From the Vault: Bicameralism, Part 2

have been since we first talked about this idea. My basic take is that I don't think it's correct as a theory of where consciousness came from, yet it remains a fascinating, comprehensive hypothesis to explore, even if its main point is I think probably wrong. Some sub points that Jane's makes within his argument are really interesting and may in fact have some historical purchase. And it's also just

a great, fun, fascinating book to read. I also think it's interesting how one can you can almost feel like a religious zeal for it, you know, like and sometimes I detected that in you. Yeah, Well, like I said in the last episode, there's this there's this way that the hypothesis can make the magic of religion and mythology, uh,

seem more believable and seem more possible. Uh, you know, especially from more of a like a grounded skeptical point of view, and uh and it but it's the kind of thing too, I can imagine how like I can easily envision some sort of alternate future or even an alternate at present in which the bi cameral mind has

become a kind of religion. So anyway, it's a it's a It was a fascinating pair of episodes to record, and I wouldn't rule out returning to it at some point in the future if we find enough new angles to take on it and new things to say about it, or find some individuals who would want to talk with

us about it. Yeah. I know. Since we did these episodes, I've read articles about all of the all of the like sort of popular mainstream academics and thinkers and sky allers who are sort of secretly fans of this theory. I think, maybe sort of in the same camp we are, Like, they don't necessarily believe it's correct, but they're just they can't stop thinking about it. I know I've seen Daniel Dennett placed in this camp before that he's sort of

secretly a fan of it. I now have to say that among the various ways I try and interpret attacks, you know, you looking at it as literature, as as some sort of you know, a true story, as some sort of allegorical story, etcetera, I also throw in the bicamera right mind, and I think, well, what's the bicamera read on this? And it's a really fun fun way to to to pass the time if you find yourself

being like bombarded with a kind of say, boring Bible story. Yeah, I can totally see how it would play that kind of role. I would be interested in returning to it some day, especially if we could find a way of bringing some fresh evidence to it, anything in in support

or in opposition. I mean, one thing I would I have thought would be interesting is just try to find lots of counter examples to Jane's idea that like ancient literature is not display interiority, that the most ancient stories, people don't seem to have inner minds, that they just you know, their decisions come from deliverances of the gods, and if you can just collect lots of examples where that's not the case, that could provide some sort of

counter evidence to say, Okay, so he's probably not right about this part of the theory, but other things might might still have some purchase. Yeah. Absolutely, So on that note, we're going to dive back in. We're gonna play the second part of our bi cameral Mind episode we hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe

McCormick in today. This is going to be part two of our two part series on Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind and the origin of consciousness in the Breakdown of the bi cameral Mind. So as this is part two of a two part episode. If you haven't heard part one yet, you should go back and listen to

that one first. Sometimes we say, you know, if you feel like jumping right in and go for it, this is one where I feel like you're really going to have a hard time following us if you haven't heard part one yet, because that's gonna be where we explain what Julian Jamee's main hypothesis is and how he arrived at it. And then in the second episode we're gonna be talking about evidence for it from the ancient world

and from the modern world. Yeah, this episode is going to be full of like falling kingdoms and whispering statues and other great stuff, but you need that first episode to understand it. Now, as with the first episode, we want to make clear that we're not necessarily endorsing this hypothesis. This is a very controversial hypothesis. It's not something that is at all considered proven or even necessarily very well attested by evidence. It's something that is controversial but very

fascinating I think worth exploring as a hypothetical. Yeah, it is a it is a radical hypothesis and if nothing else, it is just a fascinating thought experiments. So as we discuss it again, you're going to hear us Uh discussing it as if it was fact, as if this is actually how ancient people thought. But that is just a part of our exploration of the hypothesis. Now, to briefly recap the core of Julian James theory, and we should say, Julian James, when did he live? Nine? Yeah? So nine seven.

Julian James was an American psychologist. He's primarily known for this book that was published in nineteen seventy six called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, And the thrust of that book is, until about three thousand years ago, human beings were not conscious. They did

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

called gods or another way of putting it. And uh, and James himself put it this way, everybody was schizophrenic

sort of. Yeah, I mean, so schizophrenia, as Jane's imagines, it is one form or a modified version of a regression to this bicameral mind state that used to be the norm for how humans and ancient civilizations lived and so this norm would be that most of the time you would be going around unconsciously behaving out of habit you know, you have a stimulus response behaviors, and you would have habitual behaviors that you would enact, and this would serve to do most things that would be you know,

recurrent repetitive behaviors over the day. But whenever something new happened, whenever you needed to make a decision and there was a stress point induced by that decision, you would be told what to do by a hallucinated auditor or voice that you would perceive as a god, and that you would enact that. Now, this is, as you said, a

radical hypothesis. Yeah, because again the idea here is that everybody heard these voices, that this was the universal human experience, this was the norm, right, And so obviously I mean that that sounds kind of crazy to us, now, like what really could could that be true? So if there is any truth to Jane's theory, and as we said before, we're not necessarily endorsing it as true, just entertaining it as an interesting hypothesis, we should be able to find

some evidence of that theory. And so we can look at psychiatry, and we can look at neuroscience, and we can look at evidence from the ancient world. And today we're going to start by looking at evidence from the

ancient world, from history, from archaeology, from ancient literature. If there was a bicameral mind state, this divided mind state, where one half of the brain spoke to the other as the voice of a god and commanded the unconscious other half, we should be able to see that in the behaviors of a people's and the traces left of those behaviors. Right, So, a lot of this episode is going to be uh, Joe and I discussing some of

the examples that James brings up in the book. We can't possibly touch on all of the examples because much of the book, and much of the real joy of the book is is him bringing up these various examples from from historical accounts, from archaeology, from literature, and using that to support the idea of the by bicameral mind. Yeah, and one of the pleasures of the book is even if Jane's hypothesis does turn out to be entirely incorrect, you know, if there never was any bicameral mind, if

consciousness is not a recent invention. If he's wrong about all that, it's still a fascinating book just because of the way he pulls in so many different disciplines and ranges throughout history, incorporating evidence in such an amazing and fascinating way. All right, well, let's jump into it a bit here and are discussing some of the evidence that

James brought up in the book. Okay, Well, one of the things that we probably should be able to think about is if ancient people's perceived auditory hallucinations that they regarded as gods, and these gods told them what to do. There should be some evidence of this in what traces they left of their relationship to the gods they believed in. Right, Yeah, And one of those examples, Jane's argues is the positioning of the houses of the gods. So this is the

basic idea. Well, so today you travel to a big city. Let's say you go to Washington, d C. All right, this is our example, not James. So I'm in Washington, all right, and you seek out the grandest, most centralized home, the one that just really stands out from the rest, is the most protected it has them. You know, the most central status of any other habitat. Okay, so I'm imagining it is the home of an extremely tall, thin person that stands looking out over the water. Yeah, that's

that's one one interpretation. No way, that thing isn't a home, is it. No, well, it's not a home. But I mean that is an example of a of a building of prominence with a with a statue in it, which kind of gets into some additional arguments that we're going to make here. But no, no, no no, you'd expect to find the home of a king, right, yeah, yeah, you would. That's the thing, right, you would want to you would expect, all right, this is the center of the town. The

whole town is built around this. It occupies a spatial center as well as just the center of meaning and purpose. Or maybe sorry, that was probably my sexism talking to a king or a queen. In any case, you would expect the ruling person to live there. But what have you entered into this grand building at the center of the city and you found that it was home only to a quote hallucinated presence, perhaps a statue of that presence in the case of Abraham Lincoln, if you will.

