From the Vault: Bicameralism, Part 1

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, 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 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

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.

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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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 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, 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. 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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,

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. 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 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 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.

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 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? 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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.

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 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, 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, 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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? 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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,

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

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 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

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 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 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 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? 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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.

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 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, 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 and that's where you can find all the episodes of

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