The Fallacy of “Animal Consciousness” Is Reflected in Popular Scientific Journalism

It always astounds me when people express surprise at the psychological sophistication of animals. Their amazement seems premised on the assumption that an organism either has a mind or does not. A misguided corollary of this idea sometimes heard is that if an organism possesses a mind, it therefore must be endowed with human-like (or at least a near-human type of) conscious interiority. The closer an animal is to the human family (e.g., chimpanzees) the more hope there is that we can communicate with it. And of course canine companions and feline friends that moved in with human families many millennia ago are believed to share human emotions.

What Is “Mind” Anyway?

Let’s begin with a discussion of mind to get our theoretical bearings. Mind has two aspects that need to be appreciated when assessing a particular organism’s psychological abilities: Internal and external. The former describes an animal’s neurological apparatus (in which mental capabilities are grounded) and aptic structures (Jaynes’s term for instincts). How to measure an organism’s mental capabilities is debatable. We might start with the number of neurons: 200 for a tardigrade, 2,253,000,000 for a dog, 33,400,000,000 for a gorilla, 86,000,000,000 for a human, 257,000,000,000 for an elephant. Actually an investigation of an organism’s brain size is not a very good measurement of mental capabilities, since neurostructures and interconnections count for a lot more when it comes to what is commonly called intelligence (the current best predictor is the number of neurons in the forebrain).

Matters become even more complicated when we take into account how neurological hardware interacts with the external aspect of a mind. Here “external” means the environment into which an organism is born and presumably for which it has been evolutionarily designed. Besides providing nutrients, ecological surroundings trigger aptic structures and epigenetic processes. A complex neuro-ecological dynamic exists between the world and neurostructures, and the species in question determines what type of interaction transpires between its neurosystem and its ecological niche. Especially for Homo sapiens the external aspect plays a crucial role in survival and adaptation. While some animals do use tools, on this score modern humans are par excellence implement handlers; they not only utilize tools, they also manufacture them. People do more than just manipulate their environment; they build and repurpose their surroundings in an astounding manner light years ahead of any other known organism.

The Myth of “Animal Consciousness”

Popular scientific articles regularly appear with headlines conveying astonishment that animals might have minds and even consciousness. In “What is consciousness like for other animals and when did it evolve?” it is suggested that observable behavior, such as play, requires some form of conscious awareness, and that because animals engage in relatively complex activities, they must possess an “inner life.” Again, animals undoubtedly have complex minds, but no evidence exists to indicate they are conscious. Some researchers make gigantic leaps of faith without any real support. Consider “The Surprisingly Sophisticated Mind of an Insect.” This is a wonderful example of what’s wrong in certain quarters of comparative psychology. The assumption is that if an organism has a neurological apparatus, such as an ant’s 250,000 neurons, it has a mind, and if a mind, then conscious (whatever that is; it’s not clearly defined in this article so it could be perception, reacting to environmental stimuli, cognitive representations, mental imagery, etc.). In this article we learn that “‘Animals need to know what their movements are and what is happening in the world’ … That gives rise to an experience, which is the fundamental building block of consciousness.” Claiming that “experience” equals conscious is not scientifically useful. We also learn that “Even bacteria know kinds of pain and pleasure — they are hardwired to swim toward some signals but away from others.” The article states that it’s anthropocentric to assume that humans are the only conscious creatures. So animals, even insects, must have it too. The irony is that article’s argument is actually anthropocentric since it is projecting human consciousness into animals. To be clear, I agree with this article’s title that insect minds are sophisticated; but that does not mean they are the same as human minds any more than because I have ears and a nose my hearing and olfactory abilities are on par with my dog’s.

In “Assume that animals have feelings too, say cognitive biologists” it is pointed out that while researchers believe animals have emotions (basic physio-behavioral responses related to adaptation and survival), the question of whether they possess “feelings” is more debatable. While the emotional life of animals (in particular mammals) is more much subtle and complex than we often assume, it is highly doubtful that animals have “feelings” per Jaynes (i.e., consciously interiorized affects). The problem is how we define “feelings” (here we can see how our current terminology is inadequate for the scientific challenges at hand). In “A Two-tiered Theory of Emotions” Jaynes described feelings when he argued that the “new human capacity” — consciousness — stretches out affects over an imaginary spatialized time. This allows us to “dwell on past behaviors or on possible future behaviors and respond to them as if they were presently occurring, with copies of the affects themselves.” There’s no ethological evidence that animals can do this.

Minds and Mirrors

An oft-cited piece of “evidence” that at least primates possess near-human consciousness are accounts of them reacting to themselves in mirrors. But a world of difference separates stimulus-response cognition (a monkey “recognizing” its body in a mirror) versus a person conceptually “recognizing” his or her self. Despite their psychological sophistication, a primate lacks the complex, convoluted, highly symbolic understanding of self that humans acquire over years of socialization. The reason is simple, but one apparently lost on some highly trained people who should know better: A primate is not neurologically equipped to be enculturated like a person. This means that any mental representation of self they might possess operates only in a cognitively primitive, elemental dimension by human standards; the representation simply cannot symbolically recruit other associations to form semantic networks that undergird narratives, definitions of selfhood informed by collective experiences, linguo-conceptualizations, etc. Primate minds are not human minds, any more than elephant trunks are human noses.

See also: Myth 9: “Gordon Gallup’s ‘mirror test’ measures consciousness”

How Jaynes Grappled with Describing This Word Illustrates What He Meant

For many (mis)interpreters of Jaynes, the word consciousness acts as blank canvas upon which they draw and impose their own definitions of what they assume Jaynes meant by this term. The result is serious misunderstanding and a distortion of his arguments.

How to clear up the confusion? The obvious place to start is to look for how Jaynes himself defined consciousness in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (pp. 55, 65‒66). These definitions are fleshed out in an essential but much overlooked section of his book in which Jaynes explains six features of consciousness (pp. 59‒65). In a 1990 Afterword to his book, Jaynes added two more features (I have expanded this list with several of my own features). It is also vital to note well what he did not mean by consciousness (pp. 27‒44). Another commonsensical thing to do is to carefully read Jaynes in his own words rather than getting him through second-hand accounts, reviews, commentaries, critiques, etc.

Examining Jaynes’s Own Words

An analysis of how Jaynes advanced his theories using other terminology besides “consciousness” reveals what this word meant to him. Several points stand out. First, the frequency of “subjective” is salient. Its cognates appear about one hundred times (Table 1). While not quite as precise as qualia (a philosophical term he did not use; it refers to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives), “subjective,” like qualia, denotes first-person, quasi-sensory experientiality (what I term introception to describe the conscious counterpart of perception). One is tempted to wonder what would have happened if Jaynes had used “subjective” rather than consciousness in his book title. I strongly suspect this would have aided readers in appreciating his arguments. With all due deference to Prof. Jaynes, consider the ring of The Origin of Subjectivity in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind or The Origin of Subjective Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Since we’re on the topic, other titles that come to mind are The Non-evolutionary Origins of Subjectivity, The Cultural Invention of Subjectivity, or The Historical Invention of Subjectivity.

Table 1. The Frequency of the Cognate “Subjective.”

Expression	Frequency
nonsubjective (dialogues)	1
nonsubjective manner	1
protosubjective	1
protosubjective consciousness	1
subconscious	2
subjective	4
subjective (phases in linguistic development)	4
subjective act	1
subjective age	2
subjective categories	1
subjective conscious man	2
subjective conscious mind	9
subjective consciousness	23
subjective era	3
subjective experience	1
subjective feelings	1
subjective groping	1
subjective identity	1
subjective men	1
subjective mentality	1
subjective mind-space	2
subjective outcroppings	1
subjective phenomena	1
subjective phenomenon (of spirit possession)	1
subjective sadness	1
subjective Saul	2
subjective side	1
subjective states	1
subjective thinking	1
subjective thought	3
subjective uncertainties	1
subjective view	1
subjective world	2
subjectively	1
subjectively conscious	1
subjectively conscious people	1
subjective-self	1
subjectivity	15
ultra-subjective Upanishads	1
unsubjective past	1
unsubjective times	1

