1.4. The Bicameral Mind
WE ARE conscious human beings. We are trying to understand human nature. The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us. And since we are conscious, and wish to understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our experience, as we saw was the nature of understanding in Chapter 2. And this is what I shall attempt in the present chapter.
THE BICAMERAL MAN
Very little can be said to make the man side of it seem familiar to us, except by referring back to the first chapter, to remember all the things we do without the aid of consciousness. But how unsatisfying is a list of nots! Somehow we still wish to identify with Achilles. We still feel that there must, there absolutely must be something he feels inside. What we are trying to do is to invent a mind-space and a world of analog behaviors in him just as we do in ourselves and our contemporaries. And this invention, I say, is not valid for Greeks of this period.
Perhaps a metaphor of something close to that state might be helpful. In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness.1 In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of consciousness perhaps. My hand, foot, and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk. And I am not conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other topics.
Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him and his action would be an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever. And now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not do what you and I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do. He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him nonconsciously what to do.
THE BICAMERAL GOD
But what were such auditory hallucinations like? Some people find it difficult to even imagine that there can be mental voices that are heard with the same experiential quality as externally produced voices. After all, there is no mouth or larynx in the brain!
Whatever brain areas are utilized, it is absolutely certain that such voices do exist and that experiencing them is just like hearing actual sound. Further, it is highly probable that the bicameral voices of antiquity were in quality very like such auditory hallucinations in contemporary people. They are heard by many completely normal people to varying degrees. Often it is in times of stress, when a parent’s comforting voice may be heard.
Or in the midst of some persisting problem. In my late twenties, living alone on Beacon Hill in Boston, I had for about a week been studying and autistically pondering some of the problems in this book, particularly the question of what knowledge is and how we can know anything at all. My convictions and misgivings had been circling about through the sometimes precious fogs of epistemologies, finding nowhere to land. One afternoon I lay down in intellectual despair on a couch. Suddenly, out of an absolute quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my upper right which said, “Include the knower in the known!” It lugged me to my feet absurdly exclaiming, “Hello?” looking for whoever was in the room. The voice had had an exact location. No one was there! Not even behind the wall where I sheepishly looked. I do not take this nebulous profundity as divinely inspired, but I do think that it is similar to what was heard by those who have in the past claimed such special selection.
Such voices may be heard by perfectly normal people on a more continuing basis. After giving lectures on the theory in this book, I have been surprised at members of the audience who have come up afterwards to tell me of their voices. One young biologist’s wife said that almost every morning as she made the beds and did the housework, she had long, informative, and pleasant conversations with the voice of her dead grandmother in which the grandmother’s voice was actually heard. This came as something of a shock to her alarmed husband, for she had never previously mentioned it, since “hearing voices” is generally supposed to be a sign of insanity. Which, in distressed people, of course, it is. But because of the dread surrounding this disease, the actual incidence of auditory hallucinations in normal people on such a continuing basis is not known.
The only extensive study was a poor one done in the last century in England.2 Only hallucinations of normal people when they were in good health were counted. Of 7717 men, 7.8 percent had experienced hallucinations at some time. Among 7599 women, the figure was 12 percent. Hallucinations were most frequent in subjects between twenty and twenty-nine years of age, the same age incidentally at which schizophrenia most com- monly occurs. There were twice as many visual hallucinations as auditory. National differences were also found. Russians had twice as many hallucinations as the average. Brazilians had even more because of a very high incidence of auditory hallucinations. Just why is anyone’s conjecture. One of the deficiencies of this study, however, is that in a country where ghosts are exciting gossip, it is difficult to have accurate criteria of what is actually seen and heard as an hallucination. There is an important need for further and better studies of this sort.3
Hallucinations in Psychotics
It is of course in the distress of schizophrenia that auditory hallucinations similar to bicameral voices are most common and best studied. This is now a difficult matter. At a suspicion of hallucinations, distressed psychotics are given some kind of chemotherapy such as Thorazine, which specifically eliminates hallucinations. This procedure is at least questionable, and may be done not for the patient, but for the hospital which wishes to eliminate this rival control over the patient. But it has never been shown that hallucinating patients are more intractable than others. Indeed, as judged by other patients, hallucinating schizophrenics are more friendly, less defensive, more likable, and have more positive expectancies toward others in the hospital than nonhallucinating patients.4 And it is possible that even when the effect is apparently negative, hallucinated voices may be helpful to the healing process.
At any rate, since the advent of chemotherapy the incidence of hallucinatory patients is much less than it once was. Recent studies have revealed a wide variation among different hospitals, ranging from 50 percent of psychotics in the Boston City Hospital, to 30 percent in a hospital in Oregon5 and even lower in hospitals with long-term patients under considerable sedation. Thus, in what follows, I am leaning more heavily on some of the older literature in the psychoses, such as Bleuler’s great classic, Dementia Praecox, in which the hallucinatory aspect of schizophrenia in particular is more clearly seen.6 This is important if we are to have an idea of the nature and range of the bicameral voices heard in the early civilizations.