From the Vault: Bicameralism, Part 1

In 1976, psychologist Julian Jaynes presented the world with a stunning new take on the history of human consciousness. His book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” hypothesized that ancient humans heard hallucinated voices in place of conscious thought, and presented archaeological, literary, historical and religious evidence to support this highly controversial view. Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick as they dissect bicameralism and discuss the evidence, the criticisms and more in this two-parter. (originally published Sep 26, 2017)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
That means time to go into the vault for a
classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This one
originally aired September. And if you've heard us on the
show making casual references here and there to a strange
hypothesis from the history of psychology called bicameralism or the

(00:27):
bicameral mind, and you've wondered what we were talking about,
here you are. Here's our episode on it. Yeah, this
these were These were really popular episodes, and they were
really fun to put together. I will have to drive
home that you know that we have we we have
recorded a number of episodes since uh these episodes originally aired, Like,
for instance, I believe in one of these two episodes,

(00:49):
I mentioned the book by Terrence Hawkins, uh, The Rage
of Achilles, and how it sounds interesting. Why I've since
then read that book, loved that book. And also I
think in general all we've had a lot of time
to sort of continue to to turn the concepts of
Julian Janes around in our mind and think more about them. Yeah,
I'll say, as far as the credibility of the full

(01:10):
hypothesis goes about the origins of consciousness and the breakdown
of the bi cameral mind, I'm no more convinced by
it than I was when I first read the book,
And in fact, I think now I have even stronger
doubts than I originally did, so I ultimately I think
I've come to the conclusion I think Jans was mostly wrong.
But this remains one of the most interesting books I've

(01:31):
ever read. It's just a really fascinating way to approach
a difficult problem like the origin of consciousness, and bringing
together so many different disciplines and and all that. Another
thing I've mentioned on episodes since then, but that I've
definitely been thinking about, is how well I think his
whole hypothesis about the origin of consciousness is probably wrong.

(01:52):
I think there could be something in his idea that
the quality of religious behavior was was fundamentally different back
then that perhaps may be in the ancient world, like
true hallucinations were much more common within religion and some
things like that. Uh, there could be bits of truth
in it, even if ultimately a bicameral mind never existed

(02:12):
in humans. Yeah, my trajectory with the idea was I
was really super into it for a little bit, and
I probably backed off on it a fair amount. I
still I still really like it, and I think there's
probably a fair amount of truth in it. I think
one of the most attractive things about it, though, is
that it provides an hypothesis for how the gods could

(02:34):
have spoken to people, like how the voice of God
could have been true, and how this thing that we
see in all of these different myths and religions could
actually be occurring from a you know, from more of
a grounded, skeptical um mindset. So anyway, we'll just dive
back into it. We're gonna you know, going back in time,

(02:54):
and it's re exploring our first episode on the Bicameral Mind.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot Com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and

(03:16):
today we're gonna be returning to one of our favorite
mind blowing topics here on the show, and that's going
to be the problems inherent in our experience of consciousness. Yeah,
this is a great one because there's no danger of
us really explaining it and figuring out consciousness anytime soon.
And there have been so many different approaches to it,
right from the neuroscientific to the psychological to the philosophic,

(03:37):
everyone trying to understand this question. Who am I? What
am I? What is this thing I'm experiencing? One of
the most persistent, fascinating questions in the study of mind
and biology is the question of the function of consciousness,
not just what is it, but what does it do?
I mean, you know that you have an internal subjective experience,

(03:58):
that you're aware of your awareness, that you can turn
your mind's eye to work over content in this deep
place in your brain. And by analogy, you believe everybody
else has this ability as well. They seem to have it,
But biologically speaking, why does anybody have it? Now? You
might think it's just a necessary part of being an
animal with a brain, right, Like, I've got stuff to do.

(04:21):
I've got to eat, got to go get the groceries,
got to seek shelter, got to check the coin returns
in all these candy machines. So my brain needs to
be able to think about doing that stuff in order
to do it right. But hold up for a second.
I wonder if you've ever had this experience, Robert, tell
me if you have. Do you ever have that experience
where you're driving a car and you arrive at your

(04:44):
destination and you suddenly realize and sort of like the
transition between activities when you get there, that you were
not conscious of the act of driving. Oh yeah, yeah,
you go on a sort of autopilot. I've had that
happened with generally with routine ta asks. Uh, it might
be driving, it might be emptying a dishwasher, loading a dishwasher,

(05:05):
that sort of thing, you know, taking dealing with laundry. Yeah,
and so when in the example with driving, this is
often known as highway hypnosis. Maybe you were lost in
your thoughts while on the road and you just managed
to drive from one place to another without consciously thinking
about driving at all, and yet you did it. Driving

(05:26):
is this highly complicated mental task. It involves massive integration
of sense, information, and coordination of different parts of the body.
You've got a time, everything just right, and yet your
brain has the power to make your body do it
without you thinking about it at all. And unlike dealing
with laundry or unloading the dishwasher. If you do it wrong,

(05:48):
people die, So right, it's it's I think it's one
of the reasons we tend to highlight it is because
you think about the fact, Oh, I don't really remember
driving to work, I just kind of did it. And
it's such a dangerous thing for us to engage in
and seemingly turn our brain off to. Yeah, it can
be a terrifying experience for multiple reasons. I mean, one

(06:09):
is the danger, but the other is just how alien
it feels to realize that your body is capable of
doing complex behavior without your knowledge, essentially without you really
being aware of the entire time. So now, the next
step I want to take you on is very simple.
Just imagine everything you do is like this, cooking, cleaning, working, talking, fighting, parenting.

(06:36):
Imagine your brain is just as capable of doing everything
it does, but simply without reflecting upon those actions within
the mental theater of your consciousness. So it's highway hypnosis
for your entire life. It's total behavior hypnosis. Is it
possible for you to imagine this? It's difficult to imagine

(06:56):
this sort of thing, for sure, because because in this scenario,
being conscious of your drive like that would be the
abnormality you're talking about, you know, an abnormal state of
consciousness or or even a lack of consciousness really would
be the normal, That would be the predominant human experience exactly.
And now that you're considering that possibility, we ask again,

(07:19):
if that's possible, what does consciousness do and where does
it come from? And why? You know, I think we
often turned to various metaphors to partially explain our thought processes. Yeah,
how often, I mean, how often do we fall back
on computer program movie or or written fiction is a
loose means of understanding at all. But one of the

(07:39):
you know, the real damnable things about trying to understand
consciousness is that like we're stuck within it. It's like
it's like trying to understand that the Earth is not flat. Right.
We have all of these various means of of of
of testing it, of of looking at the data and
knowing for a fact that the world is not like
just a flat plane, and we can even in into

(08:00):
satellite or even a human being up into orbit to
look back down on the Earth and see it for us.
But with consciousness, it's not that easy. Uh, you know,
despite whatever different tools you might be using neuroscientific, psychological
philosophical to step outside of our consciousness and understand what
it actually is. Yeah, I mean one of the problems
is you can't really be conscious of the fact that

(08:23):
you do things unconsciously, Like you can't feel what that's
like in the moment, because as soon as you pay
attention to it to feel it, you're conscious again. Yeah,
and it's wouldn't be the same thing, really. Perhaps you
agree or disagree as not remembering doing something, right, you
could have been conscious of doing something and then had
amnesia and forgotten about it. Yeah, Or you know, you

(08:44):
hear people about here about people who consume too much
alcoholics have a blackout experience, or accounts of people who
who use ambient to sleep and uh, and they do
something that they do not remember, and you know, various
other psychological fact us that can create that experience like
this order thirty frying pans on Amazon, right, right. But

(09:05):
for for the for what we're talking about here, this
is a case where yes, you remember driving to work,
but you weren't really there for it. Yeah. Yeah, you
know it happened, but it's just your mind was not present, right, likewise,
it's not like undergoing anesthesia and just being out for
the course of a surgery. In thinking about all this,

(09:26):
you know, I often come back to a quote from
the author are Scott Baker, who was recently an honor show,
and he he said this about consciousness. The magic can
only vanish as soon as the coin trick is explained.
In this case, we are the magic. So, uh, I
have to think about that when trying to unravel consciousness,
like we're we're within consciousness, we're creatures of consciousness. And

(09:48):
then to try and take it apart as to take
about ourselves. Well, I know Scott has some anxieties about
the Well I don't want to put words into his mouth,
but I think he has some anxieties about you know,
the consequence is of explaining consciousness too much, Like if
you do explain it, does that create a sort of
crisis of meaning of existence? Yeah, the sonantic apocalypse. Yeah.