The second point is Jaynes’s use of words that indicate the metaphorical meaning of interiority when attempting to conceptualize consciousness (33 expressions) (Table 2). Like subjectivity, the connotation of inner-ness caries a quasi-perceptual sense of an imaginary spatiality centered within the person. In my own writing I have introduced “conscious interiority” as a way to alert the reader that I am referring to Jaynes’s use of consciousness. Like introcosm (a word Jaynes used twice) “interiority” resonates with an inner, imagined location (incidentally, I have also employed the rococo “subjective introspectable self-awareness” whose wordiness is intended to drive home the meaning).

Table 2. The Frequency of Expressions Denoting “Interior.”

Expression	Frequency
inner experience	2
inner kingdoms	1
inner mind-space	1
inner space	1
“inner” worlds (conscious)	1
interior (spatial)	1
interior ‘space’	1
interior dialogues	1
interior mind-space	1
interior self/selves	2
interiority of consciousness	1
interiorization of attribution	1
introcosm	2
introspectable (what is)	2
introspection(s)	10
introspective data	1
introspective psychologists/psychology	2
introspectively	2

Finally, we should pay attention to how Jaynes modified nouns with “conscious,” creating compounds. Not infrequently he prefixed conscious with “subjective” (e.g., subjectively conscious, subjective conscious mind, subjective consciousness) (Table 3; the frequency of the adverbial form — “consciously” — and conscious sans a modified noun are not listed). 

Table 3. The Frequency of Compound Expressions with “Conscious.”

Expression	Frequency
conscious age	1
conscious archaism	1
conscious articulate	1
conscious attention	2
conscious automata (T. H. Huxley)	1
conscious automaton	1
conscious causations	1
conscious component	1
conscious concentration	1
conscious conception of time	1
conscious connotation	1
conscious contrition	1
conscious decision	1
conscious deduction	1
conscious desire	1
conscious entities	1
conscious experience	3
conscious expression	1
conscious faculties	1
conscious familiarity	1
conscious fantasy	1
conscious functioning	2
conscious future	1
conscious habit	1
conscious human (beings)	3
conscious imagery	1
conscious induction	1
conscious “inner” worlds	1
conscious landscape	1
conscious life	1
conscious lives	1
conscious logic	1
conscious man	5
conscious mechanism	1
conscious memory	1
conscious men	8
conscious mentality	1
conscious mind	10
conscious models	1
conscious narratization	2
conscious nonhallucinating robbers	1
conscious objects	1
conscious of consciousness	2
conscious people	2
conscious period(s)	3
conscious plans	1
conscious poet	2
conscious populace	1
conscious portions	1
conscious process	3
conscious psyche	1
conscious psychology	1
conscious reason(ing)	2
conscious recitation	1
conscious referrents	1
conscious reminiscence	1
conscious retrospection	1
conscious Saul	1
conscious self/selves	4
conscious self-control	1
conscious self-reflective men	1
conscious spatialization	1
conscious stage of mind	1
conscious subjective mind-space	1
conscious subjective word	1
conscious thought	2
conscious time	1
conscious way	2
conscious world	1

Other relevant terms Jaynes utilized are preconscious hypostases (sixteen times), preconscious innocence (once), preconscious mentality (twice), and preconscious mind (once). Note that he did not use preconscious in the Freudian sense. To describe consciousless cognition he used nonconscious ten times, nonconsciously once, unconscious 31 times, and unconsciously seven times. He uses consciousless expressions in the Freudian sense only in about two or three places. Other relevant terms that might be mentioned include aware (ten times), awareness (six times), and self-awareness (twice). Finally, he verbified the word conscious four times (“consciousized”).

Keep It Simple and Just Say Jaynesian Consciousness

When all is said and done, it remains a challenge to discuss with others a Jaynesian perspective when the most fundamental concept of his intellectual contribution — consciousness — is misunderstood. Jaynes was more than clear in his writings and lectures that he was talking about a specific form of mentation that is not perception, thinking, learning, and any other psychological processes commonly confused with consciousness. In any case, after much consideration this writer has concluded that, in order to preclude confusion and for the sake of clarity, it is probably advisable to rely on “Jaynesian consciousness” when debating with others about the merits of Jaynes’s hypotheses.  

