Julian Jaynes Has Blown My Mind Apart, and Put It All Back Together Again

 

The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes (1976)

 

            For weeks now I have been lost in the pages of this amazing book, one which came to my attention through the bibliographies in several of my previous reads.  One of my favorite literary experiences is when I finally find a seminal book oft quoted or referenced in other books. Such a book is The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  Author Julian Jaynes has accomplished something outstandingly original and beautiful, providing what is perhaps the best explanation of what we modern humans call “Consciousness,” how it came to be, and how we can track that development.

            Books like this contain so much within their pages.  It is difficult enough to absorb all the information and ideas shared by the author, but discussing it intelligently is another matter entirely. In the over 11 years I have kept this book-review blog I have enjoyed countless books, but very few have coalesced knowledge and wisdom in my brain like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has.  It is a masterpiece of insight and research.

            Jaynes divides his work into three “books,” the first one dealing with consciousness itself, what it is, and where it comes from.  This alone is enough material for a great book.  The first great insight that the author shares involves consciousness itself.  We modern humans assume that our brains work in the same manner as all early humans.  We have an internal “I,” designating an interior head-space that exists outside of time and place, and which us modern humans see as our true selves, our internal monologue.  Jaynes central proposition is that this internal “I, this sense of individual consciousness, only arose in humanity after the invention of written language.  Before this time, humans lived in what Jaynes terms a “bicameral mind.”

            To explain what “bicameral mind” refers to, I must go into a bit of neurology and brain structure.  We humans have essentially two separate brains, connected through several channels, (the corpus-callosum is the main one, a bundle of nerves which allow signals to be sent from one brain hemisphere to the other), allowing them to communicate with each other, and to control different aspects of life.  For example, our left hemisphere contains Brocka’s and Wernicke’s areas.  These are two parts of our brain that handle language, with Brocka’s area controlling speech production, allowing our physical mouth and tongue to create meaningful words, and Wernicke’s area handling the other end of speech, that being language comprehension, the mental understanding of the auditory signals received by our ears through spoken language.  In patients who suffer from traumatic brain injuries, strokes, or other such conditions, these areas are sometimes affected, which was the initial impetus for understanding the various sections of our brain. 

            Julian Jaynes posits that, before the advent of the written word, humanity lived in a very different state of mind, the bicameral mind, a consciousness completely unaware of itself, quite the opposite of our current view of consciousness which we feel exists independently of our physical being.  For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in groups led by a “king.”  These kings dictated how the people of a said group would live. The truly great and long-lived kings would be remembered long after their death, their words still echoing in their follower’s heads.  This was not seen as an aberration.  Humans found it perfectly logical that a dead king would continue talking in their heads, as if still alive. The greater the king, the longer the voice would live on in his followers.  As evidence of this, Julian Jaynes discusses how for over ten thousand years, human burials followed the same pattern.  The deceased was not seen as dead, in the way we modern humans see things.  As long as their voice could be heard the king was alive. Because of this, the dead were buried with food, clothing, tools, and all sorts of items that would be useful to the dead person’s continuing “life.”  The high culture of the Egyptians was the pinnacle of this thinking, with Pharaohs buried alongside dozens of sacrificed slaves, wives, animals, etc.  Their isolation in northeast Africa allowed them to maintain their bicameral culture the longest, even after the advent of written language.

            Julian Jaynes posits that the first gods were the dead kings whose voices and commands could still be heard in the people’s heads.  This makes a lot of sense as ancestor worship is the oldest spiritual practice still found among us humans.  Many of the oldest tribal cultures in the world today still observe a lengthy period between when a person’s body stops breathing and when they feel the person is truly dead and ready to be buried/cremated/etc.

            This same bicameral structure is evident in Mesoamerica, where dozens of city states sprung up, flourished, and died over millennia.  These cities are all remarkably similar, containing a large central pyramid of structure housing the king, and in later times, the statue of the local god.  Everything about their lives was dictated by the king/god-king/god, and sometimes the entire city-state would revert back to the jungle after the death of a prominent king.