(10:10):
So this leads us into what we're gonna be talking
about for the next two episodes of the show. This
is going to be the first part of a two
part series where we're going to be discussing a fascinating
hypothesis in the history of psychology known as bicameralism. Now, specifically,
we're gonna be looking at the work of the American
psychologist Julian Jaynes in his nineteen seventy six book The

(10:34):
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
The two episodes that we're gonna do, we're gonna break
down roughly like this. In the first episode, we're going
to just try to explain what Julian Jane's theory of
the bicameral mind and of modern consciousness is and how
he gets there from the problem of consciousness. And then

(10:55):
in the second episode, we want to discuss his argument,
like his evidence for the theory of the bi cameral mind,
how he sees evidence of this in history, and maybe
some reactions to the idea since the bicameral mind. And
we should be super clear here at the beginning that
this was and still is a controversial hypothesis. For the

(11:16):
purposes of discussion today, we're going to be entertaining it
as a hypothetical, but you should not take this to
be an endorsement of the hypothesis as fact. It's not
widely believed to be correct and full though it has
had many supporters, and even if it's not correct and full,
which is probably not, it might be correct in part. Yeah. Indeed,
there are gonna be a lot of points in this

(11:36):
episode where we're discussing the theory of the bicameral mind
as if it is something that we are totally convinced of. Yeah,
and this book I just mentioned the origin of consciousness
in the Breakdown of the bi cameral Mind. I would
compare it to the work of, for example, James Fraser
because I think it's one of those books that's worth
reading even if it's almost completely wrong, because it's just

(12:00):
such a fascinating synthesis of so many disciplines. Today and
the next episode, we're going to be diving through history, archaeology,
ancient literature, philosophy, psychiatry, neuroscience, and just direct phenomenological experience.
I read that Dawkins criticized, Well, what Dawkins said of
the book is that it's either Richard Dawkins either said

(12:20):
that it's brilliant or it's rubbish, and that there's no
in between. I disagree with that, Yeah, I would. Yeah,
I think that it's very possible that it is both
brilliant and wrong. Yeah, if nothing else, I think it
serves as a fascinating thought experiment. Yeah, what if this
is true? What if this were true? And how does
it force us to reinterpret the past and the legacy

(12:42):
of our species? Yeah? So, even though I suspect its
conclusions are probably wrong or at least wrong in part,
this is one of the most interesting books I've ever
read in my life. So, strap in, I think we
should start just by giving a straight version of Jane's
conclusion and then work our way back to it. Does
that make sense to you, Robert, Oh, Yeah, that's pretty

(13:03):
much what he does in the book. Yeah, here's this
amazing theory of what consciousness consists of and what it
used to consist of or not consist of, and then
he works backwards from there. Right, And so here's the
most basic summary I can give of his conclusion. Until
roughly three thousand years ago, human beings were not conscious.

(13:26):
Around that time, modern human consciousness began as a cultural invention,
probably in Mesopotamia that's spread across 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 commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices

(13:49):
that they called gods. And I just want to drive
home the impact of this. The argument is that ancient
people's did not think like we think. The god run human,
as he refers to him, at one point experience something
that for us would feel like an altered state of
consciousness or spiritual event. Is if we were hypnotized by

(14:09):
a voice like that of a god and it just
told us what to do, and then catastrophe forces us
to learn consciousness, and in doing so, we ceased hearing
the voices of the gods as we once did. Yeah. So,
just to be clear about this, what is being proposed
is in this period, which he calls the period before consciousness,
is the period of the bicameral human being. In the

(14:31):
bicameral mind, there was no consciousness. There was just action
commanded by hallucinated voices from another part of the brain
that was believed to be a god. Yeah. And what
we'll get into the idea of schizophrenia as it released
all of this in the second episode. But James does

(14:52):
say that, like straight up, this was a time when
everybody was essentially schizophrenic. Now One of the things that's
interesting about this is it runs own or to a
lot of what we do when we read ancient literature
and and flip through ancient history, is that here's I
would describe my experience this way. Maybe maybe you'll tell
me whether you think it's the same for you. When

(15:12):
I read a work of ancient poetry, or I read
about you know, very very ancient, like the ancient Egypt
or ancient Mesopotamia, stuff that goes way way back from
before the Roman Empire, say, I feel like, on the
face of it, I encounter humans who are completely alien

(15:32):
to me. I feel like I can't identify with them,
and I don't understand the way they're being described. And
what usually happens is I say, okay, well, this is
just a problem of translation, Like I'm not getting some
things about the cultural ways that their lives are communicated
through this literature and recorded. Um so I just need

(15:52):
to find ways of seeing the analogies between people like
us and people like them and say, Okay, here they
were really more like us, and here's why things are
being misunderstood. But another way, do you kind of have
that same experience? Um? Yeah, well it depends I mean definitely.
I would say with the oldest civilization that we continually

(16:13):
discuss here, it is probably you know, ancient Egypt, and
you know, we've touched on the fact that like the
religion of ancient Egypt did not did not travel well
beyond its borders, and that that's they were, They were
really alien people to try and understand. So yeah, I
definitely feel that when I'm whenever we're researching the ancient Egyptians, uh,
to a certain extent, I felt that we were talking about, uh,

(16:35):
the you know, ancient ancient Mesopotamia as it relates to
the Tower of Babel. But but there's I feel like
there's often also this issue that I guess is best
summed up by the various medieval pieces of art where
you know, such as you know, the stuff by Brugal
the Elder, where you have some sort of mythic thing
going on, like the Tower of of Babel, but then

(16:57):
you also have scenes of everyday life. And so I think, well,
if I'm encountering something that doesn't feel very human and
looking at an ancient culture, then perhaps that's because this
is just like the skeleton of experience. This is just
the heroes the gods, the myths, and very little is
recorded of daily struggles and daily life. Yeah, but what

(17:17):
if the issue is not so much that the ways
they're similar to us is being lost in translation, but
it's that we're reading that basically correct at face value,
and they just weren't like us. Yeah. I feel like
it's it's kind of a challenging perspective to try and
wrestle with because I want to humanize figures of the past,

(17:38):
especially you know, people in other cultures. It feels wrong
to say, look at at at ancient Egyptians, individuals and
you know, in ancient civilizations of Asia or Africa, and
and think of them as alien, to think of them
as having a different thought process than than we have, right.
I Mean, one way I think that we're resistant to

(17:59):
that is that there's a sort of implied like denigration
in that saying like, oh, if they were very different
from us, they weren't as good as us, And we
certainly don't want to think that way, but we it
might just be the case that their internal mental life
was very different than the internal mental life of people
on Earth today. Yeah, And before we dive in any deeper,

(18:21):
I do want to point out that, yes, the bicameral
mind is referenced in HBO's Westworld, UH. And I really
love Westward. I think it's a wonderful show. However, I
think you'll find that the the idea of the bicameral
mind and the ramifications of bicameralism are far more complex, rewarding,
and terrifying, uh than anything that's explored in that show.

