“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Abraham Maslow Building a house requires tools and building materials. Put hammers, saws, and levels together with lumber, concrete, and nails, and we have a habitable edifice. Materials do not, obviously, spontaneously build themselves in...

How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems How the family has related to nonfamilial social spheres of existence involves what ways human history has unfolded on a grand scale down through the millennia. In the prehistorical period, encountering ...

Quite interesting. In my book on ancient Egypt, I point out how apparently people could "smell" the gods; presumably this was a type of hallucination. I think I mentioned to this group that twice, out of the blue, I hallucinated the smell of saguaro cacti (I lived in the southwest for 10 y...

I propose two diametrically-opposed perspectives on the nature of hallucinations. The first is the mainstream view held by most psychiatrists, mental health care providers, and researchers: Hallucinations signal brain disease or neurological dysfunction of some sort and are themselves pathological. ...

Sensed Presences as “Perceptionless Hallucinations”: The Invisible Company of “Supernatural Beings” in the Ancient World May Be Overlooked At the margins of mainstream psychology stand a family of anomalous experiences, e.g., spirit possession, hypnosis, prophetic frenzy, imaginary playmates, out-of...

Jaynes devoted a chapter to spirit possession, something widely practiced in Haiti. So he would appreciate the connection to Vodou. Yes, indeed, you're right that to understand Jaynes, we have to "invoke thousands-of-years-old history to explain it, including ancient religious beliefs that have...

I was wondering if group members would share their opinions about how best to describe the Jaynesian agenda. One of the biggest challenges many face when trying to intellectually digest Jaynes is coming to terms with his decidedly interdisciplinary approach. He integrated very different bodies of kn...

Signs of early humankind’s great preoccupationobsession?with death are everywhere, from simple neolithic graves filled with a few artifacts to monumental mortuary architecture and everything else in between: massive megalithic tombs and passage graves, catacombs honeycombing the underground for mi...

The word “consciousness” imparts a mystique that makes otherwise cautious and careful researchers jump to unwarranted conclusions. For many consciousness is a topic of mystery and fascination. Given its promiscuous mention in academic and nonacademic writings, consciousness, for not a few, is like t...

Let us start with a simple and straightforward claim: All human societies exhibit or have exhibited religiosity. This is a fact so solid, so obvious, that it usually remains unchallenged. We are so familiar with the historical landscape of religion that we do not question the utter strangeness of th...

A prevailing premise is that the origin of religion is a mystery in desperate need of explanation. Humans, after all, are inherently rational and logical, so why would they engage in something so irrational, illogical, and superstitious as religion? But it is the emergence of Enlightenment science a...

By the early 300s CE perhaps only 5% of the Roman Empire’s population was Christian. But Constantine’s “conversion” in 312 CE initiated a gradual spiritual transformation of the Empire. In 380 CE the Edict of Thessalonica proclaimed Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, grantin...

Some question Jaynesian psychology by asking “how could everyone hear the same hallucinated voices or see the same visions?” Several responses resolve this problem. First, most of the time individuals would not hear hallucinations; they only hallucinated when facing novel or relatively stress-induci...

Jaynesian Psychology: Theories in Search of a Paradigm Shift Science must guard against preconceptions, since seemingly objective research results and conclusions can be subtlety influenced by personal biases and the subjective worldview of individual researchers. But in his immensely influential Th...

How the Family Gave Birth to Religion: Kinship, Demographic Scale, and Bicameral Mentality In the 1967 movie "Our Mother's House" seven children decide not to tell anyone that their bed-ridden mother died, afraid of what might happen to them if they do. They bury their mother in their back...