top
of this step said, I know, oh you know what
I think I think I was talking about. What's it
called the Obelisk the Washington I thought you meant when
you were talking about a statue of a tall, slender figure,
I thought you meant Lincoln slender dude. There's a miscommunication
that so easily comes with our conscious inability to communicate. Well,

(22:19):
you've been you've seen Lincoln his statue in Washington. Yeah,
he's just sitting in that chair. But he probably has
not spoken to you. And I mean I don't mean
that in a in a metaphorical sense or anything. I
mean that statue has not literally spoke. You have not
heard the voice of that statue. No, But if I
were a bicameral person, apparently I might, like I could

(22:40):
go to pay reverence to that statue. But I wouldn't
just be paying reverence. I'd be getting advice on what
to do exactly. So that's the next point that the
James made, is that we have these idols of the
speaking stone that that that play into all these different cultures.
So we've already mentioned that, all right, your your father's
voice is still in your head, like literally in your head,

(23:02):
you're still hearing it after they have died. Because of
this confusion to take place about about the nature of death.
So your your parents did die, yet you still hear
their admonitions, right, and then the king dies, you still
hear the voice of the king. So one of the
first humans just raised up the corpses and skulls of
their dead loved ones and their dead leaders. Uh. After that,

(23:27):
we would turn more and more to two various artificial
likenesses of those individuals in varying degrees of detail. So
we we can find crude humanoid figurings dating back to
a roughly UM fifty six hundred BC in what's modern
day Turkey and uh and relatively, these are relics that
were already ancient when the pyramids were built. Now, Frasier

(23:53):
would have classified such carvings as just fertility figures, but
James points out that that was the horse He was right,
and he was trying to cram everything into those process. Yeah.
But but James points out that you you can find
them in very fertile parts of the world, such as
with the Old Metal civilization, and he points to some
of the various um attributes of these likenesses open mouths,

(24:15):
exaggerated ears, as if the statue is going to listen
to you and speak to you, and in the case
of the old mix, the creation of such idle skyrocketed
about seven hundred see. But James's questions whether this was
due to the cease of the voices. So did the
voices stop so that you you were crafting more and

(24:37):
more of these details to try and bring them back,
or was it due to a multiplication of them, so
you know, you're having to deal with the chaos of
all these voices now. He argues that many artifacts might
have been quote semi hallucinatory uh mnemonic aids for the
non conscious people. So they're all it's also about remembering things,

(25:00):
ings and um, you know, adding order to life. But
he argues that quote some of these small objects, we
may be confident we're capable of assisting with the production
of bicameral voices, and he points to Mesopotamian ie idols
from around three thousand BS. He and the eyes of
these and numerous others were figures were important to focus

(25:21):
because of our involved dependency on eye contact for communication. Yeah,
and then it's only left for the statute to speak
to us and speak they did. Uh. Not only according
to bicameral mind theory here, but also just according to
various accounts. Um uniform literature he writes provides examples of
speaking statues. If you turn in your Old Testament to

(25:44):
Ezekiel one, there's an example of a Babylonian king who
said to speak to idols, which were known as a terrup. Yeah,
they're there are all kinds of accounts of this throughout
the ancient world of us. I mean, this is another
case of like we were talking about in the live episode,
with ancient literature. You know, you read it and you
feel you send something alien about the characters, and you're like,

(26:06):
is that something I'm just not getting that's getting lost
in translation or were they truly alien to my mentality?
A similar thing is going on with when it describes
the practices of hearing God speak. You could think like, okay,
well I don't usually hear God speak. Um, so maybe
there's just something this, you know, this like a literary
device or something that's getting lost in translation. Or you

(26:28):
could just say, no, I'll just take this literally. I'll
take it at face value. Something was speaking to them
and it was the other hemisphere of their brain. Yeah,
So we get into this point where these statutes, these
artifacts become kind of focus points for the voice, like
in a way too, in a way summon the voice
even when it's not, you know, directly called up by

(26:51):
stressful circumstance. H. He has numerous tidbits to support this.
Some of the really fun ones I found was he
adds that to quote, the conquered Aztecs told the Spanish
invaders how their history began when a statue from a
ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders.
So I just love the mental image of you know,

(27:14):
these tribal individuals coming across the statue built by someone else,
and it it summons the voices just to look at it.
You can also imagine, though, how if this model is correct,
conscious people would react very negatively to encountering b cameral
people and and the voices of their gods. Right, Oh yeah,
I mean that's another example he makes is that you

(27:36):
have the Spaniards, who again are conscious individuals steeped in Catholicism,
and they come in and uh, they encounter the native
peoples and they actually reported that the people of of
Peru were a quote commanded by the devil. In that quote,
the devil himself actually spoke to the incas out of
the mouths of their statues. So that could just be

(27:59):
you know, historic goal cultural slander, or it could be
them trying to make sense of practices they saw. Yeah,
you know, before really getting into the bicameral mind theory,
I would have easily just said, well, that's just obviously
just a bunch of xenophobic foreigners from another continent coming
in and saying, oh, they have statues. They probably stand
around listening to their voices and they obey the statues.

(28:21):
I mean, either way, they are putting their their dominant
racist spin on it. But it could be that they
were actually observing a practice. Yes. Now again we always
get into the same situation though, where they was this
a practice that was based on on an existing bicameral
experience or is it an echo of a bicameral past. Yeah,

(28:41):
it could be either one. If there's anything to this theory.
Another thing that I think is one of the most
important takeaways of this whole theory is that if James
is correct, it's not that people used to be more
religious and now they're less religious. That's not the progression.
It's that ancient bicameral religion and modern conscious religion are

(29:04):
completely different types of things. Conscious religion requires an emphasis
on things like faith and belief and organized systems of dogma.
You know, they say, here's what we believe, and here's
why you should believe it, and so it's like regulated
by ecclesiastical authorities. It's addressed to an object that is

(29:25):
not immediately apparent. Not so for bicameral religion. Right, So
bicameral religion would have had no need for the concept
of faith, because what's the point in telling people to
believe in the gods that literally talked to them and
appear before them all the time? That's right, I mean,
the gods are speaking to you household, God's household spirits

(29:47):
are speaking to you. Uh so you really there's not
really any room to doubt there if doubt was even
a thing that your mind can do. Yeah, I mean,
our modern concept of religion you could look at as
something that came to exist at through the disappearance of
the direct experience of the gods. Likewise, I mean, could
could heresy even exist in such a world like everybody is?

(30:08):
I mean, certainly you're you're still gonna have, you know,
a structure to society but everyone is hearing voices of
the God. Everyone has has their their their radio set
to the other world. Yeah, I mean this is a
world where the voices are speaking to everyone. Okay, I
think we should look at one more thing about features

(30:29):
we see of the organization of ancient societies before we
start to look at some ancient literature. So how about
the theocratic organization of ancient society? What what does that
tell us about whether or not a bicameral mind ever existed.
According to Julian James, well, in this we're getting into
a topic that we've discussed before, the idea of divine kings.