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

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

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

was literally where the God inhabited. Yeah, where the God inhabited, and then as things sort of go on, the place where God may visit, the place where God maybe uh

contact did so. He draws on examples from the god houses at Jericho, the zigarato or which we discussed in our Tower of Babbel episode, as well as the city of Hatasus, the Bronze Age capital of the hitt Eede Empire, and in the ladder this was actually a mountain shrine with images of the overwatching gods rather than a city center, but he said it's kind of an exception that that

also lines up with the argument. He also looks to the old mec and Mayan empires as Bicameral Mesoamerican empires due to the presence of quote huge otherwise useless, centrally located buildings, in chief among these the Pyramid of TiO Tiwakan in modern Mexico. And I love how he mentioned, you know, otherwise useless buildings because this touches on on our discussions in the Tower of Babbel episode regarding the ziggurats.

A lot of our our study of the past has been us trying to figure out what was this for purpose? And a lot of times we try and figure out a practical purpose. You know what purpose did this structure have? Absolutely? I mean these building projects consumed vast resources. I mean to build the most prominent and the highest and well defended building in the middle of an inhabited space. That just seems like, why would you waste that on being there for a being that is not that does not

physically need a house. Yeah, unless you are a people for whom the voice of God is real. Again, this is just the wonder of this theory is that it turns so much of ancient history on its head. Uh. And and then also you know more recent history, as this is all an echo of the past. Now, in the previous episode, we pointed out that you know the by the voice of the bicameral mind it is it's coming in to help you deal with novel experiences that pop up, and how it might be helpful but it

might also be destructive. Well, in the same way that a conscious person can make good decisions or can make bad decisions, the God guiding the behaviors of the unconscious bicameral person, if this person ever existed, could be giving good advice or bad advice. I mean it's based on the integrated powers of the brain. In both cases, it's just that is it consciously happening or is it being delivered to you as a command that must be obeyed. Yeah.

And and along these lines, he attributes the construction of ancient meso American cities that are located in inhospitable areas, such as you on top of a mountain or uh, in the middle of a swamp on the you know, on the side of a cliff. He says that, uh, that these are areas that yeah, again, we're inhospitable, and they may have been abandoned at some point later on. Uh. And this is because they were linked to the commands of quote hallucinations, which in certain periods could be not

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

four after centuries of occupation. Now now, various explanations for the abandonment of Montezuma Castle include a drought, resource depletion, tribal conflict, and interestingly enough religious religious inclination to move.

Now you can get into a discussion of of how that would possibly line up with james timeline for the bicameral mine, but he does point out that by the time the Incans encountered Europeans in the fifteenth century, uh, there was perhaps a combination of things bicameral and things proto subjective subjective. Yeah, and that is one feature of his theory that for a long period of time it wasn't just like everyone was bicameral and then everyone was conscious.

You had a long period of the slow death of bike emeral society turning into being taken over by conscious people. You know, this makes me think of shows like Game of Thrones and other fantasy worlds where magic slowly bleeds out of the world, because that's essentially the argument here is that over time, fewer and fewer people are hearing the voice voices of the gods. Fewer people are hearing the voices of the spirits of the departed loved ones, etcetera.

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

Inca Empire and the Spanish Empire. And he says that this was as close, too close to anything in our history as to a meeting of these two different minds, of the bicameral mind and the conscious mind, like two different cultures uh encountering each other. Um And yet he points to a number of different arguments for and against the Inca Empire being a bicameral empire. Well, it could have been an empire in transition, as many of these

others were for so long. Yeah, I think basically, he says that he believes that if there was a transition from a bicameral society to a conscious society. That it began in Mesopotamia about you know, roughly one thousand BC. Uh, you know, a few hundred years on each side. It was a slow transition and spread around the world from there. Yes.

So with the Inca in particularly, he um, he points out that on one hand, uh, the administrative demands and politics were probably beyond something that a purely bicameral culture could handle. Yet they had a god king who was the Inca among them, and there were you know, other

aspects of bicameral culture as well. Uh. And these may have been again to your point, mere traditional echoes of the past, but he points out that that you you had these gold and jeweled spools that members of the top of Inca hierarchy they wore in their ears and sometimes with images of the Sun on them. That these may have indicated that those same ears, we're hearing the voice of the Sun, since the Sun was a god. Yeah. Yeah.

So he spends a lot of time with various examples discussing the importance of eye symbolism, ear symbolism, as as showing that that the individual or the statue is somehow involved in speech or hearing. Now, one of the things I wanted to revisit from our last episode is just the idea that James is not necessarily saying that, for example, the bicameral mind is not as good as the conscious mind. I know, we with our conscious bias, uh, you know,

would naturally kind of feel that way. But it's not necessarily that conscious minds are better or more valuable or even smarter. Mean, that's not just that's just not necessarily the case. It's that they have different adaptive strengths, and so having different strengths, a sudden clash of a conscious culture against a bicameral culture could be very disastrous for one or the other. Yeah, I mean, this is this is basically the the the key example of an outside

context problem in our world. And uh, and James has a just a beautiful little description of how this would

have gone down. Assuming that this is a meeting of a bicameral or partially bicameral culture in the Inca and a conscious culture in that of the Spaniards, He says, quote, it is possible that it was one of the few confrontations between subjective and bicameral minds that for things as unfamiliar as Inca at a Wappo was confronted with these rough, milk skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead of from their scalps, so that their heads looked upside down,

clothed in metal, with avertive eyes writing strain ange lama like creatures with silver who's having arrived like gods in gigantic quampas uh teared like mockagan temples over the sea, which to the Inca was unsailable that for all this there were no bicameral voices coming from the sun or from the golden statues of Cuzco in their dazzling towers, not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive or to nar narraw to rize out the deception of others, the Inca and

his lords were captured like helpless automatons. Oh man, it's a horrible thing to imagine, as I mean, reading anything about the European conquest of the Americans is always like a horrible thing to Yeah, you don't have hold have to imagine a separate state of mind for it to be a rather horrific uh encounter, But yeah, that is One of the features of his hypothesis is, so one of the things that consciousness gives us is a capability for treachery. Yes, that really the bicameral person, and it's

not very much capable of treachery. I mean, they can't prolong a deceptive behavior, right because they can't run this internal narrative of how they should behave if they were to believe one thing versus how they you know, really what goal they'll be working towards secretly, it just doesn't seem like that works out very well. But these conscious people are capable of extreme deception and treachery and the

ability to just be jerks all right. Now. Another area that that he brings up is that of essentially the love to dead. He points to the burial of the dead as if they were still alive as being a key evidence for by the bicameral mind. So we've covered a number of different mommification practices on the show over the year. So I think everyone here knows the drill the corpse as an astronaut on a cosmic journey to the other side. You know, there's some sort of an

elaborate tomb. Maybe fill that tomb with items that that individual loved in a low life and therefore might continue to need on a trip. And then beyond that, you may even supply them, as we see in the case of Egyptian tombs with food stuffs, with with perishable goods

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

for them to eat, exactly. Yeah. So we think of tokens to the dead today primarily as uh, it's something representing the way the living feel. Yeah, But no, the belief here was that the dead person still needed that. Yeah. And he says that this spills over to the treatment of ordinary dead as well as royal dead in many of these ancient cultures. But the concept of bearing the dead in massive tombs, pres irving their bodies, providing them with physical luxuries and even food. Uh, this is key.

And and in cases where there was no food, such as the graves at Larsa and Mesopotamia from around that Uh, he says there these areas were foodless because the tombs were beneath human habitation, so that the dead essentially still lived among the living, so that they would wander up into the house and you would literally hallucinate them doing

so and telling you what to do. Yeah. Now, James admits that grief could have been the core motivation and most of these rights, and certainly, I think that's the way we think about it when we're trying to put ourselves in the shoes of ancient people. Right. I Mean, another very plausible and perhaps the more probable answer is just that people wished their loved ones were still alive and wanted to behave as if they could be. Now. Yeah, Now, he argues that grief alone wouldn't be able to account

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

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

of this episode. I know, Oh, you know what, I think. I think I was talking about what's it called the obelisk the Washington Oh, I think you mean when you were talking about a statue of a tall, slender figure. I thought you meant Lincoln. You know this can tell slender dude. There's a miscommunication that so easily comes with our conscious inability to communicate. Well, you've been you've seen

Lincoln his statue in Washington. Yeah, he's just sitting in that chair, but he probably has not spoken to you. And I mean I don't mean that in a in a metaphorical sense or anything. I mean that statue has not literally spoke. You have not heard the voice of that statue. No, But if I were a bicameral person, apparently I might, like I could go to pay reverence to that statue, but I wouldn't just be paying reverence,

I'd be getting advice on what to do exactly. So that's the next point that the James made, is that we have these idols of the speaking stone that that that play into all these different cultures. So we've already mentioned that, all right, your your father's voice is still in your head, like literally in your head. You're still hearing it after they have died because of this confusion

to take place about about the nature of death. So your your parents did die, yet you still hear their admonitions, right, and then the king dies, you still hear the voice of the king. So one of the first humans just raised up the corpses and skulls of their dead loved ones and their dead leaders. Uh, and after that we would turn more and more to two various artificial likenesses

of those individuals in varying degrees of detail. So we we can find crude humanoid figurings dating back to a roughly UM fifty six hundred BC in what's modern day Turkey and Uh and relatively these are relics that were already ancient when the pyramids were built. Now Frasier would have classified such carvings as just fertility figures, but James points out that that was the horse. He was right, and he was trying to cram everything into those boxes. Yeah.

But but James points out that you you can find them in very fertile parts of the world, such as what they all metal civilization, and he points to some of the areous um attributes of these likenesses open mouths, exaggerated ears, as if the statue is going to listen

to you and speak to you. And in the case of the Old Mix, the creation of such idle skyrocketed about seven hundred see but Jayne's questions whether this was due to the cease of the voices, So did the voices stop so that you you were crafting more and more of these details to try and bring them back or was it due to a multiplication of them, So you know, you're having to deal with the chaos of

all these voices. Now, he argues that many artifacts might have been quote semi hallucinatory uh mnemonic aids for the non conscious people. So they're all it's also about remembering things and um, you know, adding order to life. But he argues that quote some of these small objects, we may be confident we're capable of assisting with the production of bicameral voices, and he points to Mesopotamian ie idols

from around three thousand bees. He and the eyes of these and numerous others were figures were important to focus because of our involved dependency on eye contact for communication. Yeah yeah, and then it's only left for the statue to speak to us and speak they did, uh, not only according to bicameral mind theory here, but also just according to various accounts. Um Uniform literature he writes provides

examples of speaking statues. If you turn in your Old Testament to a sequel one, there's an example of a Babylonian king who said to speak to idols, which were known as a terrup Yeah, they're there are all kinds of accounts of this throughout the ancient world of us. I mean, this is another case of like we were

talking about in the last episode with ancient literature. You know, you read it and you feel you send something alien about the characters, and you're like, is that something I'm just not getting that's getting lost in translation or were they truly alien to my mentality? A similar thing is going on with when it describes the practices of hearing God speak. You could think like, okay, well I don't

usually hear God speak. Um, so maybe there's just something this, you know, this like a literary device or something that's getting lost in translation. Or you could just say, no, I'll just take this literally. I'll take it at face value. Something was speaking to them and it was the other hemisphere of their brain. Yeah, So we get to this point where these statues, these artifacts become kind of focus points for the voice, like in a way to in a way summon the voice even when it's not, you know,

directly called up by stressful circumstance. He has numerous tidbits to support this. Some of the really fun ones I found was he adds that to quote the conquered Aztecs told the Spanish invaders how their history began when a statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders. So I just love the mental image of you know, these tribal individuals coming across the statute built by someone else, and it it summons the

voices just to look at it. You can also imagine, though, how if this model is correct, conscious people would react very negatively to encountering bi cameral people and and the voices of their gods. Right, Oh yeah, I mean that's another example he makes is that you have the Spaniards, who again are conscious individuals steeped in Catholicism, and they come in and they encounter the native peoples and they actually reported that the people of the of Peru were

a quote commanded by the devil. In that quote, the devil himself actually spoke to the Incas out of the mouths of their statues. So that could just be you know, historical cultural slander, or it could be them trying to make sense of practices they saw. Yeah, you know, before really getting into the bi cameral mind theory, I would have easily just said, well, that's just obviously just a bunch of xenophobic foreigners from another continent coming in and saying, oh,

they have statues. They probably stand around listening to their voices and they obey the statues. I mean, either way, they are putting their their dominant racist spin on it. But it could be that they were actually observing a practice. Yes. Now again we always get into the same situation though, where they was this a practice that was based on on an existing bicameral experience or is it an echo of a bicameral past. Yeah, it could be either one.

If there's anything to this theory. Another thing that I think is one of the most important takeaways of this whole theory is that if James is correct, it's not that people used to be more religious and now they're less religious. That's not the progression. It's that ancient bicameral religion and modern conscious religion are completely different types of things. Conscious religion requires an emphasis on things like faith and

belief and organized systems of dogma. You know, they say here's what we believe and here's why you should believe it, and so it's like regulated by ecclesiastical authorities. It's addressed to an object that is not immediately apparent. Not so for bicameral religion. Right, So bicameral religion would have had no need for the concept of faith, because what's the point in telling people to believe in the gods that literally talk to them and appear before them all the time?

That's right, I mean, the gods are speaking to you household, God's household spirits are speaking to you. Uh so you really there's not really any room to doubt there if doubt was even a thing that your mind can do. Yeah, I mean, our modern concept of religion you could look at as something that came to exist after the disappearance

of the direct experience of the gods. Likewise, I mean could it could heresy even exist in such a world like everybody is I mean, certainly you're still going to have a structure to society, but everyone is hearing voices of the God. Everyone has has their their their radio set to the other world. Yeah, I mean, this is a world where the voices are speaking to everyone. Okay, I think we should look at one more thing about features we see of the organization of ancient societies before

we start to look at some ancient literature. So how about the theocratic organization of ancient society. What what does that tell us about whether or not a bicameral mind ever existed? According to Julian James, well, in this we're getting into a topic that we've discussed before, the idea of divine kings. What does it mean that the king is either you know, the right hand man of God, works for God, or in some cases is God. That's

an important distinction, and James makes that distinction. You know, there are two main types of kings for him, the steward king and the god king. Right, that's right, the steward king, this is where the king is a stand in for God and then the god king. The king

is God. And James believe that both tides developed out of the more primitive bicameral situation where a new king ruled by obeying the hallucinated voice of a dead king, which sort of that gives you, like the you know, the succession order, right, Yeah, in fact, you're never really obeying you're never really obeying the new king, You're always obeying the old king through a sort of intermediary And in this he I mean, he even argues that the

ziggurat centered civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia that in these cases it's not you can't even really look at it, like the human beings were the ones that were ruling, Like the ruling powers were the hallucinated voices of the various gods. Right, So it was not the left brain or the dominant side of the brain of the actual king, but it was the other hemisphere of their brain ruling, the dominant

side ruling the people. Right. And he also gets into how, you know, we've talked about, Okay, you're reacting to statues humanoid figures, but on top of this we also end up with all additional uh, religious imagery symbology. That's that's this used even written language. Uh. He points out the quote reading in the third millennium BC may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than

visual reading of syllables in our sense. Oh, that's that's fascinating. So you think about how reading takes place for us today. It is largely an unconscious thing if you're an adult that's been reading, not if you're a kid who's learning to read. Or if you know, at any point in your life, if you're learning to read, you do have to think about the constituent parts of words and sentences, like you have to sound them out and put them

together in your mind using your conscious mind. Eventually reading becomes unconscious. I mean, I wonder if in this, in this bicameral framework, you would learn to read in an entirely unconscious way, the same way that maybe you get better at shooting basketballs or something in an unconscious way. Yeah, yeah,

that's so. Now. No, another thing that another point that he makes about language is that in reference to ancient Egyptians, uh, much like the language of the ancient Sumerians, he says that these languages were concrete from first to last, and that interpretations involving abstract thought, uh, these are the These are modern modern intrusions, and that basically the gods commanded rather than created. Yeah, and we'll see that more when

we look in literature in the next section. Now, I I think I made reference already to household gods and household spirits. You encounter these in a lot of different cultures. If it's not household gods, then maybe it's a you know, just a memorial of various members of the family, right, And a lot of those traditions still carry on to

this day. But the idea here is that not everyone can hear the voice of the ruling God, right, that would seem to be kind of chaotic if the even if it's just a simple model of the previous dead king speaking to the current king. I mean, it wouldn't make sense for everyone to hear that king's voice and have their authority. But everyone in this scenario, in the bicameral scenario, is hearing voices, So who are those voices? Well, there's a hierarchy of God's isn't exactly like because we

there are different types of stressful situations. Imagine a scenario where one is cooking, preparing a meal in one's hut and um, let's say you've only got one piece of meat. I mean, you accidentally drop it onto the ground. There is a moment of panic. What do I do? Well, the household cooking God chimes in and says take it and wash it in the river or something to that effect, you know, and and it's solved. So that's five second rule us. Yeah, So this would be the case of

a of a lesser deity coming in and calling the shot. Yeah, you know. One of the things about ancient Religionny mentions in the book that is very interesting is his discussion of the evolution of the concepts of the car and the bar in h in Egyptian theology, where it's hard to I guess we can't summarize it here, but if you get a chance to read the book yourself, look out for that section. It's really interesting. It's it's about the way we're you know, words for theological concepts sort

of transition into other into having other meanings. Now, part of the whole timeline, of course, is that as we've already stressed, that the gods cease speaking to everyone after a while and then cease all together for the most part. We'll get into the details of that as we we go. But but then when that happens, there's uh, their order collapses, uh. Cultures end up retreating into the jungles, and for many

people everything has to be built up again. Basically, the idea here is that the bicameral mind, this, this whole system of hearing voices, this hold society together. This is it's it's an instrument of social control. Yeah, and so it's it's like playing jinga with gravity and then gravity goes away, and then how do you hold the blocks together? Well, then suddenly have to come with new novel ways to do it, such as gluing them all together, I guess.

Is so the political organization equivalent of that would be what it would be brutal dictatorship. Yeah, things like brutal dictatorship have to step in. Uh. Suddenly, you know, you have all these wars and just total bloodshed occurring because the voices that organized society have have stopped speaking or

have certainly stopped speaking with enough regularity to hold everything together. So, in closing on this, he argues quote that man in his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own. That in fact, men and women were not conscious as we are. We're not responsible for their actions and therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that

was done over these vast millennia of time. That instead, each person had a part of his nervous system which was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave of voice or voices, which indeed were what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy. And this mindset would have again developed over the over the ninth century BC to the second millennium BC, a

gradual procession progression. Right, So that's the hypothesized era of the bicameral mind, which around the first millennium BC starts to decompose and fall apart. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will look at signs of the bicameral mind in ancient literature.

Than all right, we're back, alright, So obviously it would make sense that we'd see examples or the examples could be made in literature, because, after all, the bicameral mind is uh is, according to the theory, according to the the hypothesis here an offshoot of the acquisition of language. Right, Jane says, language makes it exist. So could you could you look at ancient uses of language to find evidence

of it? Now, another thing that complicates this is that James thinks that one of the causes of the decomposition of the bicameral mind into the conscious mind is the widespread introduction of language so this also writing ends up undermining the bicameral mind. But can we see signs of the bi cameral mind in ancient literature? I think he's

got some interesting stuff to talk about here. Yet again, I want to be clear that I'm not endorsing his theory as correct, but I do think some of his claims, especially about what we see in Greek literature, are fascinating and a little terrifying. I have to admit when I was reading, you know, I kind of kind of gave me the willies at various points to try to imagine ancient people ruled by bicameral mind. But when you started talking about the Iliad in particular, kind of gave me

chill bumps. So totally. So, the Iliot is one of Jane's chief examples of bicameral literature. So, of course the Iliad if you're if you never read it, It's an epic war poem that tells the story of an alliance of Greek kings and their warriors, primarily the warrior Achilles,

laying siege to the city of Troy. This is the historical event now known as the Trojan War, and Jane's claims that the Iliad was develo by a group of oral storytellers or bards known as the ao E d And that's in contrast to sort of the traditional received knowledge that they were composed by an individual named Homer. I think it's probably more widely believed now that these

are the works of many people of time. But anyway, that that war took place about twelve thirty b C. Or sorry, it was first composed around the time the war took place around twelve thirty BC, and it was first transcribed into written form around nine hundred or eight hundred and fifty b C. And scholars may believe some different dates now, but that's what James is working with.

So when we look at the thoughts and behaviors of characters in the Iliad, it should tell us something about the mental life of people who composed and wrote the story about three thousand years ago. And when we examine this, what do we find. Well, James makes a really striking claim about the Iliad. It is a work of literature in which the characters are almost entirely devoid of any thing recognizable as consciousness. You do not really see introspection

in the Iliad. There are a few passages which serve as exceptions to this. Generally, James thinks that they look like late additions to the text or signed or they could possibly be signs of early protoconscious thoughts seeping through. But primarily, the characters of the Iliad do not introspect, they do not narrotize, they do not seem to have conscious consideration. Instead, when they're faced with the need for novel behavior, what happens. They're told what to do by

a god. A god makes them do it. Now, it's it's generally when we look back on pieces of literature like this, we think, well, this is just this was a primitive form of literature, This was a this is a more archaic um in a form of storytelling. Yeah, you see it as a literary device, which very well could be. It makes me think, you know, all these various bad films that you and I enjoy, and sometimes they're enjoyably bad because the craftsmanship isn't there at various levels.

Um if bicameral, if the bicameral mind hypothesis is true, could it be possible that that sometimes we love bad movies because they seem to have been created by a bicameral. Mind. I was with you every step of the way there, Robert. I can believe that there are movies that feel quite bicameral. Yeah, that feel as if they were like dictated by a divine presence rather than consciously thought through. All right, but but but back to the discussion here. So, yeah, we

have this this war going on. There's no introspection, there's nothing that resembles consciousness, and at all the pivotal plot points are punctuated by a God stepping in and saying do this or do that. Yeah. So there might be like a scene where Achilles is going to reach out and kill his king Agamemnon, but instead it says, a God grabs him and tell and makes him not do it. Yeah. Interesting. I would like to see more of that in our films, though, where you just have God's pop up and direct the

course of action. You know, even in the words of the Greek, Jane says, uh, we can see something of bicamerality here because there are Greek words that later come to be used to refer to consciousness, and they appear throughout the Iliad, but through contextual clues we can tell that they mean something entirely different in the Iliad than what they mean when they later come to mean consciousness. For example, the word see he it's spelt psyche, you know,

in the English pronunciation see he. In later centuries, this clearly comes to mean consciousness or mind or soul. That's how it is used in Greek, but in the Iliad phase it appears to refer to something more like physical life substances. Jane says it means something more like blood or breath, like if a soldier gets killed on the battlefield, his see he bleeds out onto the ground, or the word thumos. In later writings, Jane says this means something

more like emotional mind or soul. In the Iliad, once again, it seems to have this base level animal meaning. It's something more like animation or motion. So when a soldier stops moving, the thumos goes out of his limbs, But it also seems to mean this weird kind of organ in the body that can be filled with the impetus

for motion or activity. Next is noose. In later Greek, it certainly comes to mean consciousness, it's like a conscious mind, but in the Iliad it appears to mean something much plainer. It means like sight or field of vision. So when you see something, the thing is in your noose. Now, this next point, this is the exact place where he really gave me the creeps, and I got actual chill bumps.