(18:43):
I totally agree. I remember that it came up, but
I don't remember there being much about it in the show. Well, Robert,
I think maybe we should start where Jane's starts in
his book, which is with the problem of consciousness. And
he's got he's got an introduction to his book that
just get is a brief history of all the solutions
that people have tried to offer to the problem of

(19:04):
consciousness over the years, which, even if you don't if
you're not interested in his bicameral theory, this is a
cool intro to read because it's such a well written
and concise summary of the history of people trying to
deal with with what consciousness is and where it came
from up until the mid nineteen seventies. And he's got
a quote where he describes the you know, the question

(19:27):
at the root of the problem of consciousness that is
so good I had to read it. So consciousness is
quote a secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel,
an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, and
infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where
each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will,

(19:51):
commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may
study out the troubled book of what we have done
and yet may do. An introcosum that is more myself
than anything I can find in a mirror, This consciousness
that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet
nothing at all. What is it? And where did it
come from? And why? I should also say that the

(20:14):
description and an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries a
perfect review for Disney World. Wait, what are the discoveries
the discoveries of disappointments or no, no no, the discoveries are
you are discoveries. It's full of just wonders and disappointments.
So I mean, I loved it, but yeah, it's a
it's a it's it's hard to contemplate the discovery of

(20:37):
what other people throw in the trash. Maybe, isn't that
one of the most interesting things about going to an
amusement park is looking in the trash can and seeing
what people throw away. Maybe this is just me um,
Maybe this is a huge Joe. I don't know. I
don't remember the trash cans of Disney World so that much.
But maybe that's just because it was you know, stimulation overload. No,

(20:58):
it's great when you let you see a our glasses
in there or something and it's like, huh hm. Anyway
back to the problem of consciousness. So, in other words,
it's not hard to understand where human beings came from.
Biology and evolution seemed totally sufficient to explain the existence
of bipedal primates eating and reproducing and making tools. But

(21:21):
the question is not why are those creatures here? It's
why are we here? These entities of reflection and awareness
that seemed to inhabit the bodies of these bipedal primates,
and so one can easily imagine, as we talked about
earlier in the introduction, bipedal primates that do all the
same stuff we do, but our automata there's no inner

(21:42):
awareness or capacity for deliberative thought or reflection. So if
if we're evolved beings, at what point in our evolution
did consciousness appear? And so he he offers a few
thoughts of this. One of them is the idea that
consciousness is a property of matter. Right, so the relationship
of consciousness to what we are conscious of is not

(22:04):
fundamentally different from the relationship between objects interacting physically by
contact or by gravity. It's only different in complexity. Of course,
Jaynes is not persuaded by this view, And I would
just say, if consciousness is an inherent property of matter,
like a can of baked beans is in some way conscious,

(22:24):
why do we completely lose consciousness under general anesthesia? Like
if you've ever been put under for surgery, you know
what it's like. There's no consciousness whatsoever. It's just a
black hole in your in your experience. But so yeah,
there's no reflection, no internal experience, no memory, no choice,
no dreams. Your mind just ceases until you wake up.

(22:45):
But while you're under anesthesia, you still have the same
mass you did. So if it's something about matter that
would see, I don't see why changing the chemical uh,
you know, chemicals flowing through your brain would cause you
to completely lose consciousness. It's just that some part of
the brain has been chemically deactivated. The signals to me

(23:06):
that consciousness has something to do with something happening in
the brain. Yeah, And I think distinctions like this tend
to make a lot of sense to modern humans, in
large part because we have that handy metaphor of hardware
and software, Right, so it's really easy for us to
think of of consciousness arising as essentially like software arising

(23:26):
from the hardware um of the of the brain. Yeah,
it's not there in the hardware. It has to it
has to be run by the hardware. Okay, so so
maybe it's not there in all living matter. But maybe
Jane says, what if it's a property of all living
things like amba's have some form of consciousness. It's just

(23:47):
when life arises, that's when you start having consciousness. Apparently
Darwin was fond of this idea. He's he sort of
saw a rudimentary consciousness in all living things. But according
to Jane's and I think I'd probably have to with them,
there is just not any evidence that simple organisms possess consciousness.
Our tendency to project consciousness onto them is just some

(24:08):
fallacy of sympathy. Like we see behavior and sympathizing with
the consciousness behind similar types of behaviors in human beings,
we assume consciousness is behind those similar behaviors in all creatures.
In Amiba's because you know what, a human being fleeing
a needle would be conscious. You imagine an amiba fleeing

(24:28):
a needle would be conscious, But there's just no evidence
that that's true. Yeah, I think it's important to remember
that as humans, we we anthropomorphize like mad gods. We're
wired to see faces, but we're also wired to detect
minds totally even when there's nothing there. Right, Okay, So
maybe here's another theory. Jane says, what if consciousness is learning.

(24:49):
He says a lot of people were persuaded this by
this view for many years. And here's a quote. If
an animal could modify its behavior on the basis of
its experience, it must be having an experience. It must
be conscious. Thus, if one wished to study the evolution
of consciousness, one simply studied the evolution of learning. And

(25:10):
in fact, James himself along with many other psychologists, worked
under this assumption for many years of psychological research before
rejecting it. For example, he tells stories about how he
did experiments to see if a mimosa plant could be
trained through conditioning, and he in the end determined that
the mimosa plant was not conscious. Uh. He he found
that species with synaptic nervous systems like fish, flatworms, earthworms,

(25:34):
and so forth, could learn, and originally he took this
as evidence that they possessed some form of consciousness, but
later research has shown this to be just obviously wrong.
You don't need consciousness for learning, because we can show
in human beings that there's a tremendous amount of totally
unconscious learning, unconscious conditioning. Yeah. Plus we need only think

(25:57):
to the slime mold for an example of learning taking
place in the absence of a brain. So um, yeah,
I feel like we've we've moved beyond that. Okay, the
next one is just consciousness is a metaphysical, metaphysical imposition.
It's it's magic, you know. And Okay, well, if if
you think it's magic, enjoy, But that's that's not really

(26:19):
something that's very productive to proceed with from a scientific
point of view, it's hard to do experiments to see
if consciousness is magic. So uh so you believe that
if you want, but that's not really going to give
you a program of experimentation to work with. Yeah. I
think we can only engage in dualism so far from
a scientific standpoint, because the mind that stands apart from

(26:40):
body must still be rooted in our universe. Uh. Yeah,
so we can't really do much with magic. Here's another one.
We've talked about this one on the show before. Here's
the helpless spectator theory. Consciousness does nothing, and in fact
it can do nothing. So the idea is that at
some point an evolution, sufficiently complex brains begin to create
this sense of awareness of deliberate thought. Uh. And the

(27:03):
relationship between this sensation of experience and the actions in
your body is a complete illusion. Your consciousness does not
in fact control your body. Your body acts, and your
consciousness watches you act. It's a helpless passenger. You're essentially
watching a movie of your own mind, suffering from the
delusion that you're participating in the movie. This is also

(27:26):
known sometimes as epiphenomenalism, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal, uh,
byproduct of mental processes. Yeah. Thomas Huxley was fond of this,
and he would compare conscious mind and the physical brain
to a genie and a lamp. Yeah. But so a
lot of people have found this not very productive. I mean,

(27:47):
one would one question would be well, but still what
is it? Another thing would be the American psychologist William James,
the guy who wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience. He
argued against this view, as paraphrased by Jane's quote, If
consciousness is the mere, impotent shadow of action, why is
it more intense when action is most hesitant? And why

