Final Thoughts
In writing this article, Frank Robinson clearly did not do his homework. He is apparently oblivious to the fact that Jaynes’s neurological model for the bicameral mind has been shown to be accurate by dozens of brain imaging studies over the past 14 years (for the relevant studies, see my chapter in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness and my Introduction to The Julian Jaynes Collection), as he makes no mention of it whatsoever in his article – or any other new evidence for Jaynes’s theory for that matter. He doesn’t seem to be familiar with the last three decades of research on auditory hallucinations in various populations, command hallucinations that direct behavior, or the higher than previously known incidence of imaginary companions in children – despite the fact that I’ve conveniently organized all of this information in two books as well as the Supporting Research section of this website. In writing this article, wasn’t Robinson curious to learn how Jaynes’s theory has developed over the past 35 years since it was first published? – a literature review is one of the most basic principles in academic writing. Surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to be the case – we see no evidence that he’s read anything other than Jaynes’s original book (his single reference is to a quote by Richard Dawkins from The God Delusion).
Following in the footsteps of previous critics of Jaynes’s theory, Frank Robinson fails to offer alternate explanations for any of the otherwise mysterious phenomena Jaynes’s theory explains: the widespread occurrence of auditory hallucinations in normals today; command hallucinations; imaginary companions in children; monumental mortuary architecture; a right temporal lobe locus of auditory hallucinations, a feeling of a sensed presence, and religiosity; the ubiquity of gods and idols in the ancient world; the shift from visitation or bicameral dreams to conscious dreams that coincides with the development of consciousness; etc. For more on this subject, see: Ten Questions Critics Fail to Answer.
The larger lesson we can learn from Frank Robinson’s article is that subjects that we are not entirely familiar with are generally more complex than we first realize. We must resist the common impulse to make snap judgments and feel the illusion of mastery for subjects we don’t fully understand. By prematurely making up our mind about a topic we are unfamiliar with, we risk the tendency to oversimplify and to only seek evidence that confirms are existing beliefs.
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.