Hey, there, guys, it's joshin for this week's select. I'm going with our August twenty twenty two episode on the bicameral mind theory. It is mind blowing, mind expanding, mind flabbergasting. It's just a really good episode. It's just really me and Chuck sitting around having a really interesting conversation about some really interesting stuff. So if you feel like expanding your mind right now, I would say this is a great episode to listen to enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should Know, the ongoing, amazing, mind blowing edition.
You've been into this stuff lately? What's going on with you?
I don't know.
I don't know, man, but yes, I'm definitely into it lately.
It's weird.
Approaching fifty. Existential crisis.
I don't know about crisis, maybe more like pondering, existential pondering. I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got five years, still fifty, so give me time.
Oh you forty five, I thought you were forty seven.
I'm forty five and eight ninth.
Yeah you got time.
Yeah great, thank you for that.
But no, there's no like one thing that's making me say like, hey, when did humans become conscious? Or when did humans become intelligent? Or what do we do if aliens come down? Like for some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing to me than it has been in the past lately. I don't know, but yes, I'm definitely into this kind of thing right now. And this stuff,
well we're going to talk about today. It's based on how Stuff Works article that Robert Lamb wrote, and I'm not at all surprised that Robert Lamb is into this, but I just want to note that I've heard about this year's years and years ago and have been meaning to do an article or an episode on it. So I don't want you to think this is something that just stumbled across. This is actually the fruition of years of planning and hope and dreams coming to pass in maybe the best episode we'll ever make.
And of course Robert and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of the band Chicago, just to make it.
It's another Robert Lamb, and he was in Chicago.
It still is in Chicago.
Is that Peter Sittara's stage name.
No Setara was the bass player and part lead singer along with Robert Lamb, who played keyboards and also sang lead on some and before Terry Cats died, he played guitar and also sang. So they had three singers in the early days of Chicago.
That's just confusing.
But none of them are our colleague Robert Lamb, who, along with our colleague Joe, had been doing stuff to blow your mind for many, many years. Another great show.
Yeah, and I didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that they have their own episode on this Julian James by Cameron Mind.
I bet they have. And we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology Today, and Frontiers in Psychology. And I'm going to make one up psychology Foo Young.
Okay, I've got two more that aren't made up Slate Star Codex and a poster named Hazard on the site less Wrong.
That sounds a good great source it is.
Hazard knows what he's talking about. Oh and one more, I'm sorry, a guy named joff Ward or Jeff Ward, but you know when they spell joff on medium. So all of those combined with Robert Lamb's article that coalesce into again, probably the greatest episode we'll ever do.
Yeah, and I sort of get some of this. I think you're going to help me out some because I do have some questions that I'll just throw out here and there, because at times I found myself reading this stuff and going, yeah, but isn't that just blank.
Okay, great, I'll do my best to answer.
And you're probably right when you're thinking that that, which is probably like, yes, all.
Right, Well, I mean I guess we should say then that the whole hypothesis is that we're going to be kind of breaking down today is controversial and it's not provable necessarily scientifically speaking. So it's sort of one of those I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure, definitely, and the true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by a psychologist here in the United States
named Julian James in the mid nineteen seventies. Of course, yeah, the ear is born, yeah, seventy six baby.
So what he.
Proposed was an answer to a long standing question, and that was when did humans become conscious, Like when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came along like in the earliest archaic human is it something that came along much.
Later than that?
And how could we ever possibly answer that, like what relics have been left in history in prehistory that would say, like, hey, this is evidence of consciousness. And Julian Jane's took that up and he did it as an outsider, which was a huge strike against him because automatically legitimate scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory. Possibly this man is actually in my field of consciousness studies. But the thing is is this, this hypothesis is so well liked. It's
just roundly like people just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And in fact, there's like a Julian Jane's institute, there's like groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And what he says, in a very small nutshell is that sometime about one two thousand years ago, became conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today.
They developed the ability to think about thinking, They developed the ability to think about that other people are thinking. They developed basically what's called subjective introspection, and then as a result of that, they almost automatically gained free will
in volition. So what he's saying is that if we went back in time in the way Back Machine, Chuck, and we met somebody who lived three thousand years ago, four thousand years ago, they would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans.