            Sometime around 2,500 years ago, everything changed.  In Mesopotamia, a writing system was created which altered our entire world and, according to Julian Jaynes, altered our brain’s structure.  This was cuneiform, a method of writing which involves pressing a wooden stylus into wet clay, leaving triangular marks.  Cuneiform is not a language, but a system of writing, and due to this, it was used to write down things in Assyrian, Emetic, Akkadian, and many other languages.  Essentially, once a remote king found that his proclamations could be written down and shared without him needing to personally deliver the information, he then asked his scholars to use cuneiform to write down his proclamations, history, etc.

            In this sense, writing was not what we think of today, words which, when read, create a narrative in our minds.  Much like ancient temples, statuary, and religious artifacts initially did, writing allowed ancient humans to hallucinate words and instructions, keeping the king’s voice alive well past his death.  It was an immensely valuable tool for social control in a time before individual consciousness.  For millennia, humanity passed down its accrued knowledge verbally, with specific people in each tribe/group designated to be the memory carriers, reciting long poems and stories from memory in order to share wisdom and instructions with the next generation.  These bards would not specifically memorize a text, for there was no texts back then.  What they did was remember the salient points of a tale, concerning an old god-king perhaps, and then add in connective language as they reiterated the story in question to a new audience. This way allowed the important points to be learned by the audience, while also allowing the storyteller to shape his stories, adding and subtracting parts as they saw fit to. 

            The written word changed all of this.  Julian Jaynes recounts a very dark era in the history of our developing consciousness.  The period of time, around 500-1000 years after the initial breakdown of the bicameral mind, sometime around 500 BC, was a time of dissolution, fear, and mass-violence.  Before the written language, civilizations lived near each other in relative peace, trading goods and food items, but generally just leaving each other alone.  It was understood that other human groups followed their own gods/kings, and that was good enough for them.  Once writing appeared, the “voices” of the gods/kings no longer reverberated through the people’s minds, causing chaos, and uncertainty.  The idea of an individual “I” was unnecessary before this, for everyone knew what their role was, what they were expected to do in life, and why they did it.  The god-king’s proclamations were followed without question, for he spoke directly from the gods.  The bicameral mind did not seek explanations.

            The written word quieted that internal voice that repeated the gods/kings proclamations.  City states became too large for easy control of the population.  It was at this time that specialists came into being, people whose breeding, training, or social status prepared them to be interlocutors between the god and the people.  These were the beginnings of the sacerdotal sects that we all currently deal with.  Even these methods were not enough to hold the homogeny, and the cities slowly fell into ruin and disuse, as people moved back out into the wilds to make their own lives.  Because of this, there was an extreme rise in violence and warfare.  Without the god’s voices keeping everyone safe, neighbors were seen as violent, evil, “other,” etc., and the need to exterminate them arose.  During this turbulent period, it is estimated that in both the western and eastern worlds, nearly 90% of the human population was exterminated.  This was wholesale genocide on a planetary level.  Humans are our own worst enemies.  It is a sad reminder that, even two thousand years later, our collective humanity can be quickly erased or forgotten when we end up seeing our fellow beings as less than human because they do not believe what we chose, or are told to, believe.

            Julian Jaynes traces the development of consciousness in man through our written works, the oldest ones such as the Rigveda from what is now India or the Iliad, from Greece being written at a time when the bicameral mind was still the norm among us humans.  In these tales, the human protagonists do not share their internal monologues.  They had no internal monologues.  Their actions are not self-decided.  Instead, all the actions in the Iliad, for example, are a result of a command or a suggestion by one of the many gods. Achilles does not choose his actions.  They are dictated by the gods.  The same holds for the characters in the Rigveda.  Bicameral man did not self-assess, self-doubt, or self-analyze.  He lived, breathed, and acted in accordance with the instructions provided him by the gods and spirits, voices we modern humans would describe as our internal monologue.