(28:10):
are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? I
think that's a reasonable question. So Janes ends up saying
that he thinks any viable theory of consciousness should at
least try to explain a relationship between consciousness and behavior. Okay,
we're getting close to the end of this timeline. How
about consciousness as an emergent property. We've talked about this

(28:31):
idea before too, Right, So, hydrogen is not wet, oxygen
is not wet, but you combine them into H two oh,
and you can create the property of wetness with enough
of these atoms. So in that sense, consciousness would be
a property of certain arrangements of matter. Uh, that is
more than the sum of its parts. It's sort of
a feature emerging from interactions, like from a sufficiently complex

(28:54):
biological system. Exactly. So this may be true. And for Janes,
I think he rectially reacts to this by saying, well,
it's not that that's false, it's just that that doesn't
answer the question. Consciousness may in fact be emergent, but
so what if it is? Still what is it and
what does it do? Then we get into the middle

(29:16):
of the twentieth century with a really really distressing viewpoint
consciousness doesn't exist. This is often identified with the behaviorist
school of psychology like B. F. Skinner, very strong in
mid century psychology. Uh, Jane's says, quote, it is an
interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious
of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. Yeah,

(29:39):
you know, some would call that kind of mental exercise meditation. Yeah, okay.
I believe it's Kartole who frequently advises one to think
the following I wonder what my next thought is going
to be in order to clear the mind and uh,
paralyzing thought. Well, no, I wouldn't say paralyzing is rating.

(30:00):
You know, if you just sort of set there and
if you start, if you ask yourself, well, what my
next thought is going to be? What's my next thought
going to be? And then you kind of or at
least I kind of feel things that feel like that
the weight of the default mode network, the weight of
consciousness kind of lifting for a second. It's kind of
like standing on one leg to relieve the weight on
the other. Yeah, that's appealing. So Jane's has a fairly

(30:23):
substantial discussion about the influence of behaviorism, and so the
behavior As School of Psychology had a research program that,
just to summarize it, tried to focus exclusively on externally
measurable behaviors, and it posited that these behaviors could be
explained by the interplay of mere instinctual reactions and stimuli,
or not just instinctual ones, I mean conditioned reactions. It

(30:46):
was big on conditioning and it was not really interested
in the inner experience. And Jane says that in the beginning,
what behavior is we're really saying was consciousness is not important.
And this sort of transformed into the doctor and that
consciousness does not exist. And James actually believes that by
focusing on these externally miasurable actions, behaviorism was very useful.

(31:08):
It sort of got psychology out of that squashy realm
of philosophy that you think about with like Freud and
Young and made it a more respectable experimental science. But
Jane says, quote, but having once been part of its
major school, I confess that it was really not what
it seemed off the printed page. Behaviorism was only a

(31:28):
refusal to talk about consciousness. Nobody really believed he was
not conscious. So the way I interpret that is that
behaviorism was in fact a method, not a theory, and
it did a lot of good for psychology. But now
that psychology has sort of like had had its room
cleaned up by this process of going through a behaviorist phase,
you can return to introspective experience, the internality. What is consciousness?

(31:53):
What does it do? Where did it come from? Now,
one last thing he deals with, and I think this
is a very good point to make, is he focuses
on neuroscience. So that you may have read studies, or
not studies, maybe news reports that say, like, hey, scientists
have identified the X as the source of consciousness in
the brain. Maybe it was the reticular activating system, or

(32:15):
maybe it was the clos strum or something else in
the brain. There's some region of the brain that some
neuroscientists now think they've identified as the place where consciousness
happens or is made possible. You they may be right.
It may be that you can isolate some sort of
on off switch for consciousness in the brain. But yet again,

(32:36):
I would say, this doesn't answer the fundamental question. You've
just basically narrowed down the physical space of the tissue
that generates it. You still have the question of what
is it, where did it come from, and what does
it do? Yeah? If I draw a hole through um
like a hard drive, am I necessarily drilling a hole
through like the seat of like the center of computation,

(32:57):
or I mean just disrupting the the integrated system that
makes it possible? Yeah? Yeah, you could identify some part
of a computer that says, as you say, well, without
this part of the computer, he couldn't compute. Yeah, I
mean I can. I can steal like the battery off
of somebody's laptop, right, But that really doesn't necessarily answer this,
Like deeper question of like, what is the nature of

(33:18):
computing and why does it occur? Much easier to answer
in the nature in the discussion of the nature of
a computer. Yeah, and I have to say we we
went into this a little bit in the episode Where
Is My Mind? Yeah, there's a good one to refer
back to if anyone wants more on this topic. Alright,
and then we're gonna take a quick break and when
we come back, we will dive right back into consciousness

(33:41):
than alright, we're back. All right. We've been discussing in
trying to work our way up to Julian Jane's theory
of the origins of consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind. We're starting with his discussion of what consciousness
is um So another thing that he points out in
his book is that there's an important distinction to be
made between consciousness and reactivity. So this is something interesting

(34:05):
to think about. You know, we talked about the the
high the highway hypnosis state where you can drive without
really being conscious of it. It's a fact that people
in some nambulistic states, meaning sleepwalking, can react without being conscious,
like you put an obstacle in their path. And they
might go around it, or they can they can react
to their environment and yet not be conscious the entire time.

(34:27):
That people don't know what they're doing, and so we
react unconsciously to all kinds of things. For example, unconscious
learning through conditioning and reactivity can also be explained through
neurology and behavior, but consciousness not so easily. I've got
another thing to ask you, you listener, right now, Where
are you now? Before I ask you that question, I

(34:52):
think it's very likely that you were not conscious of
where you were. And that's not the same thing as
saying you didn't know where you or like, if somebody
asks you, you can turn your attention to the answer
to that question and immediately provide the answer. But you
were not thinking about where you were. The fact of

(35:12):
your physical location was not present in the theater of
your mind at that moment, unless it just happened to
be by chance. Yeah, Like kind of a more extreme
example of this would be if I am reading a
really exciting book in my living room, Am I really
in my living room? Or am I on that you
know that that epic battlefield that I'm reading about. Yeah,

(35:32):
that's a great example. I mean, one of the interesting
things about engaging with fiction and like watching a movie
or reading a book, is that you enter this kind
of unconscious flow state, or what you're unconscious about is
your own physical life and your surroundings, and that you're
engaged deeply with the ongoing narratives, such that you forget

(35:53):
yourself and where you are, yeah, or you know. Another
example would be if someone is played by traumatic memory.
You know, you you're aware of your actual physical surroundings,
though your mind is continually going back to this one
place or time and experience. So with those really simple experiments,
you can demonstrate that consciousness is actually a much narrower

(36:14):
part of your mental experience than your entire mental life. Right.
Not everything you do with your brain is conscious. In fact,
most of what you do with your brain is not
conscious consciousness. James uses this one image that I think
is very effective. It's sort of like a flashlight shining
around in a dark room. The whole room is there,

(36:35):
but you can use your You can use the flashlight
to shine on any individual object. And then once you
shine it there and you try to imagine, Okay, what
what is going on in my brain that's not conscious?
So you move the flashlight around to look at things
that you're not conscious of, you immediately become conscious of
them when you shine the light on them. Yeah. This
gets into ideas too that we've discussed about consciousness as

(36:57):
being potentially being just like basically an ass act of
who of awareness, which is not exactly the same as
James is going to propose for the definition of consciousness,
but we're getting there. So James gives this list of
things saying what consciousness is not. So he says, it's
not mental activity. We have demonstrated that tons of mental

(37:17):
activity is Unconsciousness is unconscious. Uh, it's not recording information
because a whole lot of memory is clearly established unconsciously.
Think about the ways that, Uh, there are things that
you could not physically draw a picture of because you
don't remember what they look like, but you would notice
if something was wrong with them. To think about, like