He points out that the Iliad, as well as a Greek art of the time quote, shows man as an assembly of strangely articulated limbs, the joints under drawn and the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs as being fleet, sinewy in speedy motion, etcetera, with no

mention of the body as a whole. Yeah. So it's just this idea of of just these automatons waging war, uh, you know, killing each other with without this concrete sense of self guiding. It so alien to comprehend. Oh, it really is. And so if you buy into Jane's theory, or if you just want to entertain it as we are doing, these characters simply do not seem to introspect.

They argue, they rage, they desire, they act out on desires, but they don't seem to have access to a mind space where they can perform introspective, metaphor based activities like we described in the previous episode, they don't have access either to the conscious aspect of decision making. Instead, when they got to make a novel decision, the iliot is very clear about what happens. The God tells them what

to do and they do it. Hm. Maybe this is one of the reasons we like like a very classic action hero, you know, because it's like they don't think, they just do. They are a man of action. They are a bicameral hero. I mean, you sometimes do get that sense, right that there is a kind of there's a kind of unthinking charisma to the action hero in most action movies. Uh. I guess that is what you'd call that, that man of action cliche. I mean, I

guess it. Technically usually is a man in these movies, and he's got this kind of macho swagger that does not seem to involve thinking, It doesn't seem to involve self reflection. They've just got this. Uh, this like violent intuition, can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, and absolutely will not stop. I mean this that's the terminator. Uh. In a nutshell, the by the terminator is is a is a machine. Everybody was the terminator in the Iliad.

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

I feel like I need that. Yeah, Otherwise I feel like I'm just buying into the idea that Stanley Kubrick faith them in landing or something. Right. Yeah, it is just such a radical hypothesis. Okay, Well, let's leave the Iliad and look at some other literature from the ancient world. How about Jewish literature. This is interesting. I'd not run across this before either. This is a so this deals

with him. Yeah. The Elohim, one of the names of God used in the in the Hebrew Bible, very often just translated as God as singular, right, right, But he argues that to translate it as merely God is to miss the plural nature of the word in Hebrew Uh, which is something I've independently read, like eloheim is essentially a plural word, but it's rendered in the modern sense and as a singular word. Yeah. It says that it

comes from the root of to be powerful. But better translations of Him might be the great ones, the prominent ones, the Majesty's, the judges, the mighty ones, etcetera. And so these, he argues, are the vote could be the voice visions of the bicameral mind. And he also argues that one can really see the decline of the bicameral vision in the Bible. And now this is I really love this, because he's basically talking about all right, if you pick up the Old Testament and you read it front to back,

you can see this transition. So in the he says, quote, in the true bicameral period, there was usually a visual component to the halluciated hallucinated voice, either it's self hallucinated or as the statue in front of which and in front of which one listened so even as a modern

reader of the Bible will find this. You go from a physical God who physically does stuff like kick people out of the garden or shut the door on the arc, to a God that merely speaks to everyone, and a purely auditory God that we account that we encounter with Moses, you know, with additional visual flares here and there, and crucially after that, a God of law and religion rather

than of direct experience. So you go from this robustly imagined God who physically does stuff to a God who is a voice, to a God who is not experienced directly and rather as experience through his tradition of teachings and law and so um so yeah. James argues that the Hebrew Bible is essentially a long narrative of the transition from myth to bicameral humankind, too conscious humankind, and

you can see the whole thing there. You've got the older prophets like Amos, who Jans identifies as clearly bicameral, to Ecclesiastes, who uh. James thinks the author shows all the markers of consciousness, and he claims you can also see this painful transition from bicameral society to conscious society

in many aspects of the canon. A couple of examples, he says people are constantly begging for contact with a god or gods that no longer speak to them in the literature that he believes comes from the conscious period of this history. So one quote he gives from Psalm forty two, and this is with the name of God rendered directly to the plural rather than the singular, as it would usually be rendered as the stag pants after the water brooks. So pants my mind after you, Oh Gods,

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

But then again, there are there are definitely in Jane's vision, partisans of the conscious version of the religion that don't want anything to do with the direct experience version of the religion. Like he says that there are many signs throughout the books of the Hebrew Bible that the Bicameral people may have been actively persecuted by conscious people for religious reasons. I'll just read one quote, he says. Quote. A further vestige from the Bicameral era is the word obe,

often translated as a familiar spirit. A man also or a woman that have an obe shall surely be put to death, says Leviticus. And similarly, Saul drives out from Israel all those that had an obe in First Samuel. Even though an obe is something that one consults with, according to Deuteronomy eighteen eleven, it probably had no physical embodiment. It is always bracketed with wizards and witches, and thus probably refers to some Bicameral voice that was not recognized

by the Old Testament writers as religious. Yeah. I mean, you get into this scenario where you know, obviously the individuals who don't hear the voices, they've built up all this this law and order based on the old texts in the old stories. It becomes dangerous if other individuals are attempting to to add new material to it. No,

I'm hearing God's right now, and they're telling me something different. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of the fact that the church that I attend they have this saying God is still speaking, which, as it's intended, the idea is God is still real and a part of everyone's lives, and you know, this is not just a story. But on the other hand, there's it's kind of scary to think, well, if God is still speaking, what's he going to say?

You know, Um, the conflict comes. It could provide license for some very uh, for some very disturbing content, yea, or some great stuff. Yeah indeed. Yeah, it's just sort of like it provides you with a blanket authorization for action that is not so there if you have a written and codified law. So again, all of this just ends up playing into the conflict of the downfall of the bicameral mind. As the voices blink out and this a new system of of order and social stability has

to take hold. So let's try to summarize real quick what James is saying is the basic contours of the transition through the bicameral period to the conscious period. Let's see Robert tell me what you think of this. As I've tried to summarize his view, I think James argues that bicameral society emerged with language and the increasing size of tribal groups. So when one could encode mental content into grammatical sentences, it was possible to code action motivation

efficiently through language. So you have a big group where your authority figure can't be around to constantly tell you what to do because the group's too big. So a command heard from one's parents or one's tribal chieftain is hallucinated to recur over and over again provide continuous motivation for action. And this is the non dominant hemisphere commanding the dominant hemisphere. This is the first version of bi camerality.

So when you've got words and sentences that can be hallucinated, then over time these admonitory voices, eventually they become not just repetitive but synthetic. So they're not just telling you what these authority figures have told you in the past, but they're telling you what these authority figures would command if they were present now. And of course we know, the mind has the power to synthesize information and imagine

what somebody else would command. We do that consciously now, But here it's saying, what if the right hemisphere and in most people, or the non dominant hemisphere generally did that automatically, nonconsciously. Uh So, over time, parents and chieftains die and their voices are still heard instead of internal copies of authority figures, they become imbued with disim bodied authority. The voice itself provides inherent authorization, magical authority, as from

a God. Then for a long time, bicameral society grows and develops, and bicameral people build technologies and kingdoms and begin to write works of ancient literature. But what happens to make it all disappear? Essentially, his answer is a combination of catastrophe and literature. Would you agree with that, Robert, Yeah, that seems to be the basic idea catastrophe and literature. Yeah, the story of the story of our lives. Yeah, that that that is the roof collapsing on the bicameral mind.

