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.
"Given that there are no references to conscious thinking in the Iliad, but an abundance of them in the Odyssey, Jaynes concluded that consciousness evolved in the period between the creation of the two epics."
"Jaynes believed that it was possible to see, from a careful and unbiased examination of documents like Homer's Iliad and the earlier parts of the Old Testament, that the supposedly conscious actions of the individuals described in those documents were results of a set of causal processes that were very dissimilar to those that are usually effective in today's world."
"According to philosopher and psychologist Julian Jaynes, it is the structure of the human brain itself that accounts for humanity's persistent yearning for a lost, more perfect union."
"I interpret this hypothetical fall of man to be the groping of newly conscious men to narratize what has happened to them, the loss of divine voices and assurances. — Julian Jaynes"
"In antiquity, the Near East crawled with demons. Speaking specifically of Mesopotamia, the psychologist and anthropologist Julian Jaynes wrote, 'The very air ... became darkened with them,' a 'decaying civilization as black with demons as a piece of rotting meat with flies.'"
"...Psychologist Julian Jaynes sees consciousness as a learned process that originated somewhere in the second millennium B.C. when humans finally realized that the voices inside their heads were not the gods speaking to them but their own internalized speech."
"The late psychologist Julian Jaynes likened consciousness to 'asking a flashlight in a dark room to look around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.'"
"Because a physical space in the world can always be returned to, ... we feel irrationally, somehow certain, impossibly certain, that we should be able to return again to some often unfinished relationship ... back in the imagined inexistent space of the past. — Julian Jaynes"
"Julian Jaynes's theories for the nature of self-awareness, introspection, and consciousness have replaced the assumption of their almost ethereal uniqueness with explanations that could initiate the next change in paradigm for human thought."
"And whatever may be thought of Julian Jaynes's thesis about auditory hallucinations, there can be no doubt that religious revelation has frequently taken the form of hearing voices speaking in humanly comprehensible terms about empirically observable matters."
"Jaynes claims that reflexive thought and thinking about one's self was not possible until the development of language, intercultural travel and commerce."
"Whether or not you find merit in Jaynes's theory, he presents massive scholarly evidence for a divided human brain that fails to differentiate where its ideas come from, and hence exhibits the mental susceptibility to 'supernatural' influences."
"'Few questions have endured longer or traversed a more perplexing history than this, the problem of consciousness and its place in nature,' says Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist."
"Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, offered the provocative and highly controversial hypothesis that human beings were, in fact, precisely in this position until relatively recently in their history."
"The Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes wrote: 'Few questions have endured longer or traversed a more perplexing history than this, the problem of consciousness and its place in nature ... Something about it keeps returning, not taking a solution.'"
"Jaynes presents the idea that modern consciousness is of relatively recent origin and that earlier man had a bicameral mind, one chamber of which literally spoke to the other when decisions or thoughtful action was needed."
"Julian Jaynes has offered a (controversial) interpretation of selfhood in these times — which lasted longest in their western and northern instantiations."
"Using the writings of Homer as one primary source of evidence, the psychologist Julian Jaynes has argued that ancient people actually did hear or experience the voices of deities in their minds. ... Their minds were more a multiplicity of wills and personalities than a singular voice."
"One classic example of this type of social change concerns the hearing of the voices of spirits — or gods or goddesses — in one's mind. Several thousand years ago, such experiences may have been the norm. ... This is the theory presented in a book I read at this time by Julian Jaynes."
"Julian Jaynes ... places this change in the later part of the second millennium B.C. However, Jaynes is not talking about consciousness in general but self-consciousness or ego consciousness."
