I find that whenever I'm exploring new ideas, reading books, looking at art or talking with people, topics seem to intermingle. I've wanted to share what interests me in hopes that others may find it interesting.
When a book fascinates me, it almost always changes my perspective on life, and I am often driven to read books that question my understandings of what is and what isn't true. Whether good literature or a book of facts and theories, if it is written with interest by a good author, their excitement can rub off on me and I can find it every bit meaningful and enjoyable.
Jules Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1970.
The title is intimidating and sounds a bit dry when you see it on a shelf, but at least for me this book was a journey through the history of mankind and language in an attempt to understand how the human brain changed and why we question our purpose and existence.
The tile is a helpful way to explain how Jaynes' book explores an evolutionary shift in consciousness for humans that began to take place around 4000 BC.
Here is a quick summary and overview of the book.
SUMMARY:
1. Bicameral Brain
-Most people are familiar with the idea that the brain is separated into two hemispheres. Each hemisphere is relatively identical and can have the same functions, but peculiarly is that our brains process some functions more dominantly on one side than the other. There is common understanding that the left hemisphere of the brain thinks logically, while the right hemisphere thinks in a 'creative' way. In the 1970's when this book was written, this was just becoming common knowledge but today there still lacks certainty that one side is more creative than the other. Jaynes explains that there are skills that each side of the brain can be adept towards and can be more common on one side than the other; often left-handed people's brains function differently than right-handed people’s brains. Current studies have yet to confirm if this allows for specialized usage based on the side of the brain or whether one side is more creative than the other but the argue that it is developmental leaves possibilities open.
Specifically Jaynes explains the importance of two regions of the brain, Wernicke's Area and Broca's Area which are oddly located on the left hemisphere of the brain in most right-handers, and the opposite in left-handers. It is most responsible for the brain's ability to process speech, allowing someone’s thoughts to be translated and spoken into words. Strangely enough, the same area in the right brain does not process speech, perhaps un-needed because the other side is capable of it and both brains are connected.
Although the right brain cannot speak, it can think, and is specifically good at reasoning large concepts and understanding emotions. Both sides of the brain can understand and produce thoughts (106), but the author claims the left hemisphere regulates speech while internalizing the mute right hemisphere.
When Jaynes speaks about the Bicameral Mind, he is referring to the human brain at a time where both hemispheres worked separately and there is no centralized 'self' yet. Because the right hemisphere in most minds is unarticulated, it must be mediated by the left hemisphere.
The Bicameral Mind-
Before 3000 BC the human brain worked differently; each side processed the world around it separately. The left brain/hemisphere was the only one able to speak aloud, while the right brain and all its thoughts were 'stuck inside'. The left hemisphere is better able to process abstract ideas such as language, where words are used to represent ideas and objects in the world. On the other side, the right brain often had a divine-like perceptive insight but it was restricted when processing words associated with the thoughts it dwelled on, but could only communicate with the left hemisphere. The left brain, according to Jaynes, would have been able to hear the voice of the other side in their head, much like a schizophrenic hears commanding, judging or suggestive voices.
Diagram i: Bicameral mind; processing thoughts and voices, where only left hemisphere of brain can process speech.
These voices have very real influence over their minds, and are often heard as someone else’s voice, not of their own. The voices might have been persistent and difficult or impossible to silence. Much like schizophrenics, the voices would sound as if someone else’s, yet critical or commanding of the listener; and because it is sourced from inside their own mind, could be unavoidable similar to current persons living with schizophrenia who also hear hallucinated voices.
2. Breakdown of Bicameral Brain
So according to Jaynes, a shift in consciousness occurs as the brain in Bicameral times no longer is two brains separated, but unified. He explains that this happens over a long period of several centuries and is a social change. There were several factors that allowed this change, and several results.
-Language- Before this time, language between people existed but there were no written words or characters to represent the sounds heard and spoken. All communication was through speech and so the left hemisphere of the brain became the chief agent of communication.
-Gods- Voices heard from the Right Brain, over many years and generations, become the wise speech of personal Gods or God-kings. Under stress and decision-making, the 'God Voice' might have special insight that the other left mind isn't aware of, and so these voices are attributed to some other higher power with a ‘divine understanding’.
"The right hemisphere, perhaps like the gods, sees parts as having a meaning only within a context." (Jaynes, 119)
This connection between the understood gods and the right hemisphere, which is creatively inclined, is an interesting connection I want to return to later. It is important to understand that this is all going on within the mind, and that it is the person who recognizes the voices as the voice of god or other spirits.
