Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got five years, still fifty, So give me time now, you forty five, I'm forty five and eight ninths. Uh, 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 gonna talk about today It's based on a 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 years and 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 who just stumbled across.

This is actually the fruition of years of planning and hope and dreams coming to to pass in the in uh, maybe the best episode will ever make. Uh. And of course Robert and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of the band Chicago. There's another Robert Lamb, and he was

in Chicago. In Chicago, is that Peter Sata's stage name No Stara 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. 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 Camra Mind. I bet they have. And we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology Today and Frontiers in Psychology. And I'm gonna make one up um psychology food Young. Okay, I've got two more that aren't made up late Star Codex and um uh poster her name Hazard on the site less Wrong. That

sounds like a great source. It is, Hazard knows what he's talking about. Oh. In one more, I'm sorry, a guy named Jeff Ward or jeff Ward but you know when they say jeff um on medium. So all of those combined with Robert Lamb's article the Coalesce and again, probably the greatest episode we'll ever do. Yeah, and I

sort of get some of this. Um, I think you're gonna 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 and stuff and going, yeah, but isn't that just blank? Okay, great, I'll do my best to answer, and you're probably right, um, when you're thinking 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 Um, I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure, definitely into true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Jaynes in the mid nineteen seventies. Of course, yeah, the ear was born. So what he proposed was an answer to a longstanding 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 humans? 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, um, in prehistory that would say like, hey,

this is evidence of of consciousness um. And Julian James 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 in actually in my field of consciousness studies. Um. 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 James 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 thousand, two thousand years ago humans 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 and 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 kind just 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 our mind, our brain is, or was rather very important was because it no longer is bicameral, 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 and here's where I get a little tripped up right out right out of the gate. Is Basically he says that instead of an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates a consciousness, uh, 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 t 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, Uh, 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's what help 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, they 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 um one, um one. I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to angels walking beside them um 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 they 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, Well, 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 if an actual god got into your brain and like 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 it would respond the same way. So it was entirely real to them, and the same way that a placebo effect has real effects on your body. Um, 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, 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 twenty one century person thinking that I'm engaging in But if the idea is that, uh, before this,

there was consciousness. But what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness that 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 you're not. You're not experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just

kind of um Julian James referred to now. Okay, so 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 him zombies. Other people call them like zombies, but that no one talked about zombies back then. Hard, No, that's true. But um, well evil Dead had or not evil Dead, living dead now the 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 to 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 um, 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 James 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 gonna 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 our lives. Okay, how about we take a break. Okay, I'm gonna go rip a boll uh. We'll take a break, we'll come back and we'll talk about what lots of other stuff right after this and stop shot stop all right. So I've kind of wrapped my head around what this guy is saying. Now it's uh. I will admit it's

a little naval gazey for me. Uh On 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 is the French concrete and literal in my thinking, because it's not you know, Friday night in college, like two in the morning kind of discussion. So I think that's where I am now.

But I do think it's very interesting and 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 uh, well, eventually language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that all of a sudden, we could make analogies in our brain. We could link things together. Uh. We saw ourselves as

um almost as if they were characters. Ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make his characters, 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 we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions, And wasn'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 that they were able to now make their own decisions, right, And you said something earlier where you're like, you know, you were talking about your own internal dialogue where you you think, hey, I should get up and go outside for a second. Um, Like, that's 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 that's so different. He said that this is that what we understand is consciousness just wasn't around until a couple of thousand years ago. Okay, I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in

this pool. Okay, good, good. Here's the thing it's really important to to to realize, like you said something, that you're you're a literalist, right, that's actually really appropriate to approach this because Julian Jaynes 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 he was it was really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian, and he took what they were saying when they said things like, um, you know, the gods told us to do this, that 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's 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, um, when you think of an auto, I guess an automatic society or society of automatons. Uh. 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 ever explicitly said that it was an emergent prop

pretty 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 zigguratte built. That That's just 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 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 um hypothesis, So they would probably get the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly. I

would guess. Oh, I mean consciousness proposed or brought along a whole host of problems. I imagine if you're the ruling class. Uh. I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned um about what what is it? Jane's not Johns, Jane's Jane's thought about I love Robert Lamb's James Addison joke in here by that Oh that was yours? Oh well, where to go? Thanks, you said, Janes says, and then in parentheses you put it's a pretty good joke. But what Jane said was that, um, and it's something

you mentioned earlier, was that consciousness. I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role. And what is actually a life that is can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels. And this is from the actual book in nineteen 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 meet, 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 looks, 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 um, yeah. Robert Lamb does use as 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 of your spoons and so on. Right, a maniac in other words, sensible human. If you do it like that, it's you can you can just be on a pilot