That's right, And he thinks that it was a learned thing. And the idea that he throws down is that our mind, our brain is, or was rather very important, was because it no longer is bi cameral, which means split into two parts. And we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres of the brain later on, but in this case he means split into two parts where you have a part that makes decisions and a part that follows,
and that neither one of them were conscious. And here's where I get a little tripped up right out of the gate. Is basically he says that instead of an internal dialogue which we all have and which indicates a consciousness, like us talking to ourselves, us saying things like everything from like you know, hey, get up and go do this to just internally thinking about things like humans do that instead of that we were sort of like human zombies,
and that we were creatures of habit. We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a tee, and whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when like a conscious mind you would think, would speak up that instead of that that an external agent. In this case, they thought there were gods would enter their brain and create an auditory hallucination.
Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed that auditory hallucination, and that that's what helped them get through novel situations that they didn't have like a basically a prescribed script for you know, a mindless automatic thing. Something new came along that got in their way. This god would speak to them and say, go around that rock. It wasn't there yesterday, don't worry about it, just go around it. And it could be one of their gods. It could be an
ancestor guiding them. I think one. I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to angels walking beside them or and this is really important later on. It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis. It could be your local ruler, the divine king who's in charge of you and everybody else that you know and love and have ever lived among. It could be that person guiding you in your life too.
And the idea is these people heard this in the same way like you said that we hear our own internal dialogue, but they never chalked it up to themselves. It was always coming from the outside.
All right, Here's I guess where I had my first issue kind of grasping this is there were no gods speaking to them and guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just didn't know it.
Yes, yes, yes, there was no gods. But to them, and this is a really important point to them, it definitely was a god talking to them or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same way that if an actual god got into your brain and was speaking to you and you responded to it, if you could have looked at their brains lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine, it would respond the same way. So it was entirely real to them, and the same way that a placebo effect has fuel effects on your body,
this would have been the same thing. And then in addition to that, it was culturally supported everyone that they knew believed the same thing that the gods were talking to them, and so like that just lent support to this idea so that no one questioned it.
It was just that's the way it was.
Well, so this, I guess brings me to let me macro this out a little bit in my own dumb brain, and it may just be twenty first century person thinking that I'm engaging in. But if the idea is that before this there was no consciousness, but what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness, they just didn't recognize it as such. Is that the whole point was that if you do not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious.
Yes, because.
Experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious, you're just kind of Julian and Jane's referred.
To what this guy's doing now.
Okay, So but the thing is is there's like a lot of scholarly discussion on like, Okay, what did James mean exactly? How literal was he because he used words like automaton. He never called them zombies. Other people call them like zombies, but I didn't.
No one talked about zombies back then.
No, that's true, but well evil dead had or not evil dead, living dead.
No Living Dead had come out by then.
Yeah, but it wasn't like today.
Okay, no, no, I know. They're definitely over the automatons.
So he called them automatons, and it's essentially the same thing that they were. They just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about how they felt. They and this is really important too, Chuck. Of course, they still had feelings. They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group, they had feelings about their local ruler, they had feelings about, you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever. It's that
they weren't. They didn't reflect on their inner life. They didn't think about thinking. They didn't they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness, and in the terms that Jane's is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition
of consciousness. And then on top of that, he also goes to great links to say, Hey, I understand that you're going to get all up in a tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious I'm not talking about consciousness in general, and I think that you over overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives.
Okay, how about we take a break. Okay, I'm gonna go rip a bong kidding, We'll take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about what lots of other stuff right after this.
Job.
All right, So I've kind of wrapped my head around what this guy is saying now. I will admit it's a little naval gayzy for me when it comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses. I get a little bit like, uh, what's the word? Maybe I can be a little too concrete or as the French might say, concrete in literal, Yeah, in my thinking, because it's not you know, Friday night in college at like two in the morning kind of discussion. Right, So I think that's
where I am now. But I do think it's very interesting in that he I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting, but I think it's interesting that he thought around the first or second millennium BC is when things to him changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of well, eventually language, but specific metaphor, which is to say that all of a sudden, we could make analogies in our brain, We could link things together. We saw ourselves as almost as if they were characters.
Ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make as characters. Yeah, and that as these things like connected in the brain, then it created just an effect like a domino effect basically where all of a sudden we could work out our own solutions, or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions. And we also doesn't God saying God saying walk around the rock. They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock.
Yes, but it's but in part of that that also required them to be able to reflect on the idea. Like you said that they were able to now make their own decisions. Right, And you said something earlier where you like, you know, you were talking about your own internal dialogue where you think, hey, I should get up and go outside for a second. Like that's different, right, You're thinking about you yourself and you realize that you
are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time would have thought is get up and go outside. And they would stand up and go outside without questioning because God had just instructed them to do that, so it must be important. And they didn't think about where it came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves, and they didn't
reflect on it. They just obeyed it. That's Jane's position, and that if you compare those two things, you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life, and it's so different. He said that this is that what we understand is consciousness just wasn't around until a couple thousand years ago.
Okay, I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in this pool. Okay, good, good, But here's thirty minutes.
Here's the thing.
It's really important to realize, like you said something, that you're a literalist, right, that's actually really appropriate to approach this because Juliet James. One of the very radical things that he did was he took the ancients literally because when he started looking around and we'll talk more about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it at least, and he was an expert in ancient languages, right, So
it was really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian, and he took what they were saying when they said things like, you know, the gods told us to do this, that they thought that the gods told him to do this, not that they were using metaphors. So he took them literally on their word. And that is a real departure from anybody else who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying.
Yeah, And I think it's also something we should point out now, even though it comes up later in our research, is that when you think of an auto, I guess an automatic society or a society of automatons. That's not to say that they weren't successful. He's describing some of
the most successful, you know, ancient civilizations that existed. But I think his contention is that it was a hive mind, all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished, and not the conscious mind.
Right, And he didn't I don't think he ever used it as like, I don't think he ever explicitly said that it was an emergent property of a hive mind. But that's kind of what he was describing, kind of like if you take one stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by five hundred and give it a year, you have a ziggarot built that. That's just all those people knew what to do, they knew their position in their place, and they just did it.
And so yeah, you could totally do that.
With people who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious, you could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this, this work is not suited for me. I should be doing something else, or why is the foreman being so mean to me today? Like they didn't think like that under Jane's hypothesis, So they would probably get the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly, I would guess.
Oh, I mean, consciousness proposed her brought along a whole host of problems. I imagine if you're the ruling class. I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned about what is it Jane's not Jane's Jane's Jane's thought about I love Robert Lamb's Jan's a Dixon joke in here by.
The way, that was mine, Oh that was yours.
Oh well, way to go, thanks, you said, James says, and then in parentheses you put, huh, it's pretty good joke. But what jan said was that, and it's something you mentioned earlier, was that consciousness. I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that is can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels.
Yeah.
And this is from the actual book in nineteen seventy six, and it's a little little mind blowy. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. It's like asking a flat and this is where it kind of comes home to me. It's like a asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that
does not have any light shining upon it. So that's where it comes home to me, is when you and hey, it's metaphor. So how about that he lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more.
Yeah, because you know, wherever the flashlight there's light. And his point, Yeah, and his point is is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness.
But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place.
And yeah, Robert lamb uses a really good example of unloading a dishwasher, right, like when you're unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people who put like all of your knives in one place, all of your forks in one part of the basket, all your spoons and so on, right, a maniac in other words.
Sensible human.
If you do it like that, it's you can just be on autopilot because you've done it so many times. But when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm, that's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And so in the bi camera mind, God would have said, I command thee to pick up thine fork, butterfingers, and you would lean over and pick up the fork, and that was that. Instead, you might
not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatic, but it's still out of the norm. It's still different. You have to kind of think about it a little more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take that dishwasher metaphor chuck and you realize that three five, nine thousand years ago, there were no dishwashers, there was no ice cream scoop, there was no cookie scoop, there was no avocado splitter, there was nothing like that.
Wait, what's that? Is that a thing? Now?
Yeah, you don't know.
You don't have one of those? No, Oh, I'll send you one. You're missing out.
It's a multi tool for cutting avocados, getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you scoop them out. They're essential. As a matter of fact.
All right, I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these.
Okay, I'm going to get to you one for chrismas.
Okay.