-Metaphor- Words can have literal meanings, but are often associations or metaphors. Two important metaphors had to be realized before the mind could establish consciousness and unify the two brains.
The metaphor of a inner-space (spatialization): To relate the spatial world we live in to a spatial world that we think in. By being able to imagine a 'space' inside ourselves where thoughts exist, we create an abstract place. This was necessary to produce a 'self' that can reflect on itself.
Spatialization of Time- In ancient man, time was understood as cyclical, not linear. By realizing that we exist in the Present, in-between the past and future, we can imagine our self outside the present. By relating the person we were in the past to the person we are now allows for self- narrating.(218)
The mind uses metaphor to establish an "I" that exists in time and space. This self-realization, or formation of a consciousness, was necessary for the breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Another factor contributing to this is the introducing of names to individuals, where one could reflect on their self and form an ego by representing themselves with their name.
When this happens, there is a new individual identity that is self-aware in time and space, and with both hemispheres working in tandem, the voices of the right hemisphere seem to disappear. In their perspective, the guiding voices of their personal gods are no longer there and man feels a new sense of will, but also a loss of a influential and guiding force.
As words and writing are invented and the internal voices are no longer depended on, people are able to adapt to this new form of consciousness.
3. Origin of Consciousness
Jaynes explains that the breakdown involves the Bicameral Mind which at one time was more separated. Each mind could, from the person’s perspective, communicate separately. The reasoning left brain hears the right as another voice, and in ancient times people understood this inner voice to be the voice of God(s). Jaynes uses scientific understanding, knowledge and data as well at literature and language analysis in the arts to speculate on the origin of man's consciousness.
He does a wonderful job narrating the development of consciousness in man's journey through the ancient and classic eras. It is a difficult feat to describe such a change, when self-realization comes so naturally to us now. It was very confusing for the Bicameral Man, and as this consciousness develops many people cease to hear the voices of the Gods (their right hemisphere).
In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Jaynes compares more frequenting use of ancient words that are precursors to "I". It is a very human way of relating the experiences that these ancient humans went through as they no longer were hearing the guiding words of their inner gods.
In Mesopotamia, Greece and ancient Hebrew ancestors, there was a relatable loss of the spiritual voices as well as a realization of self that is reflected in these ancient literatures. Curiously is the role that language and written word affected them, and how the ancient poetry canonizing the inner Gods in such writings as the Iliad helps show the change in consciousness and how language had a role in that change.
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This book tells the story of mankind in a way I could never have imagined. When you read it, you begin to question your own understanding of reality, and what it is that makes mankind different from other animals on earth, or what it is that defines 'you' or 'me'. I often imagine ways that people can communicate beyond words, because emotions and visuals can go beyond words, yet they still provide understanding.
Poetic Inspiration
The fact that Jaynes uses Homer's Iliad as a main reference says something about the nature of the questions he is asking. It is a poetic work of art, literature. It resides in the qualitative seams of the mind that is illustrated in the Bicameral Mind as the right hemisphere. Consciousness has parts that seem not to follow logic and reason, but still make 'sense'. It is this part of our consciousness that creates great works of art like the Iliad and inspire and muse us.
In his writing, he portrays the great epic poets of the time as being written in full inspiration, canon naturally developed by the right hemisphere. Originally the word of God from the right brain, the reasoning left hemisphere has no influence over the outcome. It's as if the bicameral poets brain was able to switch to activate either side. Since bicameral minds had no consciousness, the poetry seemed to come from some other divine source within their head unknown to them.
(72) "The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectiivity to appreciate what it was like."
During the shift in consciousness from bicameral to no longer separate, it is clear there is a change in the creative flow of the poets at the time as well. It is true that the poetic epic of the Iliad is not a perfect description of the happenings of time or history. But this is because they are lively and creative inspiration that was perhaps active in the left hemisphere of the brain. Jaynes then compares the Iliad to the Odysse where an ego seems to have formed in the characters as they use new words, the precursors to “I” such as psyche, thumos and phrenes.
So the question is, where does the creativity come from, and why does the inspiration often attribute to a divine power?
Why is it that artists and writers have difficulty at accessing these creative thoughts, as if they are elusive fish in a stream that the inspired must catch in time, as if "inspiration flees in attempted apprehension".(Jaynes, 378)The great poets of the Iliad apparently had no issue incanting the lengthy poems verbatim, and without hesitation or extensive practice.