But Breaking Jaynesian Psychology Down into Four Hypotheses Makes Things Easier

I first encountered Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind almost 45 years ago. Though the book made sense to me, I could see why people would reject its arguments. Nevertheless I assumed that once carefully explained, people may not agree but would at least be able to discern a certain logic behind Jaynesian psychology. How naïve I was.

It has been an uphill battle and many years later I am more realistic about convincing others of the validity of Jaynes’s arguments. In other words, I am not particularly hopeful that many people can be persuaded of what Jaynes had to say. To me what seems blindingly obvious is apparently not so clear to others. I hasten to add that this has nothing to do with one’s intelligence or academic accomplishments, since many well-credentialed commentators still regularly misinterpret Jaynes. Rather it involves the challenge of looking at matters from a different angle, such as interrogating the assumption that the ability to experience consciousness was evolutionarily baked into our neuroanatomy.  

Why should understanding Jaynes be so hard? Again, one does not have to agree with Jaynes. But before dismissing his ideas, we are obligated to first understand them before we critique them. There are numerous reasons why Jaynes is difficult to intellectually digest, but here I highlight two. The first and biggest obstacle concerns one word that has been rendered useless in both the academic and popular scientific literature: Consciousness. Jaynes clearly defines what he means by this term but this is apparently neglected for some reason, even by those who claim to have read his book. I will not discuss this issue here as it has been addressed in many other places. I will only point out that Jaynes is easy to give up on if you do not know what he meant by the single word “consciousness.”

Another deterrent is the sheer range of topics Jaynes covers. It is his adventurous tour through archaeology, linguistics, religious history, psychology, and neurology that many serious academics no doubt find off-putting. Audaciously delving into so many fields with which presumably the average reader is unfamiliar can be a hindrance. Truly he is not for the intellectually timorous, those who like bumper-sticker science (i.e., short and sweet), or the typical scholar who is trained to climb the ladder of academic success by specialization, subspecialization, etc., so that each individual tree is clearly seen standing but the expansive canopy of the forest disappears.

We might also add that perhaps Jaynes’s conversational writing style comes off as simplifying what are regarded as complicated issues. But don’t let his informal and relaxed tone fool you; he sets the reader up for startling conclusions driven by a relentless, highly organized line of reasoning, theoretical clarity and coherency, and a boldness of thought rarely matched in much of the scholarly psychological literature.  

The Four Hypotheses: Making the Jaynesian Paradigm Manageable

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Carl Sagan reworded and popularized the French astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace’s (1749–1827) principle that “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.” In other words, big theories require big data. But we need to break imposing claims down into manageable propositions, and this is what Jaynes did with his four hypotheses:

(1) The Linguistic Construction of Consciousness. Subjective introspectable self-awareness is a learned process based on metaphors. Consciousness, then, is shaped by historical-cultural forces and is not the outcome of evolutionary forces.

(2) Bicameral Mentality―An Earlier, Preconscious Mentality. Before people learned to be conscious, a different mentality governed their behavior. Called bicameral for “two-chambered,” this mentality generated audiovisual hallucinations that were attributed to supernatural beings.

(3) The “When” of Consciousness. Though the transition occurred at different periods in various parts of the world, in most places consciousness emerged around the end of the second millennium BCE.

(4) The Neurology of the Double Brain. If Jaynes’s claims are valid about an earlier, preconscious mentality, its underlying “two-chambered” neurology must be accounted for. This concerns the lateralization of language. More specifically, the change from a preconscious bicameral mentality in which the right hemisphere generated hallucinations to a conscious unicameral mentality needs to be scientifically explained.

These four hypotheses are really just the beginning. They can generate subhypotheses and then sub-subhypotheses that can be tested. As a scientific program, then, Jaynesian psychology can advance by framing smaller hypotheses, formulating theories, and having these empirically analyzed.

