New Member, Neurologist
Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2006 3:15 pm
I am a neurologist, recently retired after 30 years of clinical practice and teaching. Despite my interest in cognition and memory, Jaynes' work was unknown to me. He is accorded 1 1/2 pages of mention in Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion. Dawkins is a fine evolutionary biologist, but like many scientists who become public intellectuals commenting on culture (such as Noam Chomsky, Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling), he is best advised to keep his day job. I am indebted to him, however, for introducing me to Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness... may be the most original work of serious scholarship I know. Two recent books complement Jaynes' arguments:
1. Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. This is a neurophysiological, psychological and cultural examiniation of religious practice. He identifies brain "modules" that function in this capacity, most notably right temporal/parietal lobe.
2. Creative Genius by Nancy Andriesson. She is one of the leading investigators of the mind, as an academic psychiatrist at U of Iowa. She relies on PET scanning and clinical data to argue convincingly that genius does not gestate great insights. Rather, fully developed concepts are presented to the genius' conscious mind instantaneously.
Jaynes' brilliant insights resonate with me in part due to my clinical experience. Over my career I encountered perhaps 5 or 6 patients with low grade right temporal neoplasms who exhibited Jaynsian profiles. Shared characteristics included hyper-religiosity, perceived divine inspiration and communication, and mistrust of medical recommendations. Anticonvulsant therapy was beneficial in some cases, although one patient, an R.N., discontinued medication due to loss of her voices on treatment. Unfortunately she steadfastly declined surgery and failed to maintain follow up, only to return a decade later. By that time, her low grade oligodendroglioma had undergone malignant change. By this time, treatment measures proved inadequate. As I recall, this small group of patients all had lesions of medial temporal lobe. Several had symptoms alleviated by neurosurgical resection. Curiously, I cannot recall a similar such syndrome in stroke or head injury patients. I did encounter one patient who recovered from herpes simplex encephalitis with post encephalitic seizure disorder. HSVE preferentially damages temporal lobes. As I well remember, the man described had a right medial temporal residual lesion with a "Jaynesian" syndrome.
Further observations to follow, including published and unpublished cases of transient global amnesia (TGA) which are illuminating.
I commend Andriessen's and Boyer's works to any admirer of Jaynes' formulation.
1. Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. This is a neurophysiological, psychological and cultural examiniation of religious practice. He identifies brain "modules" that function in this capacity, most notably right temporal/parietal lobe.
2. Creative Genius by Nancy Andriesson. She is one of the leading investigators of the mind, as an academic psychiatrist at U of Iowa. She relies on PET scanning and clinical data to argue convincingly that genius does not gestate great insights. Rather, fully developed concepts are presented to the genius' conscious mind instantaneously.
Jaynes' brilliant insights resonate with me in part due to my clinical experience. Over my career I encountered perhaps 5 or 6 patients with low grade right temporal neoplasms who exhibited Jaynsian profiles. Shared characteristics included hyper-religiosity, perceived divine inspiration and communication, and mistrust of medical recommendations. Anticonvulsant therapy was beneficial in some cases, although one patient, an R.N., discontinued medication due to loss of her voices on treatment. Unfortunately she steadfastly declined surgery and failed to maintain follow up, only to return a decade later. By that time, her low grade oligodendroglioma had undergone malignant change. By this time, treatment measures proved inadequate. As I recall, this small group of patients all had lesions of medial temporal lobe. Several had symptoms alleviated by neurosurgical resection. Curiously, I cannot recall a similar such syndrome in stroke or head injury patients. I did encounter one patient who recovered from herpes simplex encephalitis with post encephalitic seizure disorder. HSVE preferentially damages temporal lobes. As I well remember, the man described had a right medial temporal residual lesion with a "Jaynesian" syndrome.
Further observations to follow, including published and unpublished cases of transient global amnesia (TGA) which are illuminating.
I commend Andriessen's and Boyer's works to any admirer of Jaynes' formulation.