With the advent of consciousness there is a lost creative source. Even today the source of creativity is a mystery, and there has been a longing to answer the mystery of where creativity lies since the shift in consciousness outlined by Jaynes. During the 20th century, artists began to focus on the subconscious in an attempt to find that part of the self responsible for creativity, that which in bicameral times would have been so easily accessed and perhaps resides in the right hemisphere?
So if creativity is affected by the brain and consciousness, then what happens when there is no consciousness?
Artists participating in the Surrealist manifesto of Art during the early 20th century often took a Freudian approach to creativity by activating their subconscious, or the part of you and your mind that you are normally unaware of. Like a dream that manifests itself without restraint or laws of reason, the Surrealists thought that activating this part of the brain would provide a flux of genuine creativity.
A loss of consciousness can be accompanied by great spurts of creativity, but when conscious or aware of the activity, there can be an immediate loss to the creativity. Some traditional art making involves the craftsman being put into a trance, and this trance allows them greater flow of creativity. Some artists use music as a way to "drift off" allowing them to invest into their work with full concentration. When in deep thought, the divine inspiration seems to take control and creativity flows while the self is witness to it. They seem to all point towards other shifts in consciousness.
This is oddly similar to the way a mystic or divinely inspired person experiences God or the sublime, where the self must be released before whole inspiration can be witnessed. The artist who can lose himself or herself in the act creates finely superior and truthfully inspired works.
William Blake is probably one of my favorite examples of a man whose inspiration was wholly spiritual but whom channeled the sublime creativity that inspired him into wonderful works of art and poetry. He is an artist mysticof the 1800's, remarkable in that he did so in such a pre-modern society, where in England there was a shift to Scientific ways of viewing the world.
Blake and Homer, as well as an endless list of divinely inspired people seem to access the infinite source that provides creativity, and I suggest that similar people are born even to this day. Could their brains work in a similar way to the Bicameral Mind? Does a shift in consciousness occur at all?
Creativity as we know it
So where does the creativity that manifests itself today come from, if not from this ephemeral right hemisphere?
It is in the world around us, in the artists and writers of the past, and in nature. It is in the desire to discover the unknowable. Some people have the ability to sense the divine, found in the understanding of a wholeness often related to God (something the right hemisphere is/was very good at). It is in beauty that we can glimpse it, and the artist, musician and writer are the ones who has done so and responded with their artworks for others to see. "We perceive beauty in the harmonious intervals between the whole," (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy) and it is when we use the right hemisphere able to conceptualize context, that we may see this beauty.
"... Art can more strongly convey the nature of the mystical state. Art is not limited by reason."
-(Alex Grey, The Mission of Art)
Art has long reflected the sublime inspiration of a God, and perhaps this is because of the natural understanding that the right hemisphere creates. "Poetry, once started in mankind, needs not the same means for its production. It began as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. And even today, through its infinite mimeses, great poetry to the listener, however it is made, still retains that quality of the wholly other... a consolation and an inspiration, that was once our relationship to gods."(Jaynes) The Bicameral mind as well as our own might still have access to the great creativity that is often assigned to the right hemisphere, and we may always have had access to it, we need only to teach ourselves to open up to it or activate it somehow.
Faults in Dualistic nature of bicameral mind - Creative vs Reason
-I understand that the shift in consciousness is seen as a change in how the brain organizes itself, and that it is suggested as a cultural and social change. I don't want to challenge Jaynes' views or argument, instead reflect and question it. My biggest fault seeing is the dualist nature of the two hemispheres, and how easily they can be assigned opposite qualities.
I want to say that it is an outdated way of thought, and that both sides provide together the means to creativity. Again I want to emphasize that when separating the brains that is an organizational purpose and that there is no certainty that the left brain is in actuality more analytical or the right brain more creative. Instead it is more a way that we reflect on our mind, how we see ourselves and experience our inner voice.
We learn to acknowledge and use our consciousness, or at least the word we understand to represent the consciousness, spirit, soul, atman, ego etc. is something we must be introduced to. Similarly the way we acknowledge how our brain is organized has a real impression on how we think our brains can work. If you decide to read Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, then read it with a healthy sense of skepticism in hopes that you may learn a bit more about your own brain and consciousness, and understand that it is a changing and mutable thing. It tells a very coherent tale of the history of the human mind, but that it is told through the eyes of one man, an artist of the mind.