            In the follow-up to the Iliad, the Odyssey, the protagonists do make their own decisions.  They worry and fret and flip-flop without any certainty, something lacking in the heroes of the Iliad.  They still do not have what we would call a consciousness, however.  It is their own constituent parts that make demands.  Parts of the human, such as phrenes, nous, and psyche, were the ones dictating action.  Odysseus’ nous might demand that he feel jealousy, or his phrenes might state that the gods do not agree.  Ancient man did not think of the brain itself as the seat of our minds.  They saw different parts suited to different things.  Sometimes these would still be associated with specific gods, or spirits, but they were internal to man, not external.  Jaynes explains how today, we judge psychosomatic responses in people that would have been very familiar to the people of the Odyssey.  When we are stressed out, our stomachs feel curdled, bile rises in our throat, and we get the “butterflies.”  To ancient man, just developing the faculty of consciousness, this made sense.  When scared, our heart starts beating faster.  Our blood pressure rises.  Our skin gets cold and tight.  Ancient man saw this as evidence that the heart controlled certain emotions, much as the stomach controlled others, and the bowels controlled even others.  There is a wide gap between the mentality evident in the Odyssey and the mentality seen in the Iliad. 

            The second section of this book details the progression from the Bicameral Mind to our current consciousness, tracing the history of our gods, temples and rituals associated with bicameral thinking. Jaynes describes how Mesopotamia was the first example of modern consciousness, something which must have been very strange for those few humans who innately accepted their internal “I”.  Even the tales in Genesis describe this transition from bicameral thinking to our current sense of self.  The author traces the story from the ancient Greeks down to the nomadic tribes which were prevalent after the mass genocide period.  It was these tribes which practiced a new monotheism, replacing the pantheon of gods with one deity, and which led to our current Abrahamic religions and their strict morality, most of which is based on refuting the old bicameral gods and our ways of communicating with them.

            The last section of this masterwork seeks out the vestiges of the bicameral mind within our modern world.  Humanity went from each one of us hearing the gods’ voices directly, to the gods only speaking to select priests and oracles, and then to the gods becoming totally silent, letting their desires be known solely through omens, or the revelation of “prophets.”  Julian Jaynes backs up every one of his observations with rigorous science, and explores the role that our bicameral mind still plays in the creation of poetry, art, and music.  Many creators describe how a piece of art, or music, or poem came to them unbidden, as if the universe was speaking to them directly.  This is an example of how our two brains communicate, with one side dominant, and the other not so.  Jaynes explores hypnosis and the mechanisms used to incite it, mechanisms and techniques extremely similar to those used by ancient priests when selecting new oracles.  Basically, the less self-aware you are, the easier it is to be hypnotized.  The same goes for deeply devout religious belief. 

            This book blew me away.  I wish I could cover everything that Julian Jaynes discusses in greater detail, but that would take an entire other book!  It is a humbling thing to understand that our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, lived for over a hundred thousand years in the bicameral state.  It is only in the past 2,500 years that what we call human consciousness came to be.  There is no guarantee that our individual conscious selves will continue into the future.  It may be that a bicameral mind is better suited for long-term survival on Earth, and we will all soon revert back to that state.  There are no rules stating that evolution is a progressive, directional force.  Animals and plants evolve in all directions, both “forwards” and “backwards.”  It is our ego that makes us believe we are the epitome of life, that we are the best living creature created in our Universe.   That very ego may destroy us all.  I look forward to acquiring this book for my own personal library, and jumping back into its amazing pages in the future.  It is books such as this one that made me a book lover, and keep me a book lover.  What a glorious achievement.