(30:49):
What does it mean that the king is either the
you know, the right hand man of God, works for God,
or in some cases is God. That's an important distinction,
and James makes that this stinction. You know, there are
two main types of kings for him, the steward king
and the God king. Right, that's right, the steward king.
This is where the king is a stand in for
God and then the God king. The king is God

(31:11):
and James believe that both tides developed out of the
more primitive bicameral situation where a new king ruled by
obeying the hallucinated voice of a dead king, which sort
of that gives you like the you know, the succession order, right. Yeah,
in fact, you're never really obeying you're never really obeying
the new king. You're always obeying the old king through

(31:34):
a sort of intermediary. And in this he I mean,
he even argues that the ziggurat centered civilizations of ancient
Mesopotamia that in these cases it's not you can't even
really look at it, like the human beings were the
ones that were ruling, Like the ruling powers were the
hallucinated voices of the various gods. Right, So it was
not the left brain or the dominant side of the
brain of the actual king, but it was the other

(31:57):
hemisphere of their brain ruling, the dominant side ruling the people. Right.
And he also gets into how, you know, we've talked about, Okay,
you're reacting to statues, humanoid figures, but on top of
this we also end up with all with additional uh,
religious imageries, symbology. That's that's this used even written language. Uh.

(32:18):
He points out that quote reading in the third millennium
b c. May therefore have been a matter of hearing
the cuneiform, that is hallucinating the speech from looking at
its picture symbols rather than visual reading of syllables in
our sense. Woh, that's that's fascinating. So you think about
how reading takes place for us today, it is largely

(32:38):
an unconscious thing if you're an adult that's been reading,
not if you're a kid who's learning to read, or
if you know, at any point in your life. If
you're learning to read, you do have to think about
the constituent parts of words and sentences, like you have
to sound them out and put them together in your mind,
using your conscious mind. Eventually reading becomes unconscious. I mean,
I wonder if in this, in this bicameral framework, you

(33:03):
would learn to read in an entirely unconscious way, the
same way that maybe you get better at shooting basketballs
or something in an unconscious way. Yeah. Yeah, that's so. Now.
Now another thing that another point that he makes about
language is that in reference to ancient Egyptians, uh, much
like the language of the ancient Sumerians. He says that

(33:24):
these languages were concrete from first to last, and that
interpretations involving abstract thought, uh, these are that these are modern,
modern intrusions, and that basically the gods commanded rather than created. Yeah,
and we'll see that more we look in literature in
the next section. Now, I think I made reference already
to household gods and household spirits. You encounter these in

(33:47):
a lot of different cultures. If it's not household gods,
then maybe it's a you know, just a memorial of
various members of the family, right, And a lot of
those traditions still carry on to this day. But the
idea here is that not everyone can hear the voice
the ruling god, right, that would seem to be kind
of chaotic if the even if it's just a simple
model of the previous dead king speaking to the current king.

(34:08):
I mean, it wouldn't make sense for everyone to hear
that king's voice and have their authority. But everyone in
this scenario, in the bicameral scenario, is hearing voices. So
who are those voices? Well, there's a hierarchy of God's
isn't exactly like because we there are different types of
stressful situations. Imagine a scenario where one is cooking, preparing
a meal in one's hut, and um, let's say you've

(34:30):
only got one piece of meat and then you accidentally
drop it onto the ground. There's a moment of panic,
what do I do? Well, the household cooking god chimes
in and says, take it and wash it in the
river or something to that effect, you know, and the
and it's salts. Second. Yeah, so this would be the
case of a of a lesser deity coming in and

(34:52):
calling the shot. Yeah. You know. One of the things
about ancient religion he mentions in the book that is
very interesting is his discussion of the evil ocean, of
the concepts of the car and the ba in uh
in Egyptian theology, where it's hard to I guess we
can't summarize it here, but if you get a chance
to read the book yourself, look out for that section.

(35:12):
It's really interesting. It's it's about the way we're you know,
words for theological concepts sort of transition into other into
having other meanings. Now, part of the whole timeline, of course,
is that as we've already stressed, that the gods cease
speaking to everyone after a while and then cease all
together for the most part. We'll get into the details

(35:34):
of that as we we go. But but then when
that happens, there's uh, there's order collapses. Uh, cultures end
up retreating into the jungles, and for many people everything
has to be built up again. Basically, the idea here
is that the bicameral mind, this, this whole system of
hearing voices, this hold society together. This is it's it's

(35:56):
an instrument of social control. Yeah, and so it's it's
like playing jinga with gravity, and then gravity goes away,
and then how do you hold the blocks together? Well,
then suddenly have to come with new novel ways to
do it, such as gluing them all together. I guess.
Is so the political organization equivalent of that would be
what it would be brutal dictatorship. Yeah, things like brutal
dictatorship have to step in. Uh. Suddenly, you know, you

(36:19):
have all these wars and just total bloodshed occurring because
the voices that organized society have have stopped speaking, or
have certainly stopped speaking with enough regularity to hold everything together. So,
in closing on this, he argues quote that man in
his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own,

(36:41):
that in fact, men and women were not conscious as
we are. We're not responsible for their actions and therefore
cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that
was done over these vast millennia of time. That instead,
each person had a part of his nervous system, which
was divine, by which he was ordered about like any
slow ave a voice or voices, which indeed were what

(37:03):
we call volition and empowered what they commanded, and were
related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully
established hierarchy. And this mindset would have again developed over
the over the ninth century BC to the second millennium BC,
a gradual procession progression. Right, So that's the hypothesized era

(37:23):
of the bicameral mind, which around the first millennium BC
starts to decompose and fall apart. All right, we're gonna
take a quick break, and when we come back, we
will look at signs of the bicameral mind in ancient literature.
Than all right, we're back, all right, So obviously it
would make sense that we'd see examples or the examples
could be made in literature, because after all, the bicameral

(37:46):
mind is uh is according to the theory, according to
the hypothes here and offshoot of the acquisition of language, right,
Jane says language makes it exist, So could you could
you look at ancient uses of language to find evidens
of it? Now, another thing that complicates this is that
James thinks that one of the causes of the decomposition
of the bicameral mind into the conscious mind is the

(38:09):
widespread introduction of written language. So this also writing ends
up undermining the bicameral mind. But can we see signs
of the bi cameral mind in ancient literature? I think
he's got some interesting stuff to talk about here. Yet again,
I want to be clear that I'm not endorsing his
theory as correct, but I do think some of his claims,

(38:29):
especially about what we see in Greek literature, are fascinating
and a little terrifying. I have to admit, when I
was reading you know, it kind of kind of gave
me the willies at various points to try to imagine
ancient people ruled by bicameral mind. But when you started
talking about the Iliad in particular, it kind of gave
me chill bumps. Oh totally. So the Iliot is one

(38:50):
of Jane's chief examples of bicameral literature. So, of course
the Iliad if you're if you never read it, it's
an epic war poem that tells the story of an
alliance of Greek kings and warriors, primarily the warrior Achilles,
laying siege to the city of Troy. This is the
historical event now known as the Trojan War. And Jane's
claims that the Iliad was developed by a group of

(39:11):
oral storytellers or bards known as the ao E d
and that's in contrast to sort of the traditional received
knowledge that they were composed by an individual named Homer.
I think it's probably more widely believed now that these
are the works of many people of time. But anyway,
that that war took place about twelve thirty b C.