(37:39):
if you came home from your house today and somebody
had moved the pictures around on the wall. You might
not be able to consciously recall where all the pictures
are if you tried to draw a picture of it
right now, but you might notice something was off if
they had been moved. You know. It kind of reminds
me how some you know, some books you read there
is a very detailed description of a particular character. Other

(38:00):
times there's not. And I know when I was younger,
I used to engage in an exercise where I would
basically pick a movie star and slot them in as
that character, and uh, I don't. I haven't done that
really in years. Occasionally, like there'll be an actor or
some you know, a particular face that kind of becomes
that character in my mind always Jeff Goldblum. Just universe

(38:23):
is full of Goldblums. It's not a bad choice. But
but I find a lot of times if if the
author is not giving a very detailed description, I kind
of have a loose idea of what that character looks like.
And I don't think about it much. But if you
were to present me with an artist sketch of that character,
I could instantly tell you if I liked it or not,
or if you know, whether it matched my, uh my

(38:46):
vision of what that character would be, even though my
vision of the character is rather abstract, like in your
mental theater, it's like they're wearing the scramble masks from
a scanner darkly. You know that they look like many
things at once as kind of a blur, but you
can identify particular that you think it does not fit
that character as soon as you see it. Okay, So
it's not recording of information, he says, it's not the

(39:08):
basis for forming concepts. I think he's right about this,
because how about the concept of a tree. Now he
talks about the idea that no one has ever seen
a tree. In fact, you've only seen this tree or
that tree. But he sort of disagrees with it because
he says, you know, animals have to have categories of
things that they react to in a certain way. So

(39:30):
it would kind of be hard to imagine the life
of a squirrel if a squirrel did not have something
like the concept of a tree. It's got to be
able to scramble into a tree that's never scrambled into
before by recognizing it as a thing that can be
scrambled into, which is a tree. Yeah, And it's difficult,
I think for us to think about that kind of
thing because it's very difficult for us to think about

(39:51):
it outside of language. Yeah. So Jane says that consciousness
is not, in fact the basis of learning, and we
we know this to be true through experience menation. Now,
signal learning happens automatically. Now that's just like you know conditioning,
Pavlovian conditioning. You see a signal and you expect something
to happen according to association with it. UH. Skill learning

(40:12):
also seems to happen when we're least conscious. Think about training.
You ever trained for like some kind of athletic feed
or trained on a musical instrument, you probably know from
experience that you can't focus too much on your actions.
You have to sort of let go and not overthink it.
How about solution learning? Uh? He he talked about how

(40:33):
even even the solutions to like working toward a goal
or a problem, the solutions are things we arrive at unconsciously.
So he describes this experiment where UH students were performing
an experiment on their professor, where every time the professor
moved to the right side of the room, the students,
instead of being board paid rapped attention and they laughed

(40:54):
really hard when you would make a joke. And so
by you know, the end of a week, he's basically
so far to the right of the room that he's
going out the door, and he was not aware that
they had been training him this way. Interesting, he says,
consciousness is also not the process of thinking, thinking, like
making judgments. So here's a quick test. Hold two objects

(41:16):
in each hand or one, sorry, one object in each hand?
Which one is heavier? All right? So you think about
that and you make a judgment, but you're not conscious
of how the judgment arises. Your brain just sort of
presents the answer to you. Right, one feels heavier, and
your brain tells you that's the one that's heavier. But

(41:36):
you you don't, like you've done some kind of unconscious
arithmetic and you're not aware of the process by which
the answer was generated. Yeah, it's kind of difficult to
show your work exactly. It's sort of like saying, why
is too greater than one? Or like I give you
two numbers, you know, six and four? Which one is larger?
You can't explain a conscious process of deciding which one

(42:00):
was larger. Well, I mean I intrinsically know that that
six is greater than one and I and those are
small enough numbers two that I can I can visualize
the quantity. Yeah, I can imagine six eggs and four eggs.
So I can engage in that kind of like basic
visual uh judgment. But you didn't have to do that,
did you. You just had the answer immediately. Yeah, I guess.

(42:22):
I guess it does become tricky like that because you
because because I'm doing it all in in reverse. I'm
looking back on my decision making, looking back at my
judgment and trying to figure out how it took place
in the mind. Yeah, you're trying to consciously reverse engineer
your unconscious thought process. So here's another one. He he mentions.
Let's go with a pattern. Tell me if you say

(42:44):
what comes next A B, A B A question mark B. Right,
everyone can get the answer. It's totally simple. But notice
how you're not consciously aware of how the answer is generated.
You can consciously reflect on the answer once you have it,
but it's not generated by consciousness, it's just there. Yeah.

(43:05):
This is actually a standard part of of of testing
for kindergarteners. By the way, my son just went through this,
and I get to see like the questions he was asking,
and one of them involves a couple of different rounds
of this to see if they what kind of pattern
recognition they have. Yeah. Uh, so here's a crazy thing.
He says that consciousness is not even the process of reasoning.

(43:27):
How would that be the case. Surely we think reason
has something to do with consciousness, and it may have
something to do with consciousness, like, for example, reasoning may
require conscious laying of the groundwork of sort of the
reasoning space. But it is curious to pay attention to
stories of scientists coming up with answers to like complex
mathematical problems or physics problems. They very very often report

(43:52):
that the solutions come to them out of the blue
when they're doing unrelated activities. Like there's a story about
how Einstein had be careful when he was shaving because
suddenly solutions to problems in physics would leap into his
mind and surprise him when he hadn't been thinking about them,
and he had to be careful not to cut his
own throat with his razor when this happened. That's interesting. Yeah,

(44:15):
I mean, I think we can all relate to situations
where you you know, you go out on a walk
or you engage in some of their activity and yeah,
that's when the thoughts begin to come. Yeah, it's like
it's it's in the bath that you have your Eureka moment.
So having excluded all that stuff in deciding what consciousness is,
it's time to get to the bones here, Jane says,

(44:37):
or would this be the meat? Would it be the bones?
Would it be the fat to chew on? M let's
go with Let's go with the meat, the meat. Okay,
maybe this is the meat, so Jane says again, I'll
just hit you with it and then we can try
to explain it. Consciousness is a metaphor based model of
the world, and it arises from language. Without language, according

(44:58):
to Jane's you could not have consciousness, uh. And it
comes from the way we use language to create metaphors
and how those metaphors themselves lead to new ways of thinking.
So how does this work? Well, let's explore real quick.
So a metaphor is actually, when you think about it,
one of the most fascinating things about language. It's a
thing that without language we cannot do. Right. Language makes

(45:22):
metaphors possible. And it's the use of a term for
one thing to describe another because of some kind of
similarity between them or between their relations to other things.
That sounds kind of complex, but you use metaphors in
your life you basically know what they are, right, So uh.
He introduces two terms for the two halves of a metaphor.

(45:42):
You've got the meta frand, which is a new thing,
a thing to be described that you don't already know about.
And then you've got the meta fire, and that's the
known thing, the thing in relation used to describe the
new thing. So here's an example. Let's say there's a
new species of beetle that's got a large horn, protuberants
branching off of its head. That's the meta frand it's

(46:04):
something new. You've got the meta fire something you're familiar with,
a stag and its antlers, and the metaphor is a
stag beetle. Okay, but I'm guessing this also applies to say, like,
the meta fran could be a feeling that I have exactly,
and the metaphere is, say a tiger. I've seen a tiger,
but this, this emotion that I'm feeling is new to me.

