EB, I remember that you have an interest in Julian Jaynes’, *The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind*. Here’s something from Iain McGilchrist for you to weigh and consider.

Cheers.



There is much to admire about this imaginative and in some ways eccentric book, but it remains a fact that, while Jaynes's hypothesis continues to be as widely read as ever, it has not been taken up or expanded by psychologists. Perhaps this was inevitable with a hypothesis of such breadth and originality, lying so much outside the mainstream of psychological research. But I think there is at least one other important reason. In keeping with a view more fashionable at the time he was writing, and based on a psychoanalytic interpretation of schizophrenia as a regressive state of unfettered emotionalism, lack of self-awareness and relative disinhibition, he sees schizophrenia as a return to a more ancient, perhaps ‘primitive’, form of mental functioning, in which the effects of civilisation have not been permitted, as in the rest of us, to overlay the primary processes of mental life with rationalisation, the voices that schizophrenic subjects experience not yet dismissed as simply an aspect of our own thought processes. If there are parallels between the hearing of voices in the ancient world and in schizophrenia, his argument goes, that is because these mental processes are a sign of a more primitive structure and organisation of the mental world (in respect both of phylogeny and of ontogeny). One can see that his argument necessitates this. The inhabitants of the ancient world heard voices, literally, but we no longer do; schizophrenics hear voices and we do not; ergo, schizophrenia must involve a regression to a primitive form of mentation.

The problem with this is that all the evidence suggests that schizophrenia is a relatively modern disease, quite possibly existent only since the eighteenth century or thereabouts, and that its principal psychopathological features have nothing to do with regression towards irrationality, lack of self-awareness, and a retreat into the infantile realm of emotion and the body, but entail the exact opposites: a sort of misplaced hyper-rationalism, a hyper-reflexive self-awareness, and a disengagement from emotion and embodied existence. This is awkward for his position.

I believe Jaynes was near to making a breakthrough – did in fact make one – but that, perhaps derailed by the view of schizophrenia outlined above, his conclusion was diametrically opposed to the one he should have drawn. His insight that there was a connection between the voices of the gods and changes in the mental world of those who heard them, that this might have something to do with the brain, and indeed that it concerned the relationship between the hemispheres, remains, in my view, fundamentally correct. However, I believe he got one important aspect of the story back to front. His contention that the phenomena he describes came about because of a breakdown of the ‘bicameral’ mind – so that the two hemispheres, previously separate, now merged – is the precise inverse of what happened. The phenomena came about because of a relative separation of the two chambers, the two hemispheres. Phenomena that were previously uncomplicatedly experienced as part of a relatively unified consciousness now became alien. Intuitions, no longer acted on unselfconsciously, no longer ‘transparent’, no longer simply subsumed into action without the necessity of deliberation, became objects of consciousness, brought into the plane of attention, opaque, objectified. Where there had been previously no question of whether the workings of the mind were ‘mine’, since the question would have had no meaning – there being no cut off between the mind and the world around, no possibility of standing back from one's own thought processes to ascribe them to oneself or anyone or anything else – there was now a degree of detachment which enabled the question to arise, and led to the intuitive, less explicit, thought processes being objectified as voices (as they are in schizophrenia), viewed as coming from ‘somewhere else’. This interpretation, moreover, has the advantage that it fits with what we know about the tendency in schizophrenia to bring into conscious awareness processes normally left unconscious and intuitive.

Putting it at its simplest, where Jaynes interprets the voices of the gods as being due to the disconcerting effects of the opening of a door between the hemispheres, so that the voices could for the first time be heard, I see them as being due to the closing of the door, so that the voices of intuition now appear distant, ‘other'; familiar but alien, wise but uncanny – in a word, divine.

—Iain McGilchrist—
—The Master and His Emissary—

Adam and Eve were schizophrenic before they ate the forbidden fruit?

But they were paranoid about being seen naked after they ate it.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/18/2021 06:09PM by bradley.

Thank you for this,

> I see them as being
> due to the closing of the door, so that the voices
> of intuition now appear distant, ‘other';
> familiar but alien, wise but uncanny – in a
> word, divine.
>
> —Iain McGilchrist—
> —The Master and His Emissary—

I just finished listening to this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Civilized-to-Death-audiobook/dp/B07QGH3TDF

In it Ryan mentioned that in the U.S. the voices people hallucinate are scary and strangers in their heads yet in developing countries they are often funny, helpful, and often ones of relatives.

Some author's like McGilchrist see them as oracles and sages and connected to human experiences with gods. Others see them as voices of the insane. But what are these personal voices? The Holy Ghost?

Humans hearing voices is fascinating and indicative to me that we are of a divided brain with an ego bent on denying that fact.

"Intuitions, no longer acted on unselfconsciously, no longer ‘transparent’, no longer simply subsumed into action without the necessity of deliberation, became objects of consciousness, brought into the plane of attention, opaque, objectified."

But I wonder, were they really "simply subsumed into action" and if they were why the voices? I thought the theory was that the voices articulated the intuitions? If you do something without thought you have no time to deliberate but if you "hear" something then it gives you time to deliberate...