So the point is that, like, there wasn't a big variety of stuff, So there wasn't that many novel situations like we encounter novel situations like almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis of Jane's hypothesis that the reason that consciousness evolved is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a
much more frequent basis. So it maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every thirty seconds, or maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind of evolved out of that. But the point is life was much less complex back then, So you could have something like a b camera mind. You could have somebody who who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't been introduced to enough experience in life, And with.
That experience came the fork falling on the floor.
In other words, yeah, or you know, there's a lot more dishes to put away in much more different dishes to put away rather than just forks, you know, you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, Or you have one.
Fork and you just carry it with you everywhere, you know, like you don't have to think about that. There was just less stuff to think about.
Is what I'm saying.
Well, now you're speaking my language, because if I had it my way, every member of my family would have one fork, one spoon, one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate. Yeah, and they were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away.
Man, every time I hear one cup, I'm like, there's a joke in there somewhere. But even if I could come up with it, I wouldn't.
Be able to say it.
Oh, Yeah, that's true. All right, So now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit more about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing
about this change. And so what James was throwing down in nineteen seventy six, besides apparently a bunch of roach clips, was the emergence of agricultural societies kind of changing everything, and that all of a sudden, we are not living in groups of you know, ten or twelve people that are hunting and gathering, where even if there was sort of a leader within that group, it was very easy
to disseminate information and follow that leader. Once we started settling down, planting and growing things, engaging in trade with other peoples, that did a lot of things that complicated every process, and it meant that societies were much much larger, and that rulers couldn't necessarily speak directly to people anymore. Yeah, so the another not to specific people, like they could lay down an edict and that would get disseminated in other.
Words, Right, So, like I've read before, back when I was an anthropology student, that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no more than thirty people, like that was the absolute mass. And once you reached that you'd split off into two different bands. So yeah, like the person in charge was like part of your moment to moment life. And if you have if you're suddenly in a civilization and you're building a zigguratte for somebody, it's probably not deigning to
talk to you. And part of Jane's hypothesis is that this, this bicameralism emerged from you know, all those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk to other people, that we started to like need direction from the gods more and more, and it started.
To kind of get faster and faster.
But in the meantime it was a form of social control because one of the people you could think was talking to you was that local ruler who you were building the ziggarotte for. So that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population in check.
Right, And as they got bigger and bigger and they started, you know, trading with people like we were saying that, you know, that was sort of the beginning of the end for his not his bicameraal mind, but the b camera mind. And one of the biggest problems with all of that was when we started writing stuff down, because all of a sudden, this these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on what
to do. There was there was now stuff down on paper that you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around and post on the you know, on tablets at the walls of the city or whatever. And that was all of a sudden, you weren't waiting around for a god to tell you what to do. You could just go read that tablet.
Yeah, so the power that we gave to the god's commands were kind of transferred to.
The written word.
And yeah, that seems to have been like the death now for the bi cameral mind. Right, And there's something
really interesting that it's worth pointing out. James apparently didn't have any high hypothesis on what came before the bi cameral mind, because he said it started as a result of the increasing organization that agriculture brought along and that there wasn't by camera minds before then, But he doesn't say what was before then, And people even asked him like, okay, what about you know, hunter gatherer societies that are still around today, you know, where would they have gotten consciousness?
And he never really answered that, but it's it's definitely worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he basically says bi cameralism or the bi camera mind. I should say bi cameralism is the senate in the house. But the by cameral mind lasted from the advent of agriculture about eleven thousand years ago till about two thousand ish, maybe fifteen hundred or no, three thousand ish years ago, so it was about a seven thousand year span of bi camera mind. And then as life got more and
more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he says is that language, in particular the written word, but also language got more and more sophistic and as it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential for us to start thinking in metaphors, and metaphors, as you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way we think in Julian Jane's mind. And there's actually a lot of support for that. Charles, may I, oh please, so that post by Hazard on less wrong.
Oh yeah, Let's see what Hazard has to say.
It's called consciousness as metaphor. What Jans has to offer, and what Hazard says is that like Hazard just puts out like a paragraph from like an economic report, and it's about recessions in Europe and it talks about Germany plunging into recession, or the UK falling deeper into recession, or France emerging from a recession. And what Hazard points out is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as a three dimensional physical thing that we can entire
nations can move into and out of. That's not true. Recession aren't three dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge from them, you can't fall into them. But we just think about it like that, and that's metaphor. So we think in metaphors so frequently we don't even recognize it anymore. And that was Jane's point that when we gain the ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious, We started thinking for ourselves, we became capable of introspection.