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 in the bi cameral mind, God would have said, um, I command thee to pick up thine fork butter fingers, and you would lean over and pick up the fork, and that was that. Instead you you might not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically, 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 thing? Now? Yeah, you don't know, you don't have one of those. No, I'll send you one. You're

missing out. It's a 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, I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these. Okay, I'm gonna get to you one for Christmas. 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 James um uh Like hypothesis that the reason that consciousness evolves 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 um 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 bi 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 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. 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 for one spoon, one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate, and they were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away. Man, every time I hear one cup there, 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 uh so what James was throwing down in ninety six, besides apparently a bunch of roach clips was a the emergence of agricultural society is 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 that leader.

Once we started settling down planting and growing things, engaging in trade with other people's that 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 two specific people, like they could lay down an edict and that would get disseminated in other words, right, and so like um, 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 maps and once you reach 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're if you have if you're suddenly in a civilization and you're building a ziggurat for somebody's probably not deigning

to talk to you. And part of Jane's um 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 uh, it started

to kind of get faster and faster. Um. 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 ziggerat for. So that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population in check, right, And as they got bigger and bigger, uh, and they started, you know,

trading with people like we were saying that. You know, that's was sort of the beginning of the end for his uh, not his bi camera 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, um, this these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on

what to do. There was there was now stuffed 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 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 um, the written word. And yeah, that seems to have been like the death knell for

the bicamera mind, right, um. And there's something really interesting that's worth pointing out. Jaynes apparently didn't have any hy hypothesis on what came before the bicamera mind because he said it started as a result of the increasing um organization that agriculture brought Alonge and that there wasn't bi camera minds before then, But he doesn't say what was

before then? Um, And people even asked him like, okay, what about you know, um 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 bicameralism, Uh, or the bi camera mind. I

should say bi cameralism is the senate in the house. UM, but the bi camera mind lasted from the advent of agriculture about eleven thousand years ago, all about two thousand ish maybe fred or no. Three thousand is years ago, so it was about a seven thousand year span of UM B camera minded. Then as life got more and

more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he says is that language and in particular the written word, but also language got more and more sophisticated, 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, it's called consciousness as metaphor. What James has to offer and what Hazard says, um 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. Recessions 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 languages sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts

in our brains and in turn unlocked consciousness. I mean that makes sense because you know, in a meta a metaphor is literally not literal, and if you were, if you did, if that was not a thing yet, then it chives with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up and to that point, and that that would have been a pretty seismic shift. Uh. If you can compare like with like, you know, all

of a sudden. Yeah, and you even see this in like Um, like movies that are trying to emphasize how backwards or back in time, you know, some group is um 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, 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 metaphor, you 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 James hypothesis. Yeah.

And you know what, that's a nice segue to children, because when you have a human child, Uh, it's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years 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 uh, children are are references are referenced with Jane's Uh the idea that, um, I think what age like, kids up until the age of five basically, uh don't really have much of a human consciousness. Uh. And it's and you know, the idea that children are are just little narcissist 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 that other that other people have exactly. That's what's called theory of mind, right and um On Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to great links to basically say that Julian Jaynes 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 Anderson Scott Alexander, I think, I said Anderson Scott Alexander makes some really a really good case for it, and that's kind of what he's pointing out is um. You know, like it's it's possible that because you learn it's not you're not born with it.

You 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 micro azum 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. Um, to see these little lightbulbs come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it, as you know, very much a learned thing. 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 things s I was gonna summarize what we're going to talk about, but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden

before they break. I think it's nice it's loose. Can can I talk about one of my favorite parts of this this hypothesis definitely is we were 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, uh, in the Mediterranean around the Middle East.

It was called the Late Bronze Age collapse. And it didn't take that long, and it meant like these very advanced sort of societies, in a matter of decades, a number of them, uh, a lot of their culture was lost. That was it's sort of They called it, in fact, the Greek Dark Ages, and it lasted for hundreds of years. And jibing with this was when humans started to lose. And it kind of all makes sense that they were losing um with a written word, with metaphorign language coming along,

they were losing this voice as a god. They were 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. James 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 that the timetable really jibes, and it is really interesting that that late Bronze Age collapse happened when it did. Um. But but the idea is not just

nostalgia but also desperation. 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 that as a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, um, you know, beseeching the gods to give them a sign.