(46:25):
But I can use the tigers a way to describe
what I'm feeling exactly. Now. That is one of his
key insights. We use meta fires based on the natural
physical world around us to understand the meta frans. Of
inscrutable internal consciousness. So you have mental activity that is

(46:47):
turned into a metaphor through comparison to some concrete action
in the world, and this process gives rise to conscious thought.
So here's a version of that. How about your your
trying to solve a problem and you've you've got going
on in your mind what we just described, like you
the A B A B A B problem, what comes next?

(47:07):
If you think A comes next, you don't understand what
happened in your brain to to give you that answer.
So that might be the metaphrand, the thing that needs
to be described, the unfamiliar thing. It's the inscrutable process
of coming to comprehend the solution to a problem, and
you've got to metaphire something that's totally familiar, to compare
it to seeing with your eyes something that happens in

(47:30):
the physical world. The metaphor is the conscious thought is
now I see the answer. So consciousness, for Jayne's is
something that is taking place in a metaphorical mind space
that is an analog of physical space in reality. It's
when we invent this metaphor of a world inside to

(47:54):
match the world outside, and we use metaphors from the
physical world to understand and describe our own mental activity.
And through these metaphors, we generate this self reflective process,
this spatialized stuff in the head, the mind space where
we create narratives. We reflect on our behaviors and generate

(48:17):
the circumstances that produce consciousness. And for James, this is
how consciousness arises. I think. I'm not sure I agree
with it, but I do think this is one of
the most fascinating propositions for the origin of consciousness I've
ever heard. Yeah, yeah, it's I agree with you, it's
and I'm hesitant to, you know, endorse it because I really,

(48:37):
for one thing, I really do like the the awareness explanation.
But but but yeah, when I started thinking about about
the power of metaphors, it it does. It does have
a bit of it does feel true. Yeah, I mean,
it's amazing the way metaphors do pervade our thinking about things.
It's one of the funny things about languages that language
makes metaphors possible, but almost all language is built out

(49:00):
of metaphors. Even the word metaphor is a metaphor. Like
the word metaphor comes from the Greek meaning to carry across,
so you've got this abstract action of taking the meanings
of one word and putting them on another word, But
then it is described in terms of a physical, concrete
action in the world that we're familiar with, carrying one
thing to another place. Yeah. So even if you think

(49:21):
you're being very literal, yeah, you're still you're still walking
on metaphors. Yeah, I mean pretty much the only language
that is not based on metaphors is that of the physical,
concrete world and basic activities in space. So, uh so
James gets to what are the most important features of consciousness? So, like,
what what is consciousness? According to him, he says, one

(49:44):
of the main features is spatialization, and this means that
conscious thoughts metaphorically seem to take place in a quote
mind space, which is not a physical space, and within
the mind space of consciousness, things that do not in
reality have a spatial qualit ity become what he calls spatialized,
that is imagined with spatial qualities. So, for example, time

(50:07):
in direct experience, we apprehend time as this continuous, impermanent
succession of moments. Right, it's hard to describe how you
experience time without using a conscious metaphor that turns it
into space, like can you how how can you even
describe what time is without changing it into space in

(50:29):
your consciousness? Yeah, I mean you end up having to
come up with some sort of physical description, like for instance,
Card Vonnegut in The slaughter House five had the description
for for a linear experience of time of a man
on a train with blinders on looking at mountains roll
by and he can't turn his head. Yeah, exactly. So
it's much like that. In our unconscious direct experience, each

(50:52):
moment is sort of lived in and then disappears. But
in our conscious mind space we can organize temporal of
events into a timeline, something that does not exist in
any detectable way in reality. There is no such thing
as a time line in the world. It's only a
mental uh construct. So consciousness makes the past and the

(51:14):
future comprehensible and organizable to us. Suddenly, when you have consciousness,
the past and the future in some sense exist. Yeah,
then this is a This is cool because this ties
into some past discussions we've had about the difference between
linear linear existence random and modern humans and the more
cyclical existence of the past. Yeah, totally. Another feature he

(51:37):
isolates of of being unique to consciousness. He calls it exerption.
So this is when you isolate a detail for attention,
using it to represent the whole. So I'm gonna ask you, Robert,
what did you do the summer after ninth grade? I
have no idea. I have no idea whatsoever. No, I'd
have to really think about it. I guess I probably

(51:59):
summer hip nosis, just totally totally. I don't know. I mean,
if you if you ask the question about earlier year,
I could have said, oh, I went to scout camp,
you know, or I went to this camper or another.
But for ninth grade, I'm not sure what I did. Well, Okay,
So I want to say for most memories of time
period memories, I would ask like that you probably have
at least one image rise to the top from the

(52:20):
time I ask you about, and that is the exerpt
that represents the summer. And then from that one exerpted
memory might be an image, you might be a specific
episode you recall from that one exert you can associate
around to others that have something to do with it.
Rather in this imagined physical spatialized timeline or by you know,

(52:41):
sort of theme associations and this is a process that
we know as reminiscing. Right, So, think about how a
human like us without consciousness could recall information about the past.
It's impossible to imagine that person reminiscing. Does that make sense?
Like a person without consciousness might be able to use

(53:01):
information from their past to make a decision about the future.
But and so they'd have memory, and the memory could
be recalled, but there would be no process of wandering
through the mind space of memory, of the memory theater,
looking at one exerpt of the past after another. Right. Well,
that it's crazy to try to imagine that, because it

(53:22):
would mean that you could not look longingly back on
something in the past. You exactly couldn't experience nostalgia. You couldn't.
I mean, one would wonder even if you could be traumatized.
I mean maybe you could, because you could certainly have
positive and negative associations with events. Uh, And you you
could have things you wanted that would be associated with

(53:44):
past stimuli. But you couldn't. You couldn't wander through your
memory because what would you wander with. So a bicameral
human who had been you know, experienced horrific burn, they
might they might have a strong reaction to seeing fire,
but they wouldn't just setting there eating their you know,

(54:04):
their grass and their berries and then just think out
of the blue fire is terrifying and I'm afraid of it. No,
I think they probably wouldn't. Yeah, they would not have
memories of that event. The memory would be accessible and
useful to their brain and behavior, but they wouldn't go
back to the memory and experience it with their attention.

(54:25):
So it's kind of liberating because you you wouldn't be
sitting around constantly fretting about the past and the future. Right, Okay,
So I asked just the question, if you didn't have consciousness,
what would you wander through your memory with? The thing
you wander through your memory with is the next feature
Janes identifies the analog I. So, for Jane's an analog
is something that at every point is generated by the thing.

(54:48):
It's an analog of A good example would be a map.
A map is an analog of a part of the
surface of the earth. So the analog I that James
talks about is the mental analog of your body in reality,
and it moves mentally through mind space to observe and
perform metaphorical quote action within the mind space. If that's thick,

(55:10):
just think about it's the mental version of you that
does the looking. So when you wander through your memory,
it's your analog eye that does the wandering. It's the
mental representation of yourself as a subject Edworth noting that
in his book, he he does stress that the analog
I came into being towards the end of the second
millennium BC. Yeah, and that's about the time that he's

(55:32):
saying that the bi cameral mind largely began to transition
into the conscious mind after the analog eye. He's also
got a feature of consciousness is the metaphor me. This
is the metaphorical object version of yourself that you observe.
So when you say, when you say I see myself
doing X in a memory, the eye in that sentence,

(55:53):
the subject is the analog eye. The the the analog
version of you that looks, and the me version of
yourself offen that sentence is the metaphor me, the subject
version or sorry, the object version of yourself that gets
looked at. That's crazy because it's it forces you to
try to imagine what if you only had I, or
you only had me. Yeah, Now that affects your your