And it was the evolution of language that led us to that point. Like basically, it just we just hit a threshold where suddenly language is sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts in our brains and in turn it unlocked consciousness.
I mean that makes sense because you know, a metaphor is literally not literal, and if you were, if you did, if that was not a thing yet, then it chibes with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up to that point. Yes, and that would have been a pretty seismic shift if you and compare like with like, you know, all of a sudden.
Yeah.
And you even see this in like movies that are trying to emphasize how backwards or back in time you know, some group is, and they emphasize it by having that group take everything literally, usually to comic effect, like in Kingpin when Randy Quaid was an Amish person, right yeah, yeah, yeah, he took everything literally and it was hilarious, hilarity ensued, but it was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was. He couldn't he couldn't engage in metaphors.
He didn't think like that. That's actually based on I don't know whether on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian Jane's hypothesis.
Yeah, and you know what, that's a nice segue to children because when you have a human child, it's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years. Yeah, and that they don't understand metaphor, they don't understand certainly don't understand things like sarcasm. And you have to change the way you talk to little kids because they do
take everything so literally and think so literally. And children are are referant are referenced with Jane's the idea that I think what age like, kids up until the age of five basically don't really have much of a human consciousness. And it's in you know, the idea that children are just little narcissists walking around is a fun joke, but it's true because they don't know that other people think
differently than they think. Up until about the age of five, they don't realize there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking and ways of feeling about things right that other people have exactly.
That's what's called theory of mind right And on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to great lengths to basically say that Julian Jane's using the term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily, and if you just use theory of mind, it would have made a lot more sense. And Scott and is Scott Alexander, I think, I said Anderson,
Scott Alexander makes some really good case for it. And that's kind of what he's pointing out, is, you know, like it's it's possible that because you learn, you're not born with it. You learn it through experience. It just kind of evolves in you as you grow as a person and experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more, almost like a microcosm of what happened in civilization a few thousand years ago, you gain theory
of mind. So the fact that you can learn and that you do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the idea that maybe consciousness, as we understand it, was learned. It did evolve, It was an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated language.
It's a fascinating thing to see happen in a child's life, to see these little light bulbs come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it is, you know, very much a learned thing. Man, very fascinating. All right, I say we take a break and we'll talk a little bit about uh, just some other fascinating stuff when we get back right after this.
And things job job, thanks. When shot shot.
Stop shin, I was gonna summarize what we're going to talk about, but I didn't feel like it. All of a sudden before the break.
I think it's nice. It's Lucy Goosey.
Can I talk about one of my favorite parts of this this hypothesis is we're kind of jumping around now, but jumping back to where we talked about writing things down. All of a sudden, it was around here in human history that there was a collapse of societies in the Mediterranean around the Middle East. It was called the Late Bronze Age collapse, and it didn't take that long, and it met like these very advanced sort of societies in a matter of decades, a number of them, a lot
of their culture was lost sort of. They called it, in fact, the Greek Dark Ages, and it lasted for hundreds of years. And jiving with this was when humans started to lose and it kind of all makes sense that they were losing with a written word, with metaphor and language coming along, they were losing this voice as a god. They felt like they were losing their gods because all of a sudden, the gods were silent to them. They weren't speaking to them in their mind because they
were gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. Jane's has a hypothesis that says, it's about here where the organized religions that we know today were born out of a kind of nostalgia basically for these gods that left them, Right. Yeah, I think that idea is really interesting.
It is, and I mean, the timetable really jibes, and it is really interesting that that Late Bronze Age collapse happened when it did. But the idea is not just nostalgia, but also desperation. Yeah, because these people had guidance, they didn't have to think. And this poor set of generations over a few hundred years are maybe some of the most pitiful humans that ever lived, because they went from just knowing what to do because the gods told them what to do, to having no idea what to do
because their gods had abandoned them. And they as a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, you know, beseeching the gods to give them a sign. This is when oracles started to become a thing. Prophets started to become a thing. Superstitions like omens grew, like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes into your house and bites you, you will soon die and your family
will soon be scattered. Stuff like that. Right, So this didn't exist before because the gods were in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone, and I just think it must be must have been really pitiful and dark to live through that time.