This is when oracles started to become a thing. Profits started to become a thing. Superstitions um like omens grew like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes into your house and bite you you will soon die and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that. Right, So this 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 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 would 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 had angered him or something like that. They

were genuinely lost. So what James did, uh to help support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back and look at literature, uh and at the time and see if it's sort of supported this I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in six was that 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 they just listened to the gods and did what the gods said, and they substituted, um, 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 or something like that, not um. I think the example that's used as fear filled Agamemnon's mind, and well, there wasn't a mind, so they would describe fear and other physical terms, right yeah. And that it wasn't until later on when um 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

her mind. And when they say the gods were guiding them along, they meant it literally. And he was saying that the Eliot in particular, UM started to be written about eleven d b C. And then around seven b C. It was like in its form that we see it today, but along the way it was kind of added to and it it was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness. He sees it as basically a

document that that traces that transition. Very interesting. There was some other stuff too, right literature wise, Yeah, so that wasn't the only one. UM. He also found in some of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like God had abandoned them. There's something a Mesopotamian poem called the ludlul bell Nmecki, 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 funk. 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, because this is something we've covered before in the past when we talked about alien hands syndrome where it came from a

gazillion years ago. Um, we there were there was evidence that when the um there there were certain epilepsy patients who where it was so severe that they would uh sever the corpus colossum, undergo a corpus colostomy, and the corpus colossum is basically the the thing that makes the

two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And with alien hands 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 the right brain. And they have uh James, I think, or people since James, And was it James or was it just people trying into uh sort of proof his theory. I think that

people saw this these experiments as support for Jenes's theory. Okay, So they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and they're 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 that 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 UH, if they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen, uh, 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, UH, is the only part that can respond to that. But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up, and they're really

fast nating. 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 it's almost like we had this natural instinct to bs 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 um using metaphors usually and this was this became the left brain interpreter theory and um, it kind of supports um Uh 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 um, 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 b s NG. It's very interesting stuff. Uh, And sort of tying in with the kid thing, Um,

who is this? How do you pronounced the name of that one researcher Kushtian Lastian Couture k k U I J S c E. N Oh, yeah, I'm just gonna say Chustian. I think that's pretty pretty dead on. That's the person who runs the Julian James um Uh Society today because James died in I don't think we ever

pointed that out. 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 Uh, it's the idea of the command voice

basically is to to do something. And uh, if you're hearing a voice that says, you know, moved 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 uh, we were talking about kids earlier, you know, the idea of the imaginary friend kind of jobs with this lack of consciousness 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 proof of

that initial bicamera mind at work. Right, yeah, and and I mean, um, Julian James believed that children go from a bicamera state to a conscious state, as evidenced by that development of theory of mind, or as evidenced by imaginary friends. Um, and that they're 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 um, there you might be out there, especially if you're a concretist like Chuck Um thinking like you might be rocking in your seat right now, face flushed about to faint out of rage, Cameron, because like, this is by definition unscientific. It's not provable in the form that James put it forth. It's more of a concept, uh, an idea, and apparently he was well aware of that. He didn't touted as

as anything more than that. But question uh. The director of the Julian Jane Society likes to point out that, um, 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 and figure out how he was wrong, how he was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense, and it's that form and people have been doing that again.

This is this is like a crackpot theory that has never gone away 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. Uh. And it 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. No, he said it was one of the top hundred books to read. Oh all right, I believe that totally. It's very Bowie thing for sure, and other people too. Um. And then one other thing another way to put all this to kind of sum it up that I saw it put is that, um, we developed at some point back in the in history a left brain bias, you know, which kind of ties into your original view of the whole thing, which was, you know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious? Right?

You like that? You got anything else? Uh? I might, but I might just not be aware of it man, 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 a listener mail. Uh, this is about the freedom of the Press episode and this was a Josh request. Hey guys, how freedom of the press word

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 the library and information science and now a school librarian on a minute mission to vanquish disinformation.

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 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 a l A, 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 loved. This experiment with students led to a lot of really good discussions. Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books have been banned or challenged. Were horrified to see their

own favorite books on display. Uh And we're also shocked by the justification, as are we always. Now that COVID restrictions are being lifted, I'm very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books, the Dowitt Isaac Library in the Malmer Archives as a new mole 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 uh Met van liga Hell's Niggar that is must just be a salutation and Swedish that comes from ms ms Alice Antonsen. She hear hers, thank you, Alice. That is amazing. I'm so glad we've we got to that listener meal because I've been proud of that person for a very long time. Ever since that you came in totally. How about Sweden Hunt, keeping the American Dream alive? 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. You know you don't? Did I say that? Yeah? You did. So if you want to get in touch with us 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 podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.