Below is a sampling of the thousands of books that cite or refer to Julian Jaynes's theory, showing its wide-ranging, ongoing influence — some of them may surprise you. Inclusion in this list does not constitute an endorsement by the Julian Jaynes Society.
"There was a time, Julian Jaynes suggests ... when we heard voices inside the head, not backchat from a familiar brain, we thought, but otherworldly beings telling us what to do."
"According to Jaynes, it is a pre-conscious state when the human mind is unaware of its awareness. It forms the basis of idolatry in which the large eyes of Middle Eastern idols trigger one hemisphere of the brain to speak to the other hemisphere making the idolater believe that he is hearing a divine voice commanding him to act and instructing him on how to act."
"In the 1970s psychologist Julian Jaynes offered the startling thesis that people of the Homeric era did not possess a personal consciousness that we would recognize as such."
"A fascinating alternative account of how our ancestors coped with such situations is to be found in Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in teh Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."
"... Jaynes surmises that the early Classical mind, still bicameral, shows us the coming-into-consciousness of the modern human, shows our double-minded awareness as, originally, a haunted hearing of voices."
"By 'then' in the first line [Jaynes] means in the period of the breakdown ('the internal Phase II') of the so-called bicameral mind of Phase I, in which hallucinated voices of gods instigate all human actions. ... Jaynes equates phrenes in the Iliad with respiratory apparatus or lungs... "
"This view of consciousness is also consistent with a remarkable book on the emergence of human consciousness by Julian Jaynes. ... He proposed that early human beings operated entirely on the basis of automatic proceses. Rulers gave commands and the brain repeated them to keep the person carrying them out."
"Julian Jaynes stated ... that the 'voice of divinity' that prophets and seers have heard down through the ages is simply the brain talking to itself. According to his thesis, humankind existed for thousands of centuries, functioning ant-like colonies and being directed by hallucinatory voices that survive today in schizophrenics."
"According to Jaynes, because the ancient Greeks had no sense of 'I' with which to locate their mental processes, their inner thoughts were perceived as coming from the gods, which is why the characters in the Iliad find themselves in frequent communication with supernatural entities."
"Jaynes noted the similarity between the ancient Greeks' experiences, and the experiences of modern-day schizophrenia patients, and it was this aspect of the book that had such a dramatic impact on Marius Romme's patient."
"...The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind created a minor sensation with an astonishingly quixotic and original thesis: human consciousness originated in ancient Greece sometime between Homer and the Athenian Golden Age."
"Julian Jaynes speaks to this issue quite eloquently when he writes, "It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.'"
"And during my wanderings in this dark wood, I bumped into Julian Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind. ... I didn't need to be told that this theory must be highly controversial. But it explains a lot, including the ghostly voices of schizophrenics and the heavenly visions of epileptics, to say nothing of the rampaging rages of the heroes and prophets of yore."
"The most recent origin for consciousness was suggested by American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in his controversial book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Going back 3000 years to the earliest written records, he searched for clues to the presence or absence of a subjective conscious mind."
"... Scientific interest in [Jaynes's] work has been re-awakened by the consistent findings of right-sided activation patterns in the brain, as retrieved with the aid of neuroimaging studies in individuals with verbal auditory hallucinations."
"A 1976 book by Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, theorizes that our earlier, more primitive, brains, prior to 1000 B.C., were more like the brains of today's schizophrenics or mystics, seeing visions, hearing voices — i.e. sensing a presence."
"Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, places the beginning of self-consciousness in Western civilization at around 1400 BC, during the Minoan period of Greece."
"Jaynes has developed a rather more elaborate theory of the suppression of hallucinatory experiences which, he suggests, paralleled the development of what we think of as consciousness and the ability to reflect on our own behavior and mental processes."
"According to Bruno Snell and Julian Jaynes, the identities of the ancient Greeks experiencing their impulses as autonomous, divine forces in relation to which they were largely powerless. The movement from this disjointed sense of self (impulsive identity) to a more or less continuous and unified sense of self (imperial identity) was long and arduous, and is both modelled and chronicled in Homer's epics."
"Great minds have been trying to explain consciousness for centuries ... Julian Jaynes called it the 'analog I'. The power to name some central locus 'me' seems to give intensity and focus to each individual human drama."
"Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argued that there was something qualitatively different about the human mind in ancient civilization. On first reading, Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever written, but Jaynes may have been on to something." (Gregory Cochran)
"Julian Jaynes, a peculiar but wonderful man, was a research associate at Princeton. Some people said he was a genius; I didn't know him well enough to know." (Martin Seligman)
"[Julian Jaynes] pointed to the many biblical and literary references to earlier peoples hearing voices or seeing visions, which they interpreted as messages or visitaitons from God or the gods. In fact, Jaynes believed, they were communications from the other side of the brain. "
Creativity and Consciousness: Philosophical And Psychological Dimensions
Jerzy Brzezinski, Santo Di Nuovo, Tadeusz Marek, Tomasz Maruszewski (eds.)
"To examine the genesis of consciousness, Jaynes proposed that we examine the earliest writings of mankind, including cuneiform and hieroglyphics ... After investigating ancient Greek texts, Jaynes found no evidence of consciousness. He found no decision making, no introspection, and no remembering."
"Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes's depiction of the bicameral mind and consciousness as a relatively recent behavior of our species may be illuminating. I am struck by his idea that modern human minds are vestigial glimpses of the way things were, neurologically speaking."
"[Jaynes] suggested that consciousness — that is, awareness of one's self as a person and personality — did not evolve steadily or even early in humankind's history. Jaynes suggested that what we nowadays regard as 'our own thoughts' were originally perceived by the person as voices coming from the spirits of their dead ancestors."
"For an interesting theory about the origins of prophetic speech, based in brain physiology, and of the evolutionary steps that may have contributed to the 'end of prophecy,' see Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."
"Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. A theory of consciousness that may be especially interesting to persons with bipolar disorder."
"Logic is how we ought to think if objective truth is our goal – and the everyday world is very little concerned with objective truth. Logic is the science of justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. — Julian Jaynes"
"You're just a message from the other half of my brain. A throwback to atavistic times, when the left brain was not in charge. Julian Jaynes proved it, and I believe him. He was a psychologist, in case you don't know, and my brother and I were named after him."
"Behind her, Zora and Locke were building impressive sand castles with Mona Veazie's twins, Julia and Jay, named for the psychologist Julian Jaynes, one of Mona's heroes."
"Jaynes in a study of the Iliad and the Odyssey analysed the nature of the voices of the gods and suggested that in the ancient world, voice hearing was a normal way that people made important decisions. Voice hearers have found this book helpful."
"For psychologist Julian Jaynes, the matter is quite clear: 'It is generally agreed that the ancient Egyptian language ... was concrete from first to last. To maintain that it is expressing abstract thoughts would seem to me an intrusion of the modern idea that men have always been the same.'"
"In his book Julian Jaynes proposes that ancient consciousness was radically different from modern consciousness. He suggests that ancient human beings had no sense of an interior, directing self."
"Thus Julian Jaynes describes Greeks becoming conscious when — in between the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey, they become more reflective." (Ned Block)
"She remembered a book she'd seen in her mother's office back in Columbus: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by a man named Julian Jaynes."
"Julian Jaynes has argued, persuasively, that its capacities for self-exhortation and self-reminding are a prerequisite for the sorts of elaborating and long-term bouts of self-control without which agriculture, building projects, and other civilized and civilizing activities could not be organized." (Daniel Dennett)
"Just as Julian Jaynes's ancient cultures, where the internally heard speech of the gods was prompted by props like the corpse of a chieftain or a statue, so, too, our internalized media echoes are triggered by products, props, or situations in the environment." (quoting Joyce Nelson)
"In this book [Jaynes] argues that in ancient times, prior to about the first millennium B.C., the right hemisphere of the brain had a language center which functioned quite independently of the left."
"According to Julian Jaynes, 'it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things we do, but who were not conscious at all.' If this sounds outrageous to you, it is probably because you are taking the word 'conscious' in what I will call the baseline sense."
"Inspired by both split-brain research and his readings of ancient texts, the neuropsychologist Julian Jaynes developed a theory of the evolution of human consciousness based on the increasing ability of the left hemipshere to inhibit input from the right."
"See Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, for a brilliant thesis that accounts for the loss of widespread individual contact with the numinous."
"A stab in the direction of speculating about how consciousness emerged in human beings was made by Jaynes, who ascribes it to the connection between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, which he speculates occurred only about 3,000 years ago."