(This book can be downloaded from the Internet Archive here: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes )

The Spirit Molecule and the Possibilities of DMT

DMT: The Spirit Molecule – A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences – Rick Strassman, M.D. (2001)

            There are a few fields of human scientific exploration where the amount we know is far outweighed by the vastness of what we do not know.  The study of consciousness, of how or why a nervous system and a collection of neurons embedded in fat tissues results in what we experience as self-consciousness, or awareness, has been explored for ages by theologians, mystics, and recently by scientists.  It is a very difficult field of study since we are using the same mechanism we are studying to make sense of what we are studying. How can the brain analyze itself, if our reality is but a construct of that same brain?  How do people experience consciousness outside of their bodies, whether through trauma, near-death-experiences, mystical states, or psychotropic chemicals?  These are huge questions, and we are just beginning to truly delve into them.

            One of the many ways that humans have expanded their innate consciousness and connected with what they felt was the eternal divinity, has been through the ingestion of intoxicants.  Many different things have been used, from herbs, to alcohol, to hallucinogenic plants and animals.  For many humans throughout history, this was the way they connected with the spirits, with the powers that they felt created and controlled the world around us.  Scientists have a hard time studying these experiences, as they are usually very subjective, and one person’s inner truths and revelations may not make much sense to another.  It is hard to get any definitive data.

            Dr. Rick Strassman, through his research into the compounds created by our brain to regulate body functions (serotonin and melatonin for example), was drawn to what is still a mystery in our brains. This mystery is the pineal gland.  In many species, what is our pineal gland is a third eye of sorts, capable of detecting light and dark and situated above and between the two regular eyes of primitive creatures like snakes and lizard and turtles.  In humans however, this gland is located in between the two halves of our brain.  It is not part of the brain per se.  It grows from the roof of our mouths, our palettes, and rises up into the brain sometime after the first month of conception.  What drew Dr. Strassman to the pineal gland was a synchronicity he experienced while researching the pineal gland.  He read that, around the 49^th day after conception, the pineal gland secretes a large amount of Dimethyltriptamine, or DMT, a very simple molecule that has profound effects on our brains and consciousness.  DMT is naturally occurring in much of the plant and animal life on Earth.  At the same time, Dr. Strassman was engaged in a long personal exploration of Buddhism, and he read that the Buddhists believe that the 49^th day after conception is when the soul enters the fetus, reincarnating into its next form.  Knowing of the effects that DMT can have on the brain, this coincidence sparked a desire to understand in Dr. Strassman.

            There are a lot of situations where the pineal gland secretes vast amounts of DMT directly into the brain.  These are usually trauma events, such as when a woman gives childbirth, in a baby when the baby is actually born, and also when we are about to die.  People who have taken DMT as a drug experience something that is so fast-acting, so otherworldly, so rife with a deeper consciousness than they ever knew existed, that it begged the question of why our body floods our brain with such a chemical during high levels of stress and trauma.  Dr. Strassman wondered if the chemical DMT could not be referred to as the “spirit” molecule, for it seems to be the compound that allows our consciousness to either connect or travel to, an elevated level of existence.

            Dr. Strassman details his efforts in getting this study to take place, the hardships that took years to grind through, and the experiences he had with his test subjects.  Some of the chapters cover the clinical aspect of the experiments.  Others deal with the variety of experiences that the test subjects related to Dr. Strassman upon the completion of their DMT doses.  Some subjects felt they were pulled to a higher state of reality.  Others, many others, felt they were being guarded/watched/taught by entities they encountered after taking the DMT dose.  Many described it as being aware of the oneness of consciousness, of the infinity of consciousness, of the futility of fearing death, for they saw how consciousness just transitioned from the physical to the metaphysical easily.  Many no longer feared death because of their experiences with DMT.