So the catastrophe he singles out is the widespread failure of civilization throughout the Eastern Mediterranean close to the end of the second millennium BC. This is a period that's coming off of what's now referred to as the Late Bronze Age collapse, where ancient empires fell apart and dispersed and people were displaced, and there was a lot of war and raiding and collapse of infrastructure. Trade was interrupted, education stifled, and it led to what some would consider

a dark Age of the ancient world. And he also argues that a certain a small amount of natural selection may have come into play as well, because as all this is going on, in the enormous, enormous bloodshed that's playing out here at the end of the second century BC, those who had the best chance to survive were those who could resist the commandments of the gods and the literal you know, the voice of compulsion, right, who were more adaptable and could narrotize out solutions to problems, and

who had the ability to practice prolonged deception and treachery. Yes, that's another huge idea here. So yeah, So he's got a summary of of the several factors he thinks led to in this period around the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The collapse of the bicameral mind and the beginnings of widespread consciousness in culture. So what are these main things he offers? He's talking about, first of all, one, the

weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing. Okay, A good example would be the invention of written law, right clearly distinguishing acceptable from non acceptable behavior in a way that does not require the intervention of an internal God. Yeah, we've got these tablets here. He didn't have to speak to you all the time. Just refer to the tablets. Yeah, this is how I feel about any kind of power point presentation. Just give me the power point. I don't

need the voice of God telling me the things. Just give me a list. Yeah, okay, okay, what's the next thing? Number two? The inherent fragility of hallucinatory control. Okay, Yeah, we can see that there's some instability in the system there. Number three, the unworkable nous of God's in the chaos of historical upheaval. Okay, So the God's prevented problem that

they caused problems when when society and hierarchy was falling apart. Yeah, and again, the voice of the gods was just there was not actually the voice of a divine being with superior knowledge. It was still originating from within the individual, right, Okay. The fourth one, the fourth one is the depositing of

internal cause and the observation of difference in others. Okay, So you see other people are behaving differently, and you begin to wonder if maybe they're just behaving on their own and not being commanded by God's maybe undermining your own authorization of god belief. Yeah, I can see where it would be. Um, I mean it would it would It would be contagious in that in that respect. Yeah. Uh. Number five the acquisition of anatization from epics, the introduction

of stories. Number six the survival value of deceit, which we already touched on, and number seven a modicum of natural selection, which we also discussed here. But to be clear, I think James is primarily thinking about these transitions in mindset, not as changes in the physical brain brought about by you know, mutation and natural selection, though there might be a little bit of selection towards levels of predisposition for it.

But he's primarily thinking about this as cultural change. Right that there there are cultures of bi camerality and cultures of consciousness. Yes, all right, we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back, we're going to jump into modern traces of the bicameral mind. Thank you, thank alright, we're back. So we've examined the evidence that James claims to offer for the existence of a bicameral mind and history and his conception of how the bicameral mind arose

and then collapsed into society's based on conscious mentality. So, if there truly was a bicamerality in the past, if our brains are still so wired as to be perhaps capable of bi cameral culture in the present, if we just practiced it, what would the evidence of that be. Well, you would think there'll be some practices in human behavior that would give you evidence that we used to be b cameral and that we could still be bicameral if we tried. That's right. And he first of all, he

makes uh, he makes some examples out of religion. So at this point I think everyone can pretty well imagine the sorts of religious examples that James is going to make. After all, we've been discussing the trans like nature of biocameral existence. Uh. In the Commanding words of corpses and statues, you know, all you know, very magical and scenarios that we can imagine lining up with both religious stories and

religious right. So expectantly he points to spirit possession. There's a topic we come back to on a few different episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and it ranges from demonic possession across various cultures to you know, tribal African beats that threatened Carl Young's sanity, and more positive forms of spirit possessions such as oracles, which which Jane

spends a lot of time with. Um. We have a recent episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind that covers the the Thaie tattoo festival in which uh, the animal tattoo ends up overtaking the individual individual. So we have examples of this this throughout different cultures. The speaking of tongues uh and similar religious experiences may also play into this, and of course we have examples of this in ancient

writings as well. So as early as a fourth century BC, Socrates wrote of odd possessed men, so and clearly like that's not the kind of thing you would uh necessarily speak about if if you were immerged within a bicameral uh world anyway, right, Um, Yeah, these might be more

vestiges of the bicameral culture. Right. And James points to a number of different examples, mainly those dealing with Greek oracles, uh, with the idea being that the oracle the individual here would have would have ramped themselves up, but they basically ramped up right hemisphere activity in relation to the left as a result, as a response to complex ritual stimuli, you know, the use of all these various and we've talked about statues and language and and all of all

of these aspects playing into passed bicameral experiences. And therefore the idea here is that even as we're shifting out of the bicameral age, even as the bicameral ages behind us, you have conscious individuals who are able to sort of resurrect the bicameral experiences. Yes, he enter into trance like states, etcetera,

by engaging in these rituals. Yeah. And these would be rituals where they channel the output of what Jans identifies as in most people the right hemisphere speech associated sections of course, right a speech usually coming from the left hemisphere, So it would be like the voices of the gods that spoke in the bicameral minds of the ancients, but speaking out through the mouths of these oracles and prophets. And you know what, those oracles and prophets, they didn't

necessarily speak in even in a commanding tone. In many cases they may have they may have sung yes. And so this is a really interesting section James gets into in the in the third book of his book where he talks about the evidence of pasted bicamerality in poetry

and music. So remember that Jane's neurological hypothesis, uh is that the bicameral mind consisted of the non dominant hemisphere, which is the right brain in most people, speaking directly as an auditory hallucination to the dominant hemisphere, which is the left brain in most people. Keep that in mind here, that's right now. His his his thesis here is quote, the first poets were God's poetry began with the bicameral mind.

The God's side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men, at one time throughout the day, we're hearing poetry of a sort composed and spoken within their own minds. That's terrifying and beautiful. Yeah, that that kind of sums up a lot of the

bicameral hypothesis in general. So evidence is scanned for this, but he argues that quote individuals who remained by cameral into the conscious age, that these individuals continue to express the voice of God or God's and poetry um the so you know, the Indian Veda dictated by the gods, the oracle at Delphi, early Arabic poets, etcetera. And this concerns music too, because early poetry was musical in nature.

Janes says absolutely. I mean, you could still say that poetry is musical and nature, especially insofar as it invokes any kind of scanning or rhythm. That's right. And speech is a function again primarily of the left cerebral hemisphere, but song is primarily a function of the right hemisphere. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. That's an interesting hypothesis in itself. Now there's a he presents a fair amount of of evidence for this, which

I'm gonna I'm gonna roll through here. Joe jump in as we go. Hit me man, all right. So, first of all, many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak, they can still sing. We also have the Wada test to determine a person's cerebral dominance. This is when sodium amatal is injected into the carotid artery on one side, putting the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation, and the other side

remains awake. So when this case case, if the left hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't speak, but they can sing. If the right hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't sing, but they can speak. So like, the centers for speech and singing are lateralized and the situation is more pronounced in cases where there's actual physical damage to one hemisphere

or the other, or you know, it's it's completely removed. Also, electrical stimulation of the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to the posterior temporal lobe often produces hallucinations of singing and music. Oh and he also he presents an experiment that you can try. He says says that you can prove the latter though the laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will perceive and remember the music on the left ear phone better.

This is because the left ear has greater neuro representation on the right hemisphere. Now, he points out that Plato spoke of poetry as possession. Yeah, said, poets then around four b C. Were comparable in mentality to the oracles of the same period and went through similar um psychological transformation when they performed. And then there's this idea. We've all heard talk of the muses, right right. I mean, so ancient epics might start saying like sing muse blah

blah blah. So the authors telling their personal composition God to start going Yeah, Now, when we talk about the muses, where you know, we're just talking about inspiration or you know, or attention even or just you know, the will to get a project done. It's a literary device we think of. Yeah. But but back back then, the argument is is that the bicameral human would literally need to hear the voice

of the muse. Yeah, the muse was literally real, and so it wasn't just something they imagine, it was something they experienced though it all was in the brain. Now, he points out that by the sixth century BC, the poet is no longer just naturally imbued with their long They have to learn the gift of the muse in order to hear it. So societea that the voice is

becoming harder and harder for everyone to hear. So this might be kind of like how the oracles of these later periods, living in conscious societies have to go through elaborate rituals to get into the altered state of consciousness where they channel their non dominant hemisphere and let the voice of God speak. That's right, And he says that in the fifth century b C, we hear the very first hints of poets being peculiar with poetic ecstasy. That's that's his quote there. So I want to use that

from now on. If I'm like trying to get some writing done and somebody interrupts me, I'm like, hang on, I'm being peculiar. Yeah, So it basically just gets harder and harder to hear the voices of the gods until you're having to essentially make up the words yourself. It reminds me a lot of of how magic works in dungeons and dragons, because dungeons and Dragons you basically have three different types of magic users. You have the warlock who works their magic the enslavement to a god or

god like being, So that's a bicamera being. Yeah, yeah, that would be the bicameral experience. A sorcerer learns to better channel magic that naturally emerges from their being. So this is like a transitional being. This is like one of the oracles in the late antiquity. Yeah, like it still flows through them, it still can flow through them, but they have to manage it. And then finally you have the arcane wizard, who has to master the workings

of magic through study and academic effort alone. So these are the pathetic poets of the modern era who have to consciously compose their works exactly. Yeah, and uh, you know, in the same way that within Dungeons and Dragons you can you can have that, you can have sort of the attitudes of what the wizard is. And this is also kind of based on attitudes involving witches and wizards

and in the real world in earlier periods. But there's the idea that the arcane wizard is a master of of these forces where lesser models are um you know, the magic is a master of them, which is, you know not unlike the comparison between the bicamera and the conscious human right. And of course the idea is as uh, conscious society exists for longer and longer, and the bicameral

society goes farther and farther into the past. Our ability to access these states of consciousness, to be an oracle, or to be a muse possessed poet gets further and further from our grasp. Exactly he writes, And then the muses hush and freeze into myths, nymphs, and shepherds dance no more. Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure inspiration gasps and dies into invention. The oral becomes written by the poet himself, and written it should be added

by his right hand, worked by his left hemisphere. The muses have become imaginary and invoked in their silence as a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind. That is gorgeous. Yeah, and the whole book is filled with passages like that that are just beautifully written and uh in and just really drive home often emotionally the subject matter. That's another reason I guess I got to be skeptical and suspicious of this hypothesis is that it's so well written.

I feel like I need to be especially cautious about it. Like he he communicates it so well and it's so beautiful in the book that that it's like getting an unfair advantage as a scientific hypothesis. Yeah, yeah, I can

definitely get that argument. Maybe that's why most scientific papers are so horrible to read, Like why you know, it's really rare you come across the one that's really well well written, and it's because, well, maybe maybe you shouldn't let your writing skills make it stand out more than the theory itself deserves in terms of content. All right, Well,

what's another lingering example of of the bicameral mind. Hey, can you think of a state in which people have altered consciousness or reduced consciousness and a tendency to obey verbal commands? Who sounds a lot like hypnosis to me, ding ding ding. There you go. Now, we've talked hypnosis on the podcast before, but just to reiterate, what's going on with hypnosis is people seem to have wildly differing

levels of susceptibility to hypnosis. Some people just can't be hypnotized, but for those that can, hypnosis does seem to be a genuine altered state of consciousness at some level in which the body is relaxed, focus is narrowed, inhibition is lowered, consciousness is reduced, and verbal obedience is increased. Sounds kind of like the model of bicamerality, with a lot of these public demonstrations of hypnosis that you see you know, or that you're on a cruise ship and somebody's doing

a show. I think people following the hypnotist commands is not necessarily always a highly altered state of consciousness. It could be partially just a performance brought on by social pressure. But this is actually part of Jane's theory. He talks about the idea of collective cognitive imperative. Group pressure enables different states of mind and this is why you can have uh basically a culture dictating which mindset you adopt,

the bicameral mindset or the conscious mindset. And it's also the reason that you can, through these elaborate rituals, say like the Oracle at Delphi, produce these these amazing. Uh, you know, metered prophecies out of your right brain because group cognitive pressure is putting you into that mindset. And so he's saying hypnosis maybe maybe in fact a modern reapproximation of the left brain operation of a bicameral person. But instead of having the right brain talk, you're having

the hypnotists talk. And again this makes me think of yoga classes where I just let the individual tell me what to do for an hour and a half and it it feels so liberate. Now, another big area that the James spends a lot of time with is the condition of schizophrenia. Now, this is obviously going to be very relevant because it's one of the features of schizophrenia

is hallucinations, especially auditory hallucinations. Yeah, it is a condition defined by voices, by auditory hallucination voices, the crew, the size, voices that tell us what to do it with. Under the tent of the bicameral mind hypothesis, it would seem to line up pretty well. And uh, and so James argues that schizophrenia is essentially a relapse into the bicameral mind. Now, he argues that in the sculptures literature, murals and other

artifacts of the great biicare bicameral civilizations. We do not see instances of individuals who suffer madness in a way that differentiates them from their fellow humans. There's idiocy, but but he says, there's no madness. Uh there, like there's no insanity in the Iliad, for instance. Yeah. Now, by the time we get to Plato, Plato speaks of madness, but in these ancient civilizations, Jane says, you don't see it. Yeah.

He says that the first instance of insanity discussed in the conscious period, uh is in Phaedrus or Plato calls insanity quote a divine gift and the source of the chiefest blessings granted two men. And then he goes on to a Plato ends up identifying four types of madness. And you'll and just again think of the bicameral mind and reference to all of these prophetic madness, ritual madness, poetic madness, and of course the erotic madness. Huh okay, So these kind of line up with some of the

categories we've just been talking about. The Greeks wrote on paranoia, he argues, which is literally having of two minds, Over time, however, madness is no longer and no longer has these sort of divine categories that Plato identified, But it becomes a part of an ill, a part of a disease. There's something,

there's an ailment at work with the human being. Now this maybe James thinks, as there is more conscious takeover of society by the conscious culture, that it becomes untenable for for bicameral society to exist and work within itself. So people who experienced the bicameral mindset within a conscious culture have they essentially have no cover. They have no nobody to like be part of their culture right now.

He also points out that the voices of schizophrenia these tend to be When I say the voices of schizophrenia, the voice is heard by individuals with schizophrenia. They tend to be authority figures created out of cultural expectation. And the hallucinations also seem to have access to more memories in the patient. There in many cases and in many cases they replace thought. The they frequently take on religious overtones because he says, the condition emerges from the neurological

structures bound to the birth of religious thought. To begin with and he says that the there's also a frequency of religious experience overall in the waking state for human consciousness, the the hypnopompic state that is often accompanied by vivid, lingering imagery. We've discussed this in terms of sleep paralysis

and supernatural experience before. James writes that these parts of the brain are quote released from their normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia, and particularized into experience. This is also telling. He points to the relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person. Think again to our

discussions of I and me. There's this draw a person test or adapt test, and it's used to help identify schizophrenia and other conditions by asking the individual to draw a person. Now, if you have trouble drawing a whole person, that kind of makes me think about those disembodied body

parts you talked about with reference to the iliad. And and I have to point out this is another thing I see my son having to do on kindergarten tests and uh, in evaluations draw a person and and see, I mean they're also looking to see with what degree of accuracy you can pull them together. But uh, but Yeah, in this case, are you able to draw a complete

person at all? Now, not all people who have schizophrenia are going to have trouble drawing a person, right, but when they do, it is uh, it is extremely diagnostic. Also with schizophrenia, neurotization can also become impossible. You see these like fractured self stories, right hues. And then there's also body image boundary disturbance or boundary loss and this again this ties into this uh, this lost sense of eye or me. And remember too that schizophrenia has a

genetic inherited basis to the underlying biochemistry. Natural selection, James argue would have favored it for a while. There's a certain tirelessness in schizophrenic individuals. They seem to have a lot of energy, and in the bicameral individual this would have become this would have become very important if you were, say, building pyramids or are there great works? Yeah, I mean