(39:33):
Or sorry, it was first composed around the time the
war took place around twelve thirty BC, and it was
first transcribed into written form around nine hundred or eight
hundred and fifty b C. And scholars may believe some
different dates now, but that's what Janes is working with.
So when we look at the thoughts and behaviors of
characters in the Iliad, it should tell us something about

(39:54):
the mental life of people who composed and wrote the
story about three thousand years ago. And when we examine
the what do we find? Well, James makes a really
striking claim about the Iliad. It is a work of
literature in which the characters are almost entirely devoid of
anything recognizable as consciousness. You do not really see introspection

(40:16):
in the Iliad. There are a few passages which serve
as exceptions to this. Generally, James thinks that they look
like late additions to the text or signed or they
could possibly be signs of early protoconscious thoughts seeping through.
But primarily, the characters of the Iliad do not introspect,
They do not narrotize, they do not seem to have

(40:38):
conscious consideration. Instead, when they're faced with the need for
novel behavior, what happens. They're told what to do by
a god. A god makes them do it. Now, it's
it's generally when we look back on pieces of literature
like this, we think, well, this is just this was
a primitive form of literature, This was a this is
a more archaic um in a form of storytelling. Yeah,

(40:58):
you see it as a literary device very well, could be.
It makes me think, you know, all these various bad
films that you and I enjoy. Uh, sometimes they're enjoyably
bad because the craftsmanship isn't there at various levels. Um,
if bicameral, If the bicameral mind hypothesis is true, could
it be possible that that sometimes we love bad movies

(41:21):
because they seem to have been created by a bicameral mind.
I was with you every step of the way there, Robert.
I can believe that there are movies that feel quite bicameral. Yeah,
they feel as if they were like dictated by a
divine presence rather than consciously thought through. All right, but
but but back to the discussion here. So, yeah, we
have this this war going on. There's no introspection, there's

(41:44):
nothing that resembles consciousness, and at all the pivotal plot
points are punctuated by a God stepping in and saying
do this or do that. So there might be like
a scene where Achilles is going to reach out and
kill his king Agamemnon, but instead it says a God
grabs him and tell and makes him not do it. Yeah. Interesting.
I would like to see more of that in our films, though,

(42:05):
where they just have God's pop up than direct the
course of action, you know. Even in the words of
the Greek, Jane says, uh, we can see something of
bicamerality here, because there are Greek words that later come
to be used to refer to consciousness, and they appear
throughout the Iliad, but through contextual clues we can tell
that they mean something entirely different in the Iliad than

(42:28):
what they mean when they later come to mean consciousness.
For example, the word see he it's spelt psyche, you know,
in the English pronunciation see he. In later centuries, this
clearly comes to mean consciousness or mind or soul. That's
how it is used in Greek, but in the Iliad
phase it appears to refer to something more like physical

(42:50):
life substances. Jane says it means something more like blood
or breath, like if a soldier gets killed on the battlefield,
his see he bleeds out onto the round or the
word thumos. In later writings, Jane says this means something
more like emotional mind or soul. In the Iliad, once again,
it seems to have this base level animal meaning. It's

(43:12):
something more like animation or motion. So when a soldier
stops moving the thumos goes out of his limbs, but
it also seems to mean this weird kind of organ
in the body that can be filled with the impetus
for motion or activity. Next is noose. In later Greek

(43:33):
it certainly comes to mean consciousness, it's like a conscious mind.
But in the Iliad it appears to mean something much plainer.
It means like sight or field division. So when you
see something, the thing is in your noose. Now, this
next point, this is the exact place where he really
gave me the creeps, and I got actual chill bumps.
He points out that the Iliad, as well as Greek

(43:56):
art at the time, quote shows man as an assembly
of strange the articulated limbs, the joints under drawn, and
the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically
what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks
of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs
as being fleet, sinewy in speedy motion, etcetera, with no

(44:19):
mention of the body as a whole. Yeah, so it's
just this idea of just these automatons waging war, uh,
you know, killing each other, uh, with without this concrete
sense of self guiding. It so alien to comprehend. Oh,
it really is. And so if you buy into Jane's theory,

(44:40):
or if you just want to entertain it as we
are doing, these characters simply do not seem to introspect.
They argue, they rage, they desire, they act out on desires,
but they don't seem to have access to a mind
space where they can perform introspective metaphor based activities like
we described in the previous episode. They don't have access
either to the conscious aspect of decision making. Instead, when

(45:03):
they got to make a novel decision, the iliot is
very clear about what happens. The God tells him what
to do, and they do it. Hm. Maybe this is
one of the reasons we like like a very classic
action hero, you know, because it's like they don't think,
they just do. They are a man of action. They
are a bicameral hero. I mean, you sometimes do get

(45:24):
that sense, right that there is a kind of there's
a kind of unthinking charisma to the action hero in
most action movies. I guess that is what you'd call
that that man of action cliche. I mean, I guess
it technically usually is a man in these movies. And
he's got this kind of macho swagger that does not

(45:46):
seem to involve thinking, it doesn't seem to involve self reflection.
They've just got this, uh this like violent intuition, can't
be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, and absolutely will
not stop. I mean this, that's the terminator in a nutshell.
The by the terminator is is a is a machine.
Everybody was the terminator in the Iliad. That's the scary part.

