National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes’s still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand … came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future.
“Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times
“When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker
“He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
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Not for the faint of heart. I had to read it three times (and it’s a very big book) in order to grasp the fundamentals of what the author was saying. I actually use this book a lot in writing where I explored the untapped power of the subconscious mind. If you want to grasp how our brain developed, I highly recommend this book. It’s hard to find, but it is out there. As a side note, my wife and I both had this book when we met (along with many others).
Think about the Greeks. Ancient man believed he was directed by the gods. Only with the onset of the pre-socratics and the philosophers that followed did “man” begin to believe that he could direct his own life, that he could introspect, that he could wonder about what lay beyond this life.
Something happened at this point in history; Jaynes posited that what happened was the development of the corpus callosum which connected the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This evolutionary jump gives us the ability to wonder about the meaning of life.
So much of religion, life, and existence is wrapped up in these kinds of ideas. The best literature, investigates, perhaps unknowingly, these very themes. Jaynes was laughed at early on, and died with no recognition, but as time has gone on, more credibility has been given to his theories,
This is a thought-provoking, well-written, and easily comprehended book,
When Julian Jaynes … speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.
Jaynes present what seems like a far-fetched notion of ancient man. His idea has not been, as I’ve read elsewhere, debunked. He does not prove that his idea is correct, but he does present lots of good reasons supporting the idea of the bicameral mind. No other notion of consciousness has been proven either and, in fact, it is probably not even possible to prove notions of consciousness. It is a least obvious from reading literature older than 2000 BC that the writers do not seem to have been conscious. At the very least, Jaynes present a fascinating way to look at the world.
Very intriguing, made me do a lot of thinking
Eloquent and revelatory
I’m not a psychologist, but I found this book really interesting and enlightening about how the conscious and un conscious mind works. I think a book is brilliant when it makes you observe and think about the world and its workings under the structure of its hypotheses. I now view the world and individuals in that world as beings with varying degrees of consciousness. It’s fun. A good, interesting and entertaining read. My favorite example in the book is the “awakening” which occurred about the time of the Iliad! “When gods became men and men became gods!” Indeed!
Jaynes argues that it is only in the last 3000 years or so that man developed consciousness. Early man, he contends, did not recognize the voice inside his head as his own and attributed that voice to the gods telling him what to do. It was late in the bronze age that man began to attribute that inner voice to himself, allowing for the development of introspection and the consciousness of self. Controversial, audacious, stunning in the scope of his scholarship. A classic.