Jaynesian Psychology Finds Support not just from the Ancient World

The Ruins of an Earlier Mentality Are All around Us if We Care to Open Our Eyes

This post is inspired by a recent exchange I had with a commentator who saw little value in relying on biblical accounts as evidence to support Jaynes’s theories because they were “fairytales.” Presumably such a criticism could be extended to other writings that constitute humanity’s extensive religious tradition. It is worth responding to this line of critique because it is not an uncommon reaction from those who find fault with Jaynes (and for what it’s worth, Jaynes did not set out to explain the origins of religion; his research was on the origin of consciousness).

Many of those who have read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind are drawn to what Jaynes wrote about long-forgotten civilizations and ancient religions. Safely tucked away in the historical past, we do not have to face what is disturbingly different. But Jaynes devoted entire chapters to the holdovers from our earlier mentality, i.e., hypnosis, hallucinations among schizophrenics, and spirit possession (other related topics treated in passing are childhood imaginary friends and glossolalia). Despite notable exceptions, unfortunately, for a long-time certain topics were not regarded as worthy of serious investigation by mainstream psychologists, being written off as uselessly psychopathological, shunned to “primitive” and peripheral societies, or even associated with the paranormal (admittedly hypnosis is a more contested, complicated case). There is also, I suspect, an anti-religion bias for some of those who see little value in humankind’s spiritual traditions (which is indeed ironic since Jaynes’s arguments can be used as powerful ammunition by the atheist crowd), especially if those elements of religiosity are closer to home. I remember presenting my research on spirit possession at conferences. The same anthropologists who were interested in the people I studied in Japan were disdainful of Christians who “spoke in tongues” from their own society (North America). It was as if anomalous behavior, at least for some anthropologists, only mattered as something scholarly if it occurred in “exotic” locales.

The Present-day as a Museum of Relics of an Earlier Mentality

Jaynes’s theories become much more persuasive when one surveys the remainders of bicamerality. Bronze Age textual and archaeological evidence only takes us so far. We need to take seriously, from an academic perspective, the present where the leftovers of bicamerality still haunt modern civilizations. Note that we cannot view these vestiges as loitering around aimlessly as if ghosts lost in the wrong century. This is because even now they perform important sociological functions, as alien as they may be to us.

A good place to start is with ethnography. One needs to take into account the overwhelming number of reports and chronicles from non- or preliterate “tribal societies.” Much of this material was recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by explorers, adventurers, missionaries, conquerors, and assorted agents of imperialism. These accounts were not ethnographers in the modern sense, but in any case more recently anthropologists have left and are still providing detailed accounts of divination, spirit possession, shamanism, and ancestor worship. These various supernatural beliefs and behaviors are not silly superstitions sideshows; they are culturally front and center, playing a vital role in the daily life of these small-scale communities.

So this is the problem: We are so used to hearing about anomalous psychosocial practices, as unfamiliar as they are to us, that we assume there’s something inevitable about them, as if they naturally sprout up wherever humans form communities. Then in a very unscientific manner we fail to ask very basic questions: Why are they found in all societies? Why aren’t there any exceptions in terms of global patterns? What do they say about the workings of the human psyche? One would think that if such practices were related to fantastical fairytales, there would exist somewhere cultures that evolved and did just fine without bizarre, unscientific beliefs. To date no such culture has been found.

How Scientism Distorts Our View of the Human Condition

Many fall into the common trap of scientism. This reactionary approach to knowledge means being overly picky about what is respectable or worthy research subjects, quickly dismissing what cannot be readily explained, and having a particularly difficult time taking anything seriously that smacks of the spiritual. Scientism is legitimized by modernity’s “official” (though unstated and implicit) hierarchy of knowledge. Some of us take this hierarchy too seriously. This laddered organization of accumulated learning is arranged so that the closer one approaches the top, the closer one is supposedly to the unvarnished, objective truth. At the lowest level are made-up folktales, magical practices, and unfounded fables found in faraway places. This bottom, more “primitive” level reeks of irrationalities and nonsensical notions.