(46:07):
Oh man, So what I what I'm thirsting for now?
It's almost like this theory is too interesting and I'm
too tempted to want it to be true. So what
I want now is for a great classic scholar to say, like, no, no, no,
he's got it all wrong. Here's why, here's how. You
can definitely find lots of signs of consciousness in the Iliad.
And they're not later editions. They are part of the

(46:28):
original text. I want that, or I don't want that.
I feel like I need that. Yeah, Otherwise I feel
like I'm just buying into the idea that Stanley Kubrick
faith them in landing or something. Right. Yeah, it is
just such a radical hypothesis. Okay, well, let's leave the
Iliad and look at some other literature from the ancient world.
How about Jewish literature. This is interesting. I'd not run

(46:52):
across this before either. This is ah So this deals
with Yeah, the Elohim, one of the names of God
used in the the Hebrew Bible, very often just translated
as God, a singular right, but he argues that it
translated as merely God is to miss the plural nature
of the word in Hebrew. Uh, which is something I've

(47:12):
independently read, like Melohem is essentially a plural word, but
it's rendered in the modern sense and as a singular word. Yeah.
It says that it comes from the root of to
be powerful. But better translations of of ela him might
be the great ones, the prominent ones, the Majesty's, the judges,
the mighty ones, etcetera. And so these, he argues, are

(47:35):
the vote could be the voice visions of the bicameral mind.
And he also argues that one can really see the
decline of the bicameral vision in the Bible. Now, this
is I really love this because he's basically talking about
all right, if you pick up the Old Testament and
you read it front to back, you can see this transition.
So in the he says quote. In the true bicameral period,

(47:56):
there was usually a visual component to the holluciated holy
sinated voice, either it's self hallucinated or as the statue
in front of in front of which one listened. So
even as a modern reader of the Bible will find this,
you go from a physical God who physically does stuff
like kick people out of the garden or shut the
door on the arc, to a God that merely speaks

(48:19):
to everyone, and a purely auditory God that we account
that we encounter with Moses, you know, with additional visual
flares here and there, and crucially after that, a God
of law and religion rather than of direct experience. So
you go from this robustly imagined God who physically does
stuff to a God who is a voice, to a

(48:41):
God who is not experienced directly and rather as experience
through his tradition of teachings and law and so um
so yeah. James argues that the Hebrew Bible is essentially
a long narrative of the transition from myth to bicameral
humankind too conscious humankind, and you can see the whole thing. There,
you've got the older prophets like Amos, who Janes identifies

(49:03):
as clearly b cameral, to Ecclesiastes, who uh. James thinks
the author shows all the markers of consciousness, and he
claims you can also see this painful transition from bicameral
society to conscious society in many aspects of the canon.
A couple of examples, he says people are constantly begging
for contact with a God or God's that no longer

(49:26):
speak to them in the literature that he believes comes
from the conscious period of this history. So one quote
he gives from Psalm forty two, and this is with
the name of God rendered directly to the plural rather
than the singular as it would usually be rendered as
the stag pants after the water Brooks, So pants my
mind after you, Oh Gods, my mind thirsts for God's,

(49:48):
for living gods. When shall I come face to face
with God's. Yeah, it's almost like a like a gradual
breakup story, like oh, he used he used to see
God all the time we hung out, and now, yeah,
we talk on the phone sometime, but it's not quite
the same. And now it's like he won't even call.
We just keep exchanging texts, and suddenly you know, that's
all I have to go on. It's just the the

(50:09):
not even new text but the old texts. But then again,
there are there are definitely, in Jane's vision, partisans of
the conscious version of the religion that don't want anything
to do with the direct experience version of the religion.
Like he says that there are many signs throughout the
books of the Hebrew Bible that the Bicameral people may
have been actively persecuted by conscious people for religious reasons.

(50:33):
I'll just read one quote, he says. Quote. A further
vestige from the Bicameral era is the word obe, often
translated as a familiar spirit. A man also or a
woman that have an obe shall surely be put to death,
says Leviticus. And similarly, Saul drives out from Israel all
those that had an obe. In First Samuel, even though

(50:55):
an obe is something that one consults with, according to
Deuteronomy eighteen eleven, it probably had no physical embodiment. It
is always bracketed with wizards and witches, and thus probably
refers to some Bicameral voice that was not recognized by
the Old Testament writers as religious Yeah, I mean, you
get into this scenario where you know, obviously the individuals

(51:18):
who don't hear the voices, they've built up all this
this law and order based on the old texts and
the old stories. It it becomes dangerous if other individuals
are attempting to to add new material to it. No,
I'm hearing God's right now, and they're telling me something different. Yeah,
I mean, it reminds me of the fact that the
church that I attend they have this saying God is

(51:38):
still speaking, which, as it's intended, the idea is God
is still real and a part of everyone's lives, and
you know, this is not just a story. But on
the other hand, there's it's kind of scary to think, well,
God is still speaking, what's he going to say? You know,
um comes it could provide license for some very uh,
for some very disturbing content or some great stuff. Yeah, indeed. Yeah,

(52:03):
it's just sort of like it provides you with a
blanket authorization for action that is not so there if
you have a written and codified law. So again, all
of this just ends up playing into the conflict of
the downfall of the bicameral mind as the voices blink out,
and this a new system of of order and social

(52:23):
stability has to take hold. So let's try to summarize
real quick what James is saying is the basic contours
of the transition through the bicameral period to the conscious period.
Let's see Robert tell me what you think of this.
As I've tried to summarize his view, I think James
argues that bicameral society emerged with language and the increasing

(52:44):
size of tribal groups. So when one could encode mental
content into grammatical sentences, it was possible to code action
motivation efficiently through language. So you'd have a big group
where your authority figure can't be around instantly tell you
what to do because the group's too big. So a
command heard from one's parents or one's tribal chieftain is

(53:07):
hallucinated to recur over and over again, providing continuous motivation
for action. And this is the non dominant hemisphere commanding
the dominant hemisphere. This is the first version of bi camerality.
So when you've got words and sentences that can be hallucinated,
then over time, these admonitory voices Eventually they become not

(53:29):
just repetitive but synthetic. So they're not just telling you
what these authority figures have told you in the past,
but they're telling you what these authority figures would command
if they were present now. And of course we know
the mind has the power to synthesize information and imagine
what somebody else would command. We do that consciously now,

(53:49):
but here it's saying, what if the right hemisphere, and
in most people, or the non dominant hemisphere generally did
that automatically, nonconsciously. Uh So, over time, parents and chieftains
die and their voices are still heard instead of internal
copies of authority figures to become imbued with disembodied authority,

(54:12):
the voice itself provides inherent authorization, magical authority, as from
a god. Then for a long time, bicameral society grows
and develops, and bicameral people build technologies and kingdoms and
begin to write works of ancient literature. But what happens
to make it all disappear? Essentially, his answer is a

(54:32):
combination of catastrophe and literature. Would you agree with that, Robert, Yeah,
that seems to be the basic idea of catastrophe and literature. Yeah,
the story of the story of our lives. Yeah, that
that that is the roof collapsing on the bicameral mind.
So the catastrophe he singles out is the widespread failure
of civilization throughout the Eastern Mediterranean close to the end

(54:55):
of the second millennium BC. This is a period that's
coming off of what's now referred to as the Late
Bronze Age collapse, where ancient empires fell apart and dispersed
and people were displaced, and there was a lot of
war and raiding and uh and collapse of infrastructure, trade
was interrupted, education stifled, and it led to what some