Yeah, I mean they were lost, I guess as a people.
Yeah, And I mean that was figuratively they were lost, but literally too, because that Late Bronze Age collapse they think was brought on at least in part by climate change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the Sea People's that seem to have overrun different cultures, and so like culture after culture fall, those people would become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that to the
breaking point that culture would fall. It was just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once.
So they really felt.
Like the gods had abandoned him, like they'd angered him or something like that.
They were genuinely lost.
So what James did to help support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back and look at literature and the time and see if it sort of supported this. I know. One of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in nineteen seventy six was that it was Homer's Iliad because he's kind of like, here's proof right here. I mean, if you look at the Iliad,
they were basically automatons. They just listened to the gods and did what the gods said, and they substituted like the words that we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to indicate consciousness just weren't there.
Right, So they were more like physical descriptors, like my belly was quivering or my heart was fluttering, something like that. Not I think the example that's used is fear filled Agamemnon's mind. Yeah, Well, there wasn't a mind, so they would describe fear in other physical terms, right yeah. And that it wasn't until later on when new translations were coming along, that people who were now conscious turned the
stuff into metaphor. And James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before, they meant it as literally, and they didn't have descriptors for minds, and when they say the gods were guiding them along, they meant it literally. And he was saying that the Iliad in particular started to be written about eleven hundred BCE, and then around seven hundred BCE. It was like in its form that we see it today, but along the way it was kind of added to and it was written during the
transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness. He sees it as basically a document that traces that transition.
Yeah, very interesting. There was some other stuff too write literature wise.
Yeah, that wasn't the only one.
He also found in some of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like God had abandoned him. There's something a Mesopotamian poem called the Ludloutle bell Nemechi, and it says, my God has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed. And again, most other scholars would say, there's something happened. This guy was blue, he was in a fonk. Who knows, But
it's all metaphorical. And James is saying, no, this guy had God talking to him. Now he doesn't anymore.
So should we talk a little bit about actual science here with the brain?
Yeah?
I think so because this is something we've covered before in the past, when we talked about alien hand syndrome. Oh is that where he came out from a gazillion years ago? There was evidence that when the there were certain epilepsy patients where it was so severe that they would sever the corpus colossum undergo a corpus colostomy, and the corpus colosum is basically the thing that makes the
two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And with alien hand syndrome, I think they found that it could be brought on by this surgery where all of a sudden, the left arm was doing something and without being told to do it by the right brain. And they have Jane's I think are people since Jaans? Was it Jaans or was it just people trying to sort of proof his theory?
I think that people saw these experiments as support for Jane's theory.
Okay, so they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and they're called split brain patients basically where they you know, after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out of whack. They felt like a regular, you know, whole human being, but they learned that there were these little things it would pop up where a hemisphere would take an action based on this information that it didn't have
access to. And the example they gave was if they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen, and they would get up and walk to the kitchen, but they would say, hey, why did you get up and walk to the kitchen. The language the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere, is the only part that can respond to that. But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up. And the really fascinating part is that they wouldn't say, well, I don't know, I'm not sure
why I just did that. I just did it. They would make something up on the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting up and going to make a bowl of cereal. And it's almost like we had this natural instinct to b as somebody when faced with a question that we can't answer about why we did something.
Yeah, because the left hemisphere wants to explain things it wants to tell the story using metaphors usually, and this became the left brain interpreter theory, and it kind of supports Jane's idea that the consciousness is a flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and it just can't find it. And the idea is that the left hemisphere creates the explanation the stories for our behavior, even if it doesn't know why we did something, but that's
just what it does. And there's a saying in consciousness research among people who subscribe to the left brain interpreter theory is that consciousness isn't in the oval office like it thinks it is. It's more in the press office, like it's the one that's public facing explaining what you're doing, but it might not have all the information, so sometimes it's just besing.
It's very interesting stuff. Yeah, and sort of tying in with the kid thing, who is this? How do you pronounce the name of that one researcher Chustian Austian cuture k U I J S c E. N Oh, yeah, I'm just gonna say Christian.