(56:14):
your conscious experience of the world. Well, it seems to be,
at least in his theory. The bicameral human has neither one,
and the conscious human has both. So yeah, what if
you're some kind of transitionary human where you you you
can't imagine yourself, but you can wander through mental space? Yeah,
or kind of like things only happen to me, but
I don't do things. Uh, yeah, I don't know. I

(56:37):
wonder if that's possible anyway. Two more features of consciousness
he identifies. So he says consciousness enables neurotization. So an
unconscious being could not form thoughts into coherent stories. You
make a narrative that makes sense. So the non conscious
brain would react to events of the present, perhaps based

(56:58):
on things learned from experiences in the past. But the
conscious mind weaves past, present, and future into a story,
and the story also includes dependencies of cause and effect,
and a story things didn't just happen, They happened for
a reason. So this is the part of the conscious
mind that makes us concerned with the question why. A

(57:19):
final feature of consciousness is what he calls conciliation or
later in his afterward, he calls concilience, and this is
fusing exerpted mental contents together to make it spatially compatible
in a way that makes sense. So if I, Robert,
I'm going to ask you to imagine a couple of things,
a plate and a bunch of spaghetti. Okay, Now you're

(57:40):
probably imagining the spaghetti on top of the plate, yes,
not the other way around. There was no hesitation there. Yeah,
but I didn't tell you to do that. That's concilience
in your mind. You're organizing things in your mind into
a way that makes sense. Yeah. I would never put
the plate on the spaghetti. At most, I would imagine
the spaghetti in a pile here and the plate over here.
But my mind didn't go there either, Yea. So here

(58:02):
we finally worked our way up to Jane's idea of
what consciousness is. He says, it's quote an operation, rather
than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates
by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog
space with an analog I that can observe that space
and move metaphorically in it. Or the even shorter version,

(58:24):
He says, consciousness is quote an analog I neratizing, so
creating stories in a mind space, which I think is
a very elegant way of reckoning with what consciousness is.
I'm not sure that he's correct about the generative mechanism
that like language creates consciousness, though I do think it's
possible that he's correct about that. Um, I'm not sure

(58:46):
he's right about that, but I do think the way
he describes the phenomena of it is very credible. Yeah, alright,
on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and
when we come back, we're going to transition from James's
view us on what we have now and get into
this concept of the bicameral mind what came before. Thank alright,

(59:07):
we're back, all right, So it's time to explore the
bicameral mind as proposed by Julian Jaynes. So, you we
we talked to the beginning about how you can have
this experience of highway hypnosis. Your body can perform complex
behaviors with you really just not being aware that it's happening.
Your brains work in all the stuff. It's pulling the levers,
it's using your vision and your hearing, and it's making

(59:30):
your body move, but you're just not there for it.
You can do all that stuff almost perfectly unconscious of
the process of driving, if it's highway hypnosis or whatever else,
acting purely out of habit an instinct. When suddenly there's
a mime in the middle of the street pretending to
be stuck in a glass box, Well that's gonna that's
gonna shake you out of it right there. H yeah,

(59:51):
So what do you do about this? Obviously, if you
are a conscious human like us, you snap out of it.
Your highway hypnosis goes away. You suddenly become very conscious
of yourself. You become conscious of your driving. You start
nearratizing your imagine self, performing possible reactions to the situation. Right,
you're working through what should I do? And you compare

(01:00:13):
these imagined hypotheticals to decide what's going to happen. And
this is one way we often find ourselves quote using consciousness,
when we have to suddenly deal with novel stimuli. A
thing you didn't expect, that isn't part of your habit
process gets thrown in front of you, and now you've
got a novelty problem. It's an outside context problem, and

(01:00:35):
you've got to deal with it. Yeah, mine in the street. Yeah,
nothing has prepared you for this? How are you going
to roll with this change? Right? So, in in Jane's
vision of consciousness, this is what consciousness mainly does. We
employ our consciousness in volition and decision making when we're
encountering something that we were not used to. But so
that's for us, that's conscious people. What if you were

(01:00:56):
not capable of consciousness? What if you were entire earlier
creature of habit behaviors like like you know, you're you're
like you are when you're driving the car out of
habit and you just can't turn to the internal nearrotization,
What do you do well, Jane says the hypothetical bicameral
person of antiquity. In this example, I've given um instead

(01:01:19):
of being conscious when faced with the mime in the street,
instead of becoming conscious of the novel, stimuli would instead
unconsciously hear a voice telling them what to do about it,
and they would obey avoid the min Yeah, it would say.
It would be as if a parent said, like, go

(01:01:39):
around it, and you hear the voice of maybe your
mom or your dad, or some authority figure, your boss
or your chieftain and whatever. Yeah, suddenly would tell you, okay,
just drive to the left and go around it and
then proceed as normal, and then you would obey. So
in the next episode, we're going to go into the

(01:02:01):
into great depth about the evidence that James presents for
the bicameral mind in history. So we're gonna look at
literature and archaeology and all this stuff about what what
he thinks makes the case for the existence of the
bicameral mind. But first I think we should just look
at a couple of objections you might have to how
could this be possible? How could humans be like this? Yeah?

(01:02:22):
And I mean, of course when all of this we
have to state the obvious that it is just it
is difficult to try and imagine a default, uh human
mindset that is like this. Absolutely, So here's one objection.
Can people really hear hallucinatory voices that are indistinguishable from
real voices? The answer to this is undoubtable. Yes, just absolutely.

(01:02:44):
If you doubt this, go read about auditory hallucinations. Auditory
hallucinations are number one, They're very common. Even lots of
people who don't normally hallucinate at some point in their
life will have an auditory hallucination, often in a period
of intense stress. And auditory hallucinations are often perceived as
absolutely real, not necessarily fuzzy or dreamlike, though they can

(01:03:07):
be like that too, But in many cases they are
perceived as as lucid and clear and real as the
voices of people around them. Here's another question. You might
be like, well, wait a minute, can hallucinatory voices really
provide helpful information? Like don't they? Just if you're imagining
the experience of a person with schizophrenia who is caused

(01:03:27):
a lot of suffering by their condition, that certainly does happen.
People can be, you know, told very nasty, negative, unpleasant
things by voices in their head. But there are cases
where these voices do seem to provide comfort and helpful
information and to guide into into guide behaviors in a
in a useful way. It just depends on the case. Well,
and plus not every example James makes about the bi

(01:03:51):
cameral mind is a case where the voice or the
voice of the gods is is telling the individual to
do something that's beneficial. Right, Uh right, I mean just
the same way that conscious humans can make bad decisions.
You're a bicameral human could have part of their brain
tell them to do something that is a bad decision.
It's just part of the human brain that sometimes it

(01:04:13):
makes bad decisions, whether it's existing in a bicameral state
or a conscious state. But so anyway, Yeah, these voices,
it's not necessarily that they're omnipotent or godlike in their knowledge,
but rather when they are helpful, they tend to command
information and insight on about the level of a human brain.
This is not really surprising because they are from a
human brain. So then okay, So if you're with us

(01:04:35):
so far, you might be thinking, okay, well, what actually
causes hallucinations? Where they come from? If you're hearing voices? Uh,
it depends on many factors. Different people have vastly different
levels of susceptibility to hallucination. Some people are very prone
to them experienced them all the time. Other people are
not prone to them, but at some point in their
life will experience one, and in almost all cases, Jane says,

(01:04:58):
the trigger for hallucination is stress. In hallucination prone people,
it takes very little stress to trigger one. In less
prone people, it takes a lot of stress. Jane says quote,
during the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose
that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much much lower
than either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress

(01:05:20):
necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior
is necessary because of some novelty in a situation. This
is what we were talking about with the mime in
the road. You've suddenly had something that your habits do
not account for, and you need to make a decision
based on volition. So, resuming the quote, anything that could
not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any