(55:16):
would consider a dark age of the ancient world. And
he also argues that a certain a small amount of
natural selection may have come into play as well, because
as all this is going on and the enormous, enormous
bloodshed that's playing out here at the end of the
second century BC, those who had the best chance to
survive were those who could resist the commandments of the

(55:37):
gods and the literal you know, the voice of compulsion, right,
who were more adaptable and could narrotize out solutions to problems,
and who had the ability to practice prolonged deception and treachery. Yes,
that's another huge idea here. So yeah, So he's got
a summary of of the several factors he thinks led
to in this period around the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia,

(55:58):
the collapse of the bikeamera all mine, and in the
beginnings of widespread consciousness in culture. So what are what
are these main things he offers? He's talking about, first
of all, one, the weakening of the auditory by the
advent of writing. Okay, A good example would be the
invention of written law, right, clearly distinguishing acceptable from non
acceptable behavior in a way that does not require the

(56:21):
intervention of an internal God. Yeah, we got these tablets here.
He didn't have to speak to you all the time.
Just refer to the tablets. Yeah, this is how I
feel about any kind of power point presentation. Just give
me the power point. I don't need the voice of
God telling me the things. Just give me a list. Yeah, okay, Okay,
what's the next thing? Number two? The inherent fragility of
hallucinatory control. Okay, Yeah, we can see that there's some

(56:42):
instability in the system there. Number three, the unworkable nous
of God's in the chaos of historical upheaval. Okay, so
the gods prevented problems that they caused problems when when
society and hierarchy was falling apart. Yeah, and again the
voice of the gods was just there was not actually
the voice of a divine being with superior knowledge. It

(57:03):
was still originating from within the individual, right. Okay. The
fourth one, the fourth one is depositing of internal cause
and the observation of difference in others. Okay, so you
see other people are behaving differently, and you begin to
wonder if maybe they're just behaving on their own and
not being commanded by God's maybe undermining your own authorization

(57:24):
of god belief. Yeah, I can see where it would be. Um,
I mean it would, it would It would be contagious
in that in that respect. Uh. Number five, the acquisition
of a narratization from epics, the introduction of stories. Number six,
the survival value of deceit, which we already touched on,
and number seven a modicum of natural selection, which we

(57:45):
also discussed here. But to be clear, I think James
is primarily thinking about these transitions in mindset, not as
changes in the physical brain brought about by you know,
mutation and natural selection, though there might be a little
bit of selection towards levels of predisposition for it. But
he's primarily thinking about this as cultural change, right, that

(58:05):
there there are cultures of bicamerality and cultures of consciousness. Yes,
all right, we're gonna take one more break and when
we come back, we're going to jump into modern traces
of the bicameral mind. All right, we're back. So we've
examined the evidence that James claims to offer for the
existence of a bicameral mind and history and his conception

(58:27):
of how the bicameral mind arose and then collapsed into
society's based on conscious mentality. So, if there truly was
a bicamerality in the past, if our brains are still
so wired as to be perhaps capable of bicameral culture
in the present, if we just practiced it, what would
the evidence of that be. Well, you would think that

(58:48):
there'd be some practices in human behavior that would give
you evidence that we used to be bi cameral, and
that we could still be bicameral if we tried. That's right,
And he first of all, he makes uh he makes
some examples out of religion. So at this point I
think everyone can pretty well imagine the sorts of religious
examples that James is going to make. After all, we've

(59:09):
been discussing the trans like nature of biocameral existence uh
in the commanding words of corpses and statues, you know, all,
you know, very magical and scenarios that we can imagine
lining up with both religious stories and religious right. So
expectantly he points to spirit possession. There's a topic we
come back to on a few different episodes of Stuff

(59:30):
to Blow Your Mind, and it ranges from demonic possession
across various cultures to you know, tribal African beats that
threatened Carl Young's sanity, and more positive forms of spirit
possessions such as oracles, which which Jane spends a lot
of time with. UM. We have a recent episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind that covers the the Thaie
Tattoo festival, in which uh, the animal tattoo ends up

(59:54):
overtaking the individual individual. So we have examples of this
this throughout different cultures. H Speaking of tongues, UH and
similar religious experiences may also play into this, and of
course we have examples of this in ancient writings as well.
So as early as a fourth century BC, Socrates wrote
of God possessed men, so and clearly like, that's not

(01:00:15):
the kind of thing you would necessarily speak about if
if you were immerged within a bicameral UH world anymore. Right, Um, yeah,
these might be more vestiges of the bicameral culture, right.
And James points to a number of different examples, mainly
those dealing with Greek oracles UH, with the idea being

(01:00:37):
that the oracle the individual here would have would have
ramped themselves up, but they basically ramped up right hemisphere
activity in relation to the left as a result, as
a response to complex ritual stimuli, you know, the use
of all these various and we've talked about statues and
language and and all of all of these aspects playing
into passed by cameral experiences. And therefore the idea here

(01:01:01):
is that even as we're shifting out of the bicameral age,
even as the bicameral ages behind us, you have conscious
individuals who are able to sort of resurrect the bicameral
experience enter into trance like states, etcetera. By engaging in
these rituals. Yeah, and these would be rituals where they
channel the output of what Jans identifies as in most

(01:01:23):
people the right hemisphere speech associated sections of course, right
a speech usually coming from the left hemisphere. So it
would be like the voices of the gods that spoke
in the bicameral minds of the ancients, but speaking out
through the mouths of these oracles and prophets. And you
know what, uh, those oracles and prophets, they didn't necessarily

(01:01:44):
speak in a even in a commanding tone. In many
cases they may have they may have sung yes. And
so this is a really interesting section James gets into
in the in the third book of his book where
he talks about the evidence of passed by camera reality
in poetry and music. So remember that james neurological hypothesis, uh,

(01:02:05):
is that the bi cameral mind consisted of the non
dominant hemisphere, which is the right brain in most people,
speaking directly as an auditory hallucination to the dominant hemisphere,
which is the left brain in most people. Keep that
in mind here, that's right now. His his his thesis
here is quote, the first poets were God's poetry began
with the bicameral mind, the God's side of our ancient mentality,

(01:02:28):
at least in a certain period of history, usually or
perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men
at one time throughout the day, we're hearing poetry of
a sort composed and spoken within their own minds. That's
terrifying and beautiful. Yeah, that that kind of sums up
a lot of the bicameral hypothesis in general. So evidence

(01:02:48):
is scanned for this, but he argues that quote individuals
who remained bicameral into the conscious age, that these individuals
continue to express the voice of God or God's in poetry.
Uh the so you know, the Indian Vada dictated by
the gods, the oracle at Delphi, early Arabic poets, etcetera.
And this concerns music too, because early poetry was musical

(01:03:12):
in nature. Jane's says absolutely. I mean, you could still
say that poetry is musical and nature, especially insofar as
it invokes any kind of scanning or rhythm. That's right.
And speech is a function again primarily of the left
cerebral hemisphere, but song is primarily a function of the
right hemisphere. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the

(01:03:32):
bicameral mind. That's an interesting hypothesis in itself. Now there's
a he presents a fair amount of of evidence for this,
which I'm gonna I'm gonna roll through here. Joe, jump
in as we go. Hit me man, all right. So,
first of all, many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral
hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak,

(01:03:55):
they can still sing. We also have the Wada test
to determine in a person's cerebral dominance. This is when
sodium amatal is injected into the karatid artery on one side,
putting the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation, and the other
side remains awake. So in this case case, if the
left hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't speak, but they

(01:04:16):
can sing. If the right hemisphere sedated, the patient can't sing,
but they can speak. So like, the centers for speech
and singing are lateralized and the situation is more pronounced.
In cases where there's actual physical damage to one hemisphere
or the other, or you know, it's it's completely removed. Also,
electrical stimulation of the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to

(01:04:38):
the posterior temporal lobe often produces hallucinations of singing and music.
Oh and he also he presents an experiment that you
can try. He says, says that you can prove the
Latin though the laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different
musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will
perceive and remember the music on of the left ear

(01:05:00):
phone better. This is because the left ear has greater
neuro representation on the right hemisphere. Now it points out
that Plato spoke of poetry as possession. Yeah, I said,
poets then around four b C. Were comparable in mentality
to the oracles of the same period and went through
similar uh psychological transformation when they performed. And then there's

(01:05:24):
this idea. We've all heard talk of the muses, right right,
I mean, so ancient epics might start saying like sing
muse blah blah blah. So the authors telling their personal
composition God to start going. Yeah, Now, when we talk
about the muses, where you know, we're just talking about
inspiration or you know, or attention even or just you know,

(01:05:45):
the will to get a project done. It's a literary device.
We think of. Yeah, but but back back then, the
argument is that the bicameral human would literally need to
hear the voice of the Muse. Yeah, the muse was
literally real, so it wasn't just something to imagine, It
was something they experienced, though it all was in the brain. Now,

(01:06:06):
he points out that by the sixth century BC, the
poet is no longer in just naturally imbued with their song.
They have to learn the gift of the muse in
order to hear it. So the society that the voice
is becoming harder and harder for everyone to hear. So
this might be kind of like how the oracles of
these later periods, living in conscious societies have to go
through elaborate rituals to get into the altered state of

(01:06:28):
consciousness where they channel their non dominant hemisphere and let
the voice of God speak. That's right, And he says
that in the fifth century b C, we hear the
very first hints of poets being peculiar with poetic ecstasy.
That's this is quote there, So I want to use
that from now on. If I'm like trying to get

(01:06:49):
some writing done and somebody interrupts me, I'm like, hang on,
I'm being peculiar. Yeah, so it basically just gets harder
and harder to hear the voices of the gods until
you're having to essentially make up the words yourself. It
reminds me a lot of of how magic works in
Dungeons and Dragons because Dungeons Dragons you basically have three
different types of magic users. You have the warlock who

(01:07:10):
works their magic via enslavement to a god or god
like being. So that's a bicamera being. Yeah, yeah, that
would be the bicamera experience. A sorcerer learns to better
channel magic that naturally emerges from their being. So this
is like a transitional being. This is like one of
the oracles in the late antiquity. Yeah, like it still

(01:07:31):
flows through them, it still can flow through them, but
they have to manage it. And then finally you have
the arcane wizard, who has to master the workings of
magic through study and academic effort alone. So these are
the pathetic poets of the modern era who have to
consciously compose their works exactly. Yeah, and uh, you know,
in the same way that within Dungeons and Dragons you

(01:07:53):
can you can have that, you can have sort of
the attitudes of what the wizard is. And this is
also kind of based on attitudes involving chews and wizards
and in the real world in earlier periods. But there's
the idea that the the arcane wizard is a master
of of these forces, where lesser models are um you know,
the magic is a master of them, which is, you know,

(01:08:15):
not unlike the comparison between the bicamera and the conscious
human right, And of course the idea is as uh
conscious society exists for longer and longer, and the bicameral
society goes farther and farther into the past. Our ability
to access these states of consciousness, to be an oracle,
or to be a muse possessed poet gets further and
further from our grasp. Exactly he writes, And then the

(01:08:39):
muses hush and freeze into myths, nymphs and shepherds dance
no more. Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure
inspiration gasps and dies into invention. The oral becomes written
by the poet himself, and written it should be added
by his right hand, worked by his left hemisphere. The
muses have become imaginary and in in their silence as

(01:09:01):
a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind. That
is gorgeous. Yeah, And the whole book is filled with
passages like that that're just beautifully written and uh and
and and just really drive home, often emotionally, the subject matter.
That's another reason I guess I got to be skeptical
and suspicious of this hypothesis is that it's so well written.

(01:09:22):
I feel like I need to be especially cautious about it.
Like he he communicates it so well and it's so
beautiful in the book that that it's like getting an
unfair advantage as a scientific hypothesis. Yeah, yeah, I I
can definitely get that argument. Maybe that's why most scientific
papers are so horrible to read, Like why you know,
it's really rare you come across the one that's really

(01:09:43):
well well written, And it's because, well, maybe maybe you
shouldn't let your writing skills make it stand out more
than the theory itself deserves in terms of content. All right, Well,
what's another lingering example of of the bicameral mind. Hey,
can you think of a state in which people have
altered consciousness or reduced consciousness and a tendency to obey

(01:10:06):
verbal commands. Who sounds a lot like hypnosis to me.
Ding ding ding. There you go. Now, we've talked about
hypnosis on the podcast before, but just to reiterate what's
going on with hypnosis is people seem to have wildly
differing levels of susceptibility to hypnosis. Some people just can't
be hypnotized, but for those that can, hypnosis does seem
to be a genuine altered state of consciousness at some

(01:10:28):
level in which the body is relaxed, focus is narrowed,
inhibition is lowered, consciousness is reduced, and verbal obedience is increased.
Sounds kind of like the model of bicamerality. With a
lot of these public demonstrations of hypnosis that you see
you know, or that you're on a cruise ship and
somebody's doing a show. I think people following the hypnotist
commands is not necessarily always a highly altered state of consciousness.

(01:10:52):
It could be partially just a performance brought on by
social pressure. But this is actually part of Jane's theory.
He talks about the idea of collect of cognitive imperative.
Group pressure enables different states of mind, and this is
why you can have, uh, basically a culture dictating which
mindset you adopt, the bicameral mindset or the conscious mindset.