I think that's pretty pretty dead on. That's the person who runs the Julian James.
Society today, because Jane's died in nineteen ninety seven. I don't think we ever pointed that out. Yeah, but this person basically says, hey, if you look at people who hear voices, and that's not necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia, because that is one percent of the population, apparently is the highest ten percent of the population. Can you know, does hear things basically? So these it's the idea of the command voice basically is to do something.
And if you're hearing a voice that says, you know, move to the window and look out on the street, that's one thing. If you hear a voice that says, take the knife from the drawer and you know, put it in someone's head, then that's another thing altogether. And we were talking about kids earlier, you know, the idea of the imaginary friend kind of jobs with this lack of consciousness. Sixty five percent of kids have imaginary friends.
I had an imaginary friends. My daughter had for years what she called her ghost friends, which is a lot creepier way to put it. But I think that's all just sort of to say that like that nine percent of people who are hearing voices who are not suffering from schizophrenia. Is that's proof of that initial bicameral mind at work, right.
Yeah, And I mean Julian James believed that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state, as evidenced by that development of theory of mind, or as evidence by imaginary friends, and that they're kind of recreating what society or the human species went through thousands of years ago as they age and develop.
Very interesting.
So there you might be out there, especially if you're a concreteist like Chuck, thinking like you might be rocking in your seat right now, face flushed about to faint out.
Of rage came because.
Like, this is by definition unscientific. It's not provable in the form that Jane's put it forth. It's more of a concept, an idea, And apparently he was well aware of that. He didn't tout it as as anything more than that. But Chustian uh, the director of the Julian Jane Society, likes to point out that it was he was basically laying the groundwork for an entirely new way of looking at things so that other people could come along and you know, take it up and figure.
Out how he was wrong.
How he was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense in its that form, and people have been doing that again.
This is this is like a crackpot theory.
That has never gone away. Yea, because the more people pay attention to it and the more we start to understand about the brain, the more sense it kind of makes. And it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it over the like fifty years that it's been around.
I think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not rocking in my chair.
David Bowie loved it.
He said that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind. I think that was it the book so no, he said it was one of the top hundred books to read.
Oh all right, I believe that totally. It's a very Bowie thing.
For sure, and other people too. And then one other thing, another way to put all this, to kind of sum it up that I saw it put is that we developed at some point back in history a left brain bias's you know, which kind of ties into your original view of the whole thing, which was, you know, they weren't just that they were conscious, right.
I like that you got anything else.
I might, but I might just not be aware of it.
And as I said, this is the best episode we've ever done since Chuck Giggles, which everybody loves.
I think then it's time for listener mail.
This is about the freedom of the Press episode and this was a Josh request. Hey guys, how freedom of the press work struck a particular chord with me. I used to work as a science teacher but was finding more and more students were being duped by pseudoscience on the Internet and weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I did a master's in a library and information science and now a school librarian on a mission to
vanquish disinformation awesome. While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of approaching news critically as with any online source of information, your recent podcast on how freedom of the Press works really inspired me to put forward more information and content about media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden, it's very easy to take freedom to
press for granted. Last year, in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put up a display of banned books tracked by the ALA, and each book had a tag listing the years and ranking a book was challenged, and I encouraged the students to guess what for. It led to a lot of really good That's what I love. This experiment with students led to a lot of really good discussions.
Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books had been banned or challenged, were horrified to see their own favorite books on display, and were also shocked by the justification, as are we always now that COVID restrictions are being lifted, and very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books, the Dowitt Isaac Library and the Malmuir Archives as a numlout so that students can see the extent of limitations on
the press and media freedoms around the world. Thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series. Kind regards med vingliga Hell's niggar must just be a salutation in Swedish that comes from miss Alice Antonsen.
She heard hers, Thank you, Alice. That is amazing.
I'm so glad we got to that listener meal, because I've been proud of that person for a very long time.
Ever since that email came in totally. How about Sweden? Huh? Keeping the American dream alive?
I love it?
And Chuck Also, before we sign off, there's something I've been meaning to address that you said earlier.
You said you have a dumb brain. No you don't.
Did I say that?
Yeah? You did.
Okay, So if you want to get in touch with this like Alice did and show the world what a hero you are, we would love.
To hear that kind of thing.
You can email us to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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