Related Quotes
"[Jaynes] has one of the clearest and most perspicuous defenses of the top-down approach [to consciousness] that I have ever come across."
− Daniel Dennett, Professor of Philosophy,
Tufts University, in Brainchildren
"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."
− Michael A. Persinger, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience,
Laurentian University, in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness
"The weight of original thought in it is so great that it makes me uneasy for the author's well-being: the human mind is not built to support such a burden."
− David C. Stove (1927-1994), Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney
"The bold hypothesis of the bicameral mind is an intellectual shock to the reader, but whether or not he ultimately accepts it he is forced to entertain it as a possibility. Even if he marshals arguments against it he has to think about matters he has never thought of before, or, if he has thought of them, he must think about them in contexts and relationships that are strikingly new."
− Ernest R. Hilgard (1904-2001), Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
"Genes affecting personality, reproductive strategies, cognition, are all able to change significantly over few-millennia time scales if the environment favors such change — and this includes the new environments we have made for ourselves, things like new ways of making a living and new social structures. ... There is evidence that such change has occurred. ... On first reading, Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever written, but Jaynes may have been on to something."
− Gregory Cochran, Consultant in adaptive optics and an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah
"It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between ..."
− Richard Dawkins, Oxford University, in The God Delusion
"This book and this man's ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century. It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."
− William Harrington, in Columbus Dispatch
"Having just finished The Origin of Consciousness, I myself feel something like Keats' Cortez staring at the Pacific, or at least like the early reviewers of Darwin or Freud. I'm not quite sure what to make of this new territory; but its expanse lies before me and I am startled by its power."
− Edward Profitt, in Commonweal
"When Julian Jaynes...speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence..."
− John Updike, in The New Yorker
"He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior."
− Raymond Headlee, in American Journal of Psychiatry
"If Jaynes's theories are right, he could become the Darwin of the mind."
− Science Digest
"[Jaynes's] description of this new consciousness is one of the best I have come across."
− Morris Berman, Ph.D., in Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality
"I believe Jaynes is justified when he insists that the Greek revolution in thinking did not amount to a mere change of emphasis or of subject matter, or a tidying up of certain previously loose ends, but was nothing less than the development of a whole new mental faculty or organ."
− David Martel Johnson, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, York University
"Love Jaynes or hate him, his theory remains, after 30 years, indisputably the single most comprehensive, wide-ranging, imaginative hypothesis available."
− Bob Myers, Numenware