(01:11:15):
And it's also the reason that you can, through these
elaborate rituals, say like the Oracle at Delphi, produce these
these amazing uh you know, metered prophecies out of your
right brain because group cognitive pressure is putting you into
that mindset. And so he's saying hypnosis maybe maybe in
fact a modern reapproximation of the left brain operation of

(01:11:37):
a bicameral person. But instead of having the right brain talk,
you're having the hypnotists talk. And again this makes me
think of yoga classes where I just let the individual
tell me what to do for an hour and a
half and it it feels so liberating. Now, another big
area that the Jane spends a lot of time with
is the condition of schizophrenia. Now, this is obviously going

(01:12:00):
to be very relevant because it's one of the features
of schizophrenia is hallucinations, especially auditory hallucinations. Yeah, it is
a condition defined by voices, by auditory hallucination, voices that criticize,
voices that tell us what to do it with under
the tent of the bicameral mind hypothesis. It would seem
to line up pretty well. And uh, and so James

(01:12:23):
argues that schizophrenia is essentially a relapse into the bicameral mind. Now,
he argues that in the sculptures, literature, murals, and other
artifacts of the great bare bicameral civilizations, we do not
see instances of individuals who suffer madness in a way
that differentiates them from their fellow humans. There's idiocy, but

(01:12:44):
but he says, there's no madness. Uh. They're like, there's
no insanity in the Iliad, for instance. Yeah. Now by
the time we get to Plato, Plato speaks of madness,
but in these ancient civilizations, Jane says, you don't see it. Yeah.
He says that the first instance of insanity discussed in
the conscious period, uh is in Phaedrus or Plato calls
insanity quote a divine gift and the source of the

(01:13:06):
chiefest blessings granted two men. And then he goes on
to a Plato ends up identifying four types of madness.
And you'll and just again think of the bicameral mind
and reference to all of these prophetic madness ritual madness,
poetic madness, and of course the erotic madness. Huh okay,
so these kind of line up with some of the
categories we've just been talking about. The Greeks wrote on paranoia, uh,

(01:13:31):
he argues, which is literally having of two minds. Over time, however,
madness is no longer and no longer has these sort
of divine categories that Plato identified, But it becomes a
part of an ill, a part of a disease. There's something,
there's an ailment at work with the human being. Now
this maybe James thinks, as there is more conscious takeover

(01:13:51):
of society by the conscious culture, that it becomes untenable
for for bicameral society to exist and work within itself.
So people who experience the bicameral mindset within a conscious
culture have they essentially have no cover, They have no
nobody to like be part of their culture right now.

(01:14:12):
He also points out that the voices of schizophrenia these
tend to be when I say the voices of schizophrenia,
the voice is heard by individuals with schizophrenia, Uh, they
tend to be authority figures created out of cultural expectation.
And the hallucinations also seem to have access to more
memories in the patient. There in many cases and in
many cases they replace thought. The they frequently take on

(01:14:34):
religious overtones because he says the condition emerges from the
neurological structures bound to the birth of religious thought to
begin with right, and he says that the there's also
a frequency of religious experience overall in the waking state
for human consciousness, the the hypnopompic state that is often
accompanied by vivid, lingering imagery. We've discussed this in terms

(01:14:58):
of sleep paralysis and supernatural experience before. James writes that
these parts of the brain are quote released from their
normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia
and particularized into experience. This is also telling. He points
to the relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person.

(01:15:18):
Think again to our discussions of eye and me. There's
this draw a person test or adapt test, and it's
used to help identify schizophrenia and other conditions by asking
the individual to draw a person. Now, if you have
trouble drawing a whole person, that kind of makes me
think about those disembodied body parts you talked about With

(01:15:39):
reference to the iliad and UH. And I have to
point out this is another thing I see my son
having to do on kindergarten tests and UH in evaluations
draw a person and and see I mean they're also
looking to see with what degree of accuracy you can
pull them together. But but yeah, in this case, are
you able to draw a complete person at all? Now,

(01:16:00):
not all people who have schizophrenia are going to have
trouble drawing a person, right, but when they do it
is UH is extremely diagnostic. Also with schizophrenia, narratization can
also become impossible. You see these like fractured self stories rtues.
And then there's also body image boundary disturbance or boundary loss.

(01:16:20):
And this again this ties into this UH, this lost
sense of I or me. And remember too that schizophrenia
has a genetic inherited basis to the underlying biochemistry. Natural
selection James Argue would have favored it for a while.
There's a certain tirelessness in schizophrenic individuals. They seem to

(01:16:41):
have a lot of energy, and in the bicameral individual
this would have become this would have become very important
if you were say building pyramids or are there great works? Yeah,
I mean we were talking about one of the advantages,
or one of the possible advantages of a bi cameral
mind would be mental endurance, much more so than a
conscious person could muster. So James basically says that the
modern schizophrenic is an individual that's essentially in search of

(01:17:03):
a bicameral culture quote, but he retains usually some part
of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive
mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control
in the middle of a mental organization in which the
hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is
a mind barred to his environment, waiting on God's in

(01:17:25):
a godless world. Okay, So you convinced yet, Joe. I mean,
it's tough because I do find his argument very compelling,
but it just may be the case that he was
wrong about how about some of the evidence that he claims,
or about how he interprets some of that evidence. So
I don't know. I find the bicameral mind thesis very

(01:17:47):
interesting and very compelling, but I do not consider myself
convinced that it is correct true and with like with
the schizophrenia evidence, for instance, is this is this truly
more evidence in supported by cameral mind theory, or is
this schizophrenia as explained with bicameral mind. Yeah. I mean
one way you could look at the bicameral mind is

(01:18:09):
you could say it's a theory that explains a lot,
or you could say that it is a very interesting,
carefully conducted story that's overlaid on lots of evidence that
we already knew about. So what would be really interesting
about it would be can it predict new discoveries like,
based on the assumption of the bicameral mind hypothesis, would

(01:18:31):
you be able to predict will find X, Y and
z about the ancient world and about neuroscientific discoveries in
the future, say with you know, uh a neuroimaging, And
that would be a real good way of testing whether
it has any predictive power and thus whether we can
have any confidence that it will continue to have predictive
power in the future, which is pretty much synonymous with
saying there's something to it that it might be true.

(01:18:53):
Uh So I tried to look up you know what
if people said about it and the theory. It's had
lots of critics, It has lots of people, you know,
it's always been controversial ever since it was first introduced.
It's had supporters. Some people think that it's uh, it's
really interesting, there's something to it. Some people think it
might shed some light on some issues, even if it's wrong. Overall,

(01:19:14):
it's had a lot of people who think it's just bunk.
So you know, there's opinions all over the place. One
paper I found that I thought summarized well some of
the neuro scientific evidence and implications is a paper by
Leo Share published in the Journal of Psychology or Psychiatry
and Neuroscience in two thousand. UH. Leo Share is a
professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai and New York, and

(01:19:36):
in the short piece he collects some relevant reactions to
Jane's hypothesis and argument. Uh. Some reactions to Jane's include
He finds that in nine seven, Assade and Shapiro published
a criticism of Jane's work in the American Journal of Psychiatry,
and they write, quote, the difficulty which we find with
Jane's hypothesis is that the conclusions he draws have a

(01:19:56):
questionable basis in neuropsychiatric fact and quote. If Jane's hypothesis
were to coincide more accurately with anatomic fact facts about
what we find in the body. The right temporal area
in question would more likely coincide with Broca's expressive area,
a notion that does not conveniently fit Jane's theoretical constructs.