            Dr. Strassman tried to see how beneficial or therapeutic these sessions could be, but as with all things, it was more dependent on the mindset of the test subject and the setting they were in when they took the DMT. Some people were ready to explore such a vast experience.  Others shied away from it and feared for the loss of their “self.”  As with any powerful experience, what we get out of it is dependent upon what we bring to it.  He was unable to continue his studies on DMT, partly because of these set and setting issues, and partly because of the increasing pressure from the government to curtail all research into mind-altering chemicals, even the ones which showed promise as therapeutic drugs in psychiatry. What is evident is that more research needs to be done, and that there is likelihood that DMT could be the way our body creates a connection to the eternal/divine.  It is worth exploring more, as it seems to correlate with what much of the world’s mystics and shamans and saints have been trying to tell all of us.  Humanity is not separate from nature.  Our individual consciousness is but a small part, a shadow of the eternal consciousness of the multi-verse.  Most of the DMT test subjects experienced the deepest and most profound sense that the connecting tissue of existence is love, pure and simple.  Love.  Love is all you need.  It may be all there really is.

(This book can be downloaded and read in PDF format here: 
http://www.organiclab.narod.ru/books/DMT-The-spirit-molecule.pdf )

If I Could Have the Nervous System of an Octopus, Without Its Many Arms...

Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness – Peter Godfrey-Smith (2006)

            Much of my reading, and many of the books reviewed here at the Intellectual Journey, deal in some way with the idea of consciousness.  Some books explore the relationship between the outside world and the “inner mind.”  Others seek to understand the raw organic material that our bodies are composed of and why it creates the entity we call Mind.  Still others describe the progress of our collective knowledge and myth-building, especially as they relate to human social constructs like religion and government.  It appears that the human capacity for consciousness and thought inspires many writers, scientists, and philosophers.  One of the great things about this book is that it takes a step back away from our human field of experience, to explore one of the few other animals on Earth that also has a highly complex neurological system, this being the octopus, and their cousins, the squid and the cuttlefish.

            Peter Godfrey-Smith began his journey to writing this book because he witnessed something that many other people who work with or near these amazing animals have noted.  They appear to be observing you, just as much as you are observing them!  They interact with humans, both in the wild and in captivity, like creatures that have some sort of self-consciousness, or sentience.  In the wild, an octopus will often reach out a single tentacle arm towards a human diver, to touch them and taste them (octopuses can sense chemicals with their skin, essentially being able to “smell” and “taste” anything they encounter).  A cuttlefish will often produce the most dramatic displays of color and light through its amazing skin, in a seeming effort to interact.   In captivity, there are countless stories of octopuses that can recognize individual humans in a group, even when they are all dressed exactly the same.  Other octopuses have learned to squirt water with their siphons at people standing outside their tanks.  A few have even learned that a squirt of water is handy in turning off the aquarium lights above their tanks.  They are masters of camouflage, mimicry, and contortion.  Because the largest “solid” part of an octopus is its eyes, it can squeeze through any hole that their eye will fit through, allowing a sixty pound octopus to escape captivity through a two inch hole.  Amazing!

            One of the coolest parts of this book details how the development of an amazing nervous system occurred separately in cephalopods than in primates.  The earliest common ancestor between cephalopods and humans lived very likely over 200 million years ago, back when all animal life was in the oceans.  From this animal a branching occurred, in one direction leading to the bilateral animals, including the ones with spines and bilateral symmetry and in the other branch, a path leading to the mollusks and eventually to the cephalopods studied in this book.  For us humans, much of our nervous system is encased in a hard shell (the skull) and this is the apparent seat of our conscious and unconscious thought.  Nervous signals are received from throughout the body and processed in the brain.  Cephalopods do not work in this manner.

            An octopus has nearly as many neurons as a human, but they are not localized in one certain area.  The octopus’ neural network is spread throughout their entire body, allowing them to have massive control over their shape, color, and skin texture.  Each arm of an octopus has its own functional node of neurons, essentially controlling the arm separately from the main “brain.”  These animals appear to have consciousness of a high order, but they do not have the same equipment as us humans.  In fact, in cuttlefish for instance, each individual neuron reaches from the skin to the brain node, without any other intervening connections.  Humans and most other animals do not work in this way.  We have sequences of neurons, each connected in linear form, to allow signals to travel from our finger to our brain and back.  This, while seemingly super-fast, actually slows down the signals considerably, as not only do electrical signals travel through the neuron, but chemical signals must be released and received in the connections between the neurons.  The octopus does not have this problem, and it’s sensory world must operate on a level that to a human would be unspeakably fast.  

