Julian Jaynes is the first person to suggest and offer evidence for the hypothesis that consciousness does in fact have a history all of its own. The central thesis of The Origin of Consciousness is that our ancestors, as recently as a few thousand years ago, were not conscious in the same way that we are today. Instead of being able to be introspective and self-reflexive our ancestors were controlled or, rather, were bidden to follow an internal voice that was overwhelmingly authoritative and caused us to act in a manner we would now describe as impulsive. Jaynes labels this former mind of our ancestors the bicameral mind in reference to the dual action of both brain hemispheres (with a greater emphasis on the right hemisphere where the inner voice originated). The loss of this bicamerality and increasing experience of unicamerality (the increasing tendency to predominantly use our left hemisphere) was due for the most part to the introduction of language.
This loss however was not a quick, automatic response to the rigidity of concepts that language presents us. In reading The Origin Of Consciousness Jaynes is able to detail specific shifts in our consciousness as our conceptual, left hemisphere brain took greater and greater control of us at the expense of our right hemisphere. The net result of this has been the progressive inability to access our inner voice (likened to the authoritative voice of a god, king or chief). Jaynes is not simply describing a social shift in consciousness in the sense that at different times and in different places our consciousness was different because of alternative social conditions. Rather, he is arguing that, at least in certain respects and particularly with those aspects of culture allied with religion and spiritualism, society reflected a fundamental neurological shift in consciousness.
This neurological shift, Jaynes argues, can be witnessed in our hemispherical brain dominance. In The Origin of Consciousness Jaynes notes that in many of us our left hemisphere is dominant. It is from this area that our speech arises and the reason that so many of us are naturally right handed (the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body). However, Jaynes also recognizes that in theory the right (non-dominant) hemisphere is also capable of being a language hemisphere…but it isn’t used in that manner. His conclusion is that the redundancy of the right hemisphere as a language hemisphere is a recent development and that as short a time ago as a few thousand years the right hemisphere would have actively served to communicate ‘the language of the gods’ while the left hemisphere operated much as it does today: directing the language of men. Jaynes argues that these two hemispheres were connected via the anterior commissure*, allowing the ‘voices’ or ‘messages’ of the right hemisphere to be ‘heard’ or conceptualized by the left hemisphere.
Within the pages of The Origin of Consciousness Jaynes presents a vast array of evidence to back up his theory including modern observations of schizophrenic patients and test subjects who have willingly had their brains electrically stimulated with the result being the experience of hearing voices where none existed before. The evidence though that this is an historical fact (with the obvious possibility that the condition is persisting and becoming more pronounced today) is provided primarily in a very interesting examination of ancient Mesopotamian and Greek culture.
Jaynes first notes that around 1230 BC King Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria is depicted not only kneeling (the first known time a king is ever depicted kneeling) but that he is kneeling before an empty throne. His god is no longer present.
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.
Jaynes takes this to mean that the voice of the god (originating in the right hemisphere) has been lost. This is the origin of consciousness.
Later this loss of contact with the god voice is replaced with divination; an attempt to succeed the directives given to us by our inner voices (gods). It is after the loss of the bicameral mind that the use of divination proliferates. Later still, by the fifth century BC the use of star gazing to understand the directives of the gods leads to what we now recognize today as being horoscopes. To our ancestors though these 'horoscopes' were less an examination of possible futures and more a series of directives to take action. That we have witnessed this shift in interpretation is perhaps evidence that we are caught in a dynamic process in which our inner voices are becoming ever more distant.
Moving onto ancient Greece The Origin of Consciousness closely examines the classics The Iliad and The Odyssey. In these books and with subsequent rewrites at different times in history when the bicameral mind was degenerating (which provide us with an archaeology to examine and unearth at different strata of human development) Jaynes argues that he is able to identify specific steps in the loss of our inner voices. For example, Jaynes points out that in the earlier Iliad there is no morality. People are god-controlled and simply follow internal (right hemisphere) directives issued to them. There is no examination of the causes and merits of actions. In the Odyssey however we see the first resistance to our inner voice. Somehow ‘space’ has been created between the internal directive and our execution of that directive. The characters, at least to a limited extent, are able to analyze the directives and begin to make choices (of the kind that today we would perhaps differentiate as being ‘rational’ and ‘intuitive’). The Odyssey also shows an increasing awareness of time. The characters are not simply caught up in the present and acting from moment to moment according to their inner guide. Rather, the characters, through the ‘space’ now present between directive and execution, describe ‘hesitancy’ and doing things ‘quickly’ (rather than immediately).
The central argument then in The Origin of Consciousness is that mankind in the last couple of thousand years or so has, primarily through the introduction of metaphysical language and the use of writing, lost contact with his inner, god-like voice that previously used to guide him. This has been replaced with a consciousness that has lost increasing access to divine guidance. In neurological terms we have witnessed a shift from the bicameral mind (where both hemispheres were used – the right hemisphere to ‘hear the voice of the god’, transmit that message, and the left hemisphere to conceptualize that directive) to a predominantly single, unicameral brain that is no longer driven by any inner voice and is not only conscious of what is around it, but is also conscious of itself.
* Editor's note: Although Jaynes states in The Origin of Consciousness that he believes the left and right hemispheres communicate across the anterior commissure, it is now known that while the anterior commissure is one important highway for inter-hemispheric communication, the most important structure linking the two hemispheres is the corpus callosum. Other avenues of communication are the hippocampal commissure and (indirectly) subcortical connections.
The point that Jaynes is making however remains valid: the two brain hemispheres are linked and are able to communicate with one another. This would have allowed the inner voice of the right hemisphere to be 'heard' by the left hemisphere and conceptualized there. The conclusion of this segment of The Origin of Consciousness therefore remains valid, even if the details that lead to that conclusion are incomplete.