we were talking about. One of the advantages, or one of the possible advantages of a bicameral mind would be mental endurance, much more so than a conscious person could muster. So James basically says that the modern schizophrenic is an

individual that's essentially in search of a bicameral culture. Quote, but he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more emitive mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle of a mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is a mind barred to his environment, waiting on God's in a godless world. Okay,

so you convinced yet, Joe. I mean, it's tough because I do find his argument very compelling, but it just may be the case that he was wrong about how about some of the evidence that he claims, or about how he interprets some of that evidence. So I don't know. I find the bi cameral mind thesis very interesting and very compelling, but I do not consider myself convinced that

it is correct true. And with like with the schizophrenia evidence, for instance, is this is this truly more evidence in support of bicameral mind theory or is this schizophrenia as explained with bicameral mind. Yeah. I mean, one way you could look at the bi cameral mind is you could say it's a theory that explains a lot or you could say that it is a very interesting, carefully conducted story that's overlaid on lots of evidence that we already

knew about. So what would be really interesting about it would be can it predict new discoveries like, based on the assumption of the bicameral mind hypothesis, would you be able to predict will find X, Y, and z about the ancient world and about neuroscientific discoveries in the future, say with you know, uh a neuroimaging, and that would be a real good way of testing whether it has any predictive power and thus whether we can have any

confidence that it will continue to have predictive power in the future, which is pretty much synonymous with saying there's something to it, that it might be true. Uh So I tried to look up you know what if people said about it and the theory. It's had lots of critics, It has lots of people, you know, it's always been controversial ever since it was first introduced. It's had supporters. Some people think that it's it's really interesting, there's something

to it. Some people think it might shed some light on some issues, even if it's wrong. Overall, it's had a lot of people who think it's just bunk. So you know, there's opinions all over the place. One paper I found that I thought summarized well some of the neuro scientific evidence and implications is a paper by Leo Share published in the Journal of Psychology or Psychiatry and

Neuroscience in two thousand. Leo Share is a professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai and New York, and in the short piece he collects some relevant reactions to Jane's hypothesis and argument. Uh Some reactions to Jane's include He finds that in seven Assade and Shapiro published a criticism of Jane's work in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and they write, quote, the difficulty which we find with Jane's hypothesis is that the conclusions he draws have a questionable basis in neuropsychiatric

fact and quote. If Jane's hypothesis were to coincide more accurately with anatomic fact facts about what we find in the body, the right temporal area in question would more likely coincide with Broca's expressive area, a notion that does

not conveniently fit Jane's theoretical constructs. Assad and Shapiro. Shapiro also claim, according to Share that quote lesions of the right sided areas corresponding to Broca's and Wernicke's areas seem more related to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia like restricted affect than to the positive hallucinatory symptoms unquote, and they also claim that Jane's oversimplified the phenomenology of hallucinatory experience

to make them fit his hypothesis better. Um. Also in nine, the International Journal of Psychophysiology published a letter that wrote, quote, after many years of psychophysiological studies mainly carried out in the field, if evoked to neurocognitive bioelectrical events, I feel I can safely state that the concepts of the mind slash brain and the brain slash behavior dualisms, with their ancient, widespread and persistent philosophy, are now all outdated, as are

those of the bicameral mind or the double brain. Then again, however, Shares says in nine paper published in The Lancet by Olan claimed that research in neuroimaging has quote illuminated and

confirmed the importance of Jane's hypothesis. And this research includes a paper in the Lancet nine by Lennox at All, in which a right handed person with schizophrenia underwent neuroimaging during hallucinations, and the authors found that the auditory hallucinations occurred in the right hemisphere but not the left hemisphere, which would match up with Jane's predictions, the predictions made

by the bicameral mind hypothesis. So I'd say it's still in the realm of something that is interesting but definitely not proven. But just imagine how fascinating it would be if more and more studies start lining up with stuff that could be predicted directly by the bicameral mind hypothesis. Indeed, yeah, I mean that's that's the great thing about the about this particular hypothesis is that we can continue to study it.

We can continue to see how how it potentially lines up with their modern scientific understanding of consciousness and the brain. So yeah, I guess we can start wrapping up here. But I want to say, in the end, though I'm not convinced by I'm not advocating it as true, it's fascinating, very well argued, I would say, arguably quite brilliant in the way it pulls from so many disciplines into a coherent picture of a cross disciplinary hypothesis, but can't yet

endorse it. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would agree, But it is it is fascinating to use it as a thought exercise for looking back on past cultures. And uh, you know, after I was reading it, I kept I was wondering, well, why don't we see this reference to more works of fiction. Well, it turns out it was apparently one of the key influences on Neil Stephens snow Crash,

which we mentioned in our Tower of Babble episode. It's a cyberpunk classic then involves a linguistic momentic weapons um which you know, go back and listen to that episode of certainly read snow Crash if you want more than that. But I was not familiar with this book. There is a two thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The Rage of Achilles and get this. It's a novel of the Trojan War told within the confines of the bicameral mind hypothesis. So Odysseus is a conscious modern man in

this and Achilles is a bicameral killing machine. That is a brilliant concept for a novel, and if there's any truth to Jane's vision, this might have actually been possible. Like during the long slow breakdown to the bicameral mind, conscious people and bicameral people would have had to encounter and deal with one another. And can you just imagine all the difficulty that would create. Yeah, but for both sides, because on one hand, the conscious human is capable of

deception that the bicameral human has no ability to. Like basically comes down to that that duel in a game of Thrones between the Mountain and uh, what's his name? The over and Martel. Yeah, yeah, where one is one is crafty and deceptive and the other one is just pure brute strength and NonStop killing action. Yeah. So you're saying the Mountain is bicameral and the Red Viper of Dorn is conscious. I think so. And really, I mean he only becomes more bicameral story progresses, all right, So

there you have it. Do you have an anything else, Joe? No, I guess that's it for now. I I found this a really fascinating topic to explore. It's one of those that I've said this a few times now, but I just want to stress again it's like I feel this conflict within me about the ideas that are so cool. I feel like I have to be especially suspicious of them, Like the more interesting they are, the more I feel like I have to really check my desire for it

to be true. Yeah, especially an idea that's this expansive that concerns the history of our species and our civilizations and the very nature of consciousness. So it's not like buying into a single idea like, oh well, actually I think the Chinese discovered North America, you know, before the Vikings something like that, which I'm not saying that doesn't have large historical ramifications, but it's not something that just affects the absolute understanding of our species in our way

of thinking. All right, well, of course we'd love to hear from all of you out there. What are your thoughts on the bicameral mind. Do you buy into it? Do you do you think it's complete bunk? Do you have some sort of middle ground there? And what are some really cool examples of its utilization in various sorts of fiction that you've encountered. Here's something I would like to employ your imagination on, if this could happen, If you could go from a bi cameral mind to a

conscious mind. How much more could human mentality change? Like if you go three thousand years into the future from now, could our mindsets be as different from from hours now as the conscious mind is from the hypothetical bi cameral mind? Yeah, I mean, am I engaging in a bicameral experience when I let my GPS device tell me where to drive? I don't know, do you totally relinquish conscious control? Yeah?

I almost, It's almost to that level. Uh that I was hanging out with my family over the weekend and my sisters were like asking me, like, why did you make this turn in that it's said of this turn? And I'm like, I just do what the machine tells me to told me to drive into the ocean. Yeah, I put my trust in the machine. It's by and large, there's a less uh, there's less of a chance that it will drive me in the ocean that I will drive me into the ocean. So uh, that's how it

shakes out, all right. Well, you can find is It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all the episodes that you will find, blog post videos, you will find links out to our verious social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and more. Hey, Facebook has that great UH Discussion module group where you can join up and you can interact with us, but also other listeners to the show and you can discuss

episodes such as these with those individuals. And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. The