The next level, at least for some, is a bit more respectable: Religion. Though still clouded by questionable legends and the mythical, in the last century or two religion has worked hard to make peace with relentless scientific progress by carving out its own place in the modern world. It has discarded the more objectionable remnants of spirituality (e.g., burning witches at the stake, inquisitions, sacrificing virgins). Interestingly monotheism for some reason is more acceptable to the modern mind (“Western”?) than polytheism. The latter, while actually still followed in many parts of the world, is for some associated with “pagan” belief systems that historically predate or fall outside the Abrahamic lineage of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The third level, more prestigious and respectable than religion, is philosophy. Not as disciplined as science, perhaps, but most philosophers presumably have little patience for myths and fantasy. The crowning top level of the hierarchy of knowledge, of course, is science, with its methodological rigor and disdain for the imaginary and unreal. If broadly understood, science comes in two types, natural and social. Admittedly the latter (which shades over into the humanities) might be too interpretative and qualitative for certain quantitative hard-nosed natural scientists. In any case, both types of science rely on empiricism, detached observation, the systematic collection of facts, and are suspicious of that which is untestable. There are good reasons why modern societies have built this multi-layered intellectual edifice (it certainly resonates with the great achievements of the Enlightenment). And its success and accomplishments are impressive. But it can blind us to the storehouse of humanity, stocked as it is with all sorts of odd but useful pieces of the puzzle that make up the human condition. And when science habitually sweeps too many unexplainables under the rug of inquiry because they don’t accommodate conventional analysis or are not “respectable” as research topics, we fall prey to scientism. The point is many of us confuse the make-believe with the residues from an earlier mentality. But even fairytales have something to teach us.

Disentangling Visual Perception from Mental Imagery

Science makes progress when it differentiates, discriminates, and separates out from the messy stuff we call reality what we can carefully classify, categorize, and singularize. If our taxonomy is not clear knowledge does not advance since the defining qualities of different properties, processes, and behaviors become confused. Consider psychology’s idiom that does not always distinguish between visual perceptual experiences and mental images. The latter can be defined as introspectable, conscious representations of things that are not actually present. Such images are imbued with a mysterious, almost magical aura because, in addition to being physically absent, they are not shareable with others; only the individual can directly experience images populating his or her inner psychoscape. And as of yet no convincing physical explanation accounts for their existence (neuroscientific studies, as important as they are, that simply correlate brain regions with mental activity do not count). It is almost as if mental imagery dwells in an unrecognized dimension of existence.

Recent research into aphantasia, or the inability or difficulty some have of conjuring up mental images (also misleadingly called “blind imagination”), raises some interesting issues. For one thing, aphantasia forces us to investigate the difference between perception and introspectable experiences. Aphantasia also demonstrates salient differences concerning how the mind works among individuals. Individuals with aphantasia do not lack imagination and they do not struggle with spatial memory (which is different from imagery and may be neurologically stored differently). Interestingly, research has shown that though they remembered fewer objects on tests, aphantasics made fewer mistakes, i.e., they did not create false memories of objects that were not in pictures used in the experiments. Aphantasics appear to be using compensatory strategies, such as the verbal-coding of spatial relations that might make them better at avoiding false memories (Bainbridge, et al., Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory, Cortex, Dec. 3, 2020). Aphantasia may be congenital or acquired through trauma.

Distinguishing between Visual Perception and Conscious Images

Though visual perceptions and mental images share the same neuroanatomical regions, they are very different, and despite being commonly confused, their differences are obvious. Visual perception requires stimuli and sensory receptors, involves both bottom-up and top-down processing, and may be implicated in perceptual illusions. Mental imagery, on the other hand, does not require external stimuli or sensory receptors. It involves only top-down processing and is implicated in hypnoidal experiences, hallucinations, and dreams. Interestingly, visual imagery can interfere with visual perception. When sense modalities are the same, mental images can override perceptual processes. However, when modalities are different individuals are able to perceptually focus on an object or auditory experience. And we might note that while one can experience mental imagery based on sound, smell, taste, or even touch, visual images are more common and