(01:05:41):
conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any
choice between whom do obey or what to do, anything
that required any decision at all, was sufficient to cause
an auditory hallucination, you know. To get back to to
Westworld just a little bit. You know, I mentioned that
they that they is the bicameral mind in that series,

(01:06:01):
and the ideas that at at an earlier point, the
robots essentially at a bicameral mind where the creators we're
speaking in their head. It does remind me of a
lot of the modern science of drones, where you have
a quote man in a loop scenario um, where you
could have you have a machine that's going about its

(01:06:22):
business and when necessary a a human adjust the behavior
of the machine. Yes, yes, totally. Or I think about
like the hybrid machine human chess players. Have you read
about this, haven't? Well, I don't know if it's still
the case. For a while, so you had the point
where suddenly the best chess programs could outperform the best

(01:06:42):
human players. But then there was a period and we
may still be in that period where, in fact, better
than the best chess programs are players that are chess
programs assisted by human players. Okay, so it's almost like,
you know, the chess program it basically knows what to
do all the time, but maybe to introduce some novelty,

(01:07:05):
the human player steps in and does something clever. All right, well,
what about neuro neurological evidence for this hypothesis? Right? So,
this is one where I don't want to go into
a whole lot of detail on Jane's hypothesis because, for
one thing, a lot of it. We don't want to
get too bogged down here. And in the next episode
we're gonna primarily talk about evidence for that James presents

(01:07:26):
for the theory um, but his neurological hypothesis may also
just in some cases be proven wrong by later experiments,
and we'll talk about that some more in the second episode,
but here's the gist. There is generally a sense in
which the two hemispheres of the brain, the right hemisphere
in the left hemisphere are genuinely divided and can in

(01:07:48):
some senses act independently, almost as if they were two
separate persons. Now, I think we've talked about some of
the evidence for this before and episodes in the past, right, Yeah,
And and we only have talked about it when we've
discussed uni himispheric sleep and what it would be like
if a human experience uni hemispheric sleep. There's a character
in an Ian and Banks culture novel that has that

(01:08:11):
scenario going on, and they've essentially got two different personalities.
When there different personalities because if one side is active,
they're they're one way, of the other side at active
they're another way. And then the if both sides are active,
you know, the standard human experience, you have a mix
of both. Now, it's interesting that James points out that
on the left hemisphere, in most people, this is going

(01:08:33):
to be the dominant hemisphere, and you know right handed
people generally this will be the left left hemisphere of
the brain that it can alternate for other people. Um,
the left hemisphere is where speech generally happens, but James
turns his attention to the analog speech areas of the
right brain in most people. So under Jane's schema, in

(01:08:54):
the bicameral mind, the non dominant hemisphere, which is the
right hemisphere in most people, generates auditory hallucinated voices perceived
by the dominant hemisphere or the left hemisphere in most people.
And his explicit neurological hypothesis is quote, the speech of
the gods was directly organized in what corresponds to Vernicke's

(01:09:16):
area on the right hemisphere and spoken or heard over
the interior commissures to or by the auditory areas of
the left temporal lobe. And these commands are then obeyed
more or less automatically, as an obedient child obeys the
commands of a parent or a member of a social
animal species submits to the authority of another individual higher

(01:09:40):
up the dominance hierarchy. And he goes into great detail
about about verbal dominance like the UH the research on
like how people obey commands and how you can control
people's minds by getting right up in their space and
giving them verbal commands. Um. You know. In in reading
about all of this, I kept thinking back to uh
to yog class. I love going to I love doing

(01:10:02):
yoga on my own or I'm essentially calling the shots
and following a pattern. But I also love going to
a class where there is a uh there, there is
a leader, there is a teacher who is telling us
how to move our bodies for for an hour and
fifteen minutes, an hour and a half, And there's something
very liberating in that. Yeah. Uh So. In other words,
in Jane's hypothesis about the neurology of this, the non

(01:10:25):
dominant hemisphere does the integration of information in the difficult
thinking about how to deal with stressful situations brought about
by novel stimuli, and then that that right hemisphere or
the non dominant hemisphere, tells the dominant hemisphere what to do,
and the dominant dominant hemisphere incorporates that information and enacts it.

(01:10:47):
So he offers five main pieces of evidence for his
neurological hypothesis. I just want to present his summary of
them very very quickly, and some of these will get
into more detail in part two. Yes, so he says
the pieces of evidence are that quote one, both hemispheres
are able to understand language, while normally only the left
can speak. That's kind of interesting too, that there is

(01:11:10):
some vestigial functioning in the right Vernicke's area in a
way similar to the voices of God. So he identifies
that with like activity in the right hemisphere, and most
people the non dominant hemisphere in this speech associated area
being associated in say, people with schizophrenia hearing voices auditory
hallucinations for example, if there are somewhat severed or one

(01:11:33):
is turned off essentially the other can behave as a
person independently with some adaptation. Um for that, the contemporary
differences between the hemispheres and cognitive functions at least echo
such differences of function between man and God as seen
in the literature of bicameral Man. So he's comparing. He's

(01:11:54):
saying that there are some analogies between the functions of
the left brain and right right brain to man God,
as we will see in some ancient literature. And finally
he appeals to the sort of plasticity of the brain,
that the environment shapes the way the brain functions to
an incredible extent. A lot of what the brain does
is not determined by your genes, but is determined by

(01:12:16):
how you grow up and your social environment. All right,
So those are the basics, alright. So yeah, so we've
established that. In the next episode, we're going to explore
what James presents as the evidence for the existence of
the bicameral mind and the transition from the bicameral mind
to the conscious mind. But I want to end just
by comparing the ideas the bicameral mind versus the conscious mind.

(01:12:36):
I think one of the hardest things to recognize and
keep in mind here is that we have such a
pro consciousness bias. I mean, we we just tend to say, like, well,
consciousness is obviously what what you know, the good life
is all about. But Jane's I don't think it's ever
explicitly saying that one kind of mind is better than another,

(01:12:57):
or even that one kind of mind is smarter than
the other, because they do just seem to offer different
adaptive capabilities, right, Yeah, I mean, and as will explore,
I mean, there's a strong case that when the bicameral
mind goes away, I mean that it has tremendous catastrophic
consequences for these these early cultures. Right. So, if there's
any truth to his theory, it may be the case that,

(01:13:19):
for example, people of the bicameral mind have strengths like
they work better in groups. They on average have greater
mental endurance, you know, they can do things more and
so they're sort of like tougher in keeping at tasks,
and they have more creativity, more fluid linguistic creativity. They
may have been better poets, They may have been just

(01:13:40):
as we've been discussing, they may have been happier, if
in a way that is not like our happiness. Right.
And then on the other hand, of course, people with
conscious minds he's saying, are probably on average more adaptable
that are able to deal with new stimuli when it
comes up and the mime appears in the street. Uh,
you know, I m I won't stop and surrender to it. Right.

(01:14:01):
But but the takeaway if there's any truth to Jane's theory,
I just want to stress, is not bicameral mind equals old,
stupid and bad and conscious mind equals new smart and good.
They're they're subjectively different models of experiencing the world, with
different strengths and weaknesses. However, that the message is still

(01:14:21):
that ancient people were strange. Ancient people to us, we're
alien to us. Yeah, So in the next episode, we're
going to run through historical, religious, and even modern cultural
evidence that he says supports this theory. So if you
thought there wasn't enough bloodshed in this episode, hang on,

(01:14:42):
because empires will fall, gods and goddesses will rage, the whole,
the whole nine yards, the whole clash of the Titans
will take place in the second episode and in the meantime,
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, head on over to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind and dot com. That is the mothership
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(01:15:03):
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(01:15:24):
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(01:16:03):
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