(01:20:17):
Assad and Shapiro. Shapiro also claim, according to Share that
quote lesions of the right sided areas corresponding to Broca's
and Wernicke's areas seem more related to the negative symptoms
of schizophrenia, like restricted affect than to the positive hallucinatory
symptoms unquote, and they also claim that Jane's oversimplified the

(01:20:37):
phenomenology of hallucinatory experience to make them fit his hypothesis better. Um.
Also in ninet, the International Journal of Psychophysiology published a
letter that wrote, quote, after many years of psychophysiological studies
mainly carried out in the field, if evoked to neurocognitive
bioelectrical events, I feel I can safely state that the

(01:20:57):
concepts of the mind slash brain and brain slash behavior dualisms,
with their ancient, widespread and persistent philosophy, are now all outdated,
as are those of the bicameral mind or the double brain.
Then again, however, Share says in nineteen a paper published
in The Lancet by Olan claimed that research in neuroimaging
has quote illuminated and confirmed the importance of Jane's hypothesis.

(01:21:21):
And this research includes a paper in The Lancet nine
by Lennox at All in which a right handed person
with schizophrenia underwent neuroimaging during hallucinations and the authors found
that the auditory hallucinations occurred in the right hemisphere but
not the left hemisphere, which would match up with Jane's predictions,
the predictions made by the bicameral mind hypothesis. So I'd

(01:21:44):
say it's still in the realm of something that is
interesting but definitely not proven. But just imagine how fascinating
it would be if more and more studies start lining
up with stuff that could be predicted directly by the
bicameral mind hypothesis. Indeed, Yeah, I mean, that's that's the
great thing about the about this particular hypothesis is that

(01:22:04):
we can continue to study it. We can continue to
see how how it potentially lines up with their modern
scientific understanding of consciousness and the brain. So yeah, I
guess we can start wrapping up here. But I want
to say in the end, though I'm not convinced by it,
I'm not advocating it as true. It's fascinating, very well argued,
I would say, arguably quite brilliant in the way it

(01:22:26):
pulls from so many disciplines into a coherent picture of
a cross disciplinary hypothesis. But can't yet endorse it. Yeah, yeah,
I would, I would agree, But it is it is
fascinating to use it as a thought exercise for looking
back on past cultures. And uh, you know, after I
was reading it, I kept I was wondering, well, why
don't we see this reference to more works of fiction. Well,

(01:22:48):
it turns out it was apparently one of the key
influences on Neil stephen snow Crash, which we mentioned in
our Tower of Babble episode. It's a cyberpunk classic of
that involves a linguistic momentic weapons um which you know,
go back and listen to that episode of certainly reads
snow Crash if you want more than that. But I
was not familiar with this book. There is a two

(01:23:09):
thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The Rage of Achilles,
and get this it's a novel of the Trojan War
told within the confines of the bicameral mind hypothesis. So
Odysseus is a conscious modern man in this and Achilles
is a bicameral killing machine. That is a brilliant concept

(01:23:31):
for a novel. And if there's any truth to Jane's vision,
this might have actually been possible. Like during the long
slow breakdown to the bicameral mind, conscious people and bicameral
people would have had to encounter and deal with one another.
And can you just imagine all the difficulty that would create. Yeah,
but for both sides, because on one hand, the conscious

(01:23:52):
human is capable of deception that the bicameral human has
no ability to. Like basically comes down to that that
duel in a game of throwing owns between the Mountain
and uh, what's his name? The Ober and Martel. Yeah,
where one is one is crafty and deceptive and the
other one is just pure brute strength and NonStop killing action. Yeah.

(01:24:13):
So you're saying the Mountain is bicameral and the Red
Viper of Dorn is conscious. I think so, And really,
I mean he only becomes more bicameral. Story progresses. All right,
So there you have it. Do you have an anything else, Joe, No,
I guess that's it for now. I I found this
a really fascinating topic to explore. It's one of those

(01:24:33):
that I've said this a few times now, but I
just want to stress again. It's like I feel this
conflict within me about ideas that are so cool. I
feel like I have to be especially suspicious of them,
Like the more interesting they are, the more I feel
like I have to really check my desire for it
to be true. Yeah, especially an idea that's this expansive.

(01:24:55):
The concerns the history of our species and our civilizations
and the very nature of consciousness. So it's not like
buying into a single idea like, oh, well, actually I
think the Chinese discovered North America, you know, before the
Vikings something like that, which I'm not saying that doesn't
have large historical ramifications, but it's not something that just

(01:25:16):
affects the absolute understanding of our species in our way
of thinking. All right, well, of course we'd love to
hear from all of you out there. What are your
thoughts on the bicameral mind. Do you buy into it?
Do you do you think it's complete bunk. Do you
have some sort of middle ground there? And what are
some really cool examples of its utilization in various sorts

(01:25:38):
of fiction that you've encountered. Here's something I would like
to employ your imagination on. If this could happen, if
you could go from a bi cameral mind to a
conscious mind, how much more could human mentality change? Oh? Yeah,
Like if you go three thousand years into the future
from now, could our mindsets be as different from from
hours now as the conscious mind is from the hypothetic

(01:26:00):
call bicameral mind? Yeah? I mean, am I engaging in
a bicameral experience when I let my GPS device tell
me where to drive? I don't know, you totally relinquished
conscious control? Yeah? Almost, It's almost to that level. Uh
that I was hanging out with my family over the
weekend and my sisters were like asking me, like, why
did you make this turn in that it's said of

(01:26:21):
this turn? And I'm like, I just do what the
machine tells me to told me to drive into the ocean. Yeah,
I put my trust in the machine. It's by and
large there's a less uh, there's less of a chance
that it will drive me in the ocean. That I
will drive me into the ocean. So uh, that's how
it shakes out, all right. Well, you can find is
It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where
you'll find all the episodes that you will find, blog

(01:26:44):
post videos, you will find links out to our verious
social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and more. Hey,
Facebook has that great uh discussion module group where you
can join up and you can uh interact with us,
but also other listeners to the show and you can
discuss episodes such as these with those individuals. And if

(01:27:04):
you want to get in touch with us directly, as always,
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff To Blow Your Mind News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Robert Lamb

Joe McCormick

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial

Dateline NBC

The Breakfast Club

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Bicameralism, Part 2: The Silent Pantheon