            There is much discussion about the history of the study of sentience and consciousness, which is awesome, and provides a great background into the current state of thought on “thought” itself.  It helps the reader to understand the real differences between human consciousness and cephalopod consciousness, which is critical.  Humans have the ability to process in semantic layers, with some thoughts being submerged, others being lifted, and yet others trying to understand the thoughts being thought!  This creates a massively rich internal life in humans, and in other smart animals that have been studied, such as birds, dogs, dolphins, etc.  The octopus however lacks this inner life it seems.  What it does have is a nearly infinite ability to sense the world around it, to respond to it, and to explore it.  Our brains suit us, as we have a relatively long lifespan and a lot of information to learn as humans.  The octopus and most cephalopods live very short, brutal lives, sometimes not making it past a second year of life.  It did and does not need to store long term memory, to develop individual consciousness like humans.  It instead needs as much input from the world around it as it can get, in order to stay alive and procreate.

            I have always loved octopuses and cuttlefish.  I am so glad I found this cool book.  Peter Godfrey-Smith has given me quite a lot to think about as I continue on my Intellectual Journey.  I will for certain be reading more about the latest research on cephalopod intelligence.  As the writer states, meeting an octopus in its habitat is the closest we may get to meet a truly “alien” intelligence.

(This book can be purchased here: AMAZON  )

The ways in which our brains can go wrong are both frightening and awe inspiring

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales – Oliver Sacks (1985)

            Having seen this book referenced in several of my recent reads, I put a request for it at my library.  The author, Oliver Sacks, is a pioneer in the fields of neuropathology and the various disorders and afflictions that can arise due to brain trauma.  This book collects a few dozen case studies, each one describing a different patient of Dr. Sacks, their mental issues and treatment (if possible), as well as providing postscripts on many of the patients.

            We humans seem to go through life thinking that our “self,” our “identity” is a rigid entity.  People talk about how they have been the same person and liked the same things, their entire lives.  They do this without realizing that not only is the physical body not the same from birth to death, but that the mental self is constantly being changed.  Sometimes this happens for the better through personal growth, or life-altering experiences that force one to expand one’s consciousness in ways never done before.  Other times, it is the trauma of an automobile accident, or a tumor in the brain, or a bacterial infection of the spine that alters one’s reality and changes who you are.

            Dr. Sacks divides the case studies up into different sections.  One of the sections details people who suffered cognitive/emotional/mental losses to their faculties.  Others describe patients who seem to have gained more sensation/knowledge/capability than what is otherwise considered normal.  A third section discusses patients whose brain trauma/disease affects their ability to understand their place in time, forcing them to relive old, buried memories as if they were happening now.  This is for some a beautiful thing, and for others a horrible curse.  The last section of this book deals with Dr. Sacks mentally retarted patients who exhibit deeply unusual mental capabilities, such as the analysis of prime numbers, the ability to memorize vast amounts of data eiditically but without any intellectual or emotional connection to the data, or the prodigious talents of an artistic virtuoso, all this in spite of their sometimes crippling retardation.

            This book was written over 30 years ago.  Dr. Sacks talks at length about the deep need to understand these brain disorders, especially the ones that cannot be empirically tested and explored.  He feels that much of neurology at the time was concerned with the nuts and bolts of the brain without being able to explore the essence of mind that makes us humans.  It is through sharing these case histories that he hoped other researchers would be enticed to work in this field, to treat and help those whose minds are damaged but whose inherent humanity deserves respect and love.  Some of these stories are deeply sad.  Others shine a light on the wonders that simple companionship and care can bring forth in the care of people who have suffered what is essentially a destruction of their personal self.  It is a great book and I am glad that people like Dr. Sacks exist and do the work they do. 

(This book can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking HERE )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )