Critique 5 – Schizophrenia Part 2
Critique: “Bizarrely, Jaynes speculates that schizophrenia itself is an evolutionary adaptation, conferring certain alleged advantages on sufferers. But surely, from a survival and reproductive standpoint, it’s more advantageous to see the real world rather than a hallucinated one.”
Response: Jaynes accurately states that there is a genetic basis for schizophrenia, and discusses evidence for traits associated with schizophrenia that may convey evolutionary advantages (such as greater stamina, sensory perception, etc.). For a related discussion, see Tim Crow, “Schizophrenia as the price that homo sapiens pays for language.” Here Robinson misleadingly implies that Jaynes suggests that being in a delusional state is advantageous to being in a rational state. He is either being intentionally deceptive and setting up a straw man to bolster his weak argument, or he is again confused and is equating the bicameral mind with schizophrenia, which Jaynes suggests is a vestige of the bicameral mind (similar to his confusing hypnosis as a vestige of the bicameral mind with the bicameral mind in Critique 4). I have also previously refuted this misconception on the “Myths vs. Facts” page.
Jaynes argues that the bicameral mind had a functional role prior to the development of introspective consciousness (to focus attention and as a form of social control); what is often termed schizophrenia (or more specifically, the auditory hallucinations and other phenomena commonly associated with the label of schizophrenia), is a vestige of this former mentality (or a “partial relapse”) in a modern, conscious person. They are two different things, and Jaynes is quite clear on this issue: “…the relapse is only partial. The learnings that make up a subjective consciousness are powerful and never totally suppressed.”
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that auditory hallucinations are in fact a vestige of the bicameral mind: that they often comment on or command behavior, that they are often of religious or political leaders, that they emanate from the language areas of the non-dominant hemisphere and are perceived by the language areas in the dominant hemisphere (the neurological model for the bicameral mind), etc. I discuss this evidence in much greater detail in both Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness and The Julian Jaynes Collection.
Learn about about Julian Jaynes’s theory by reading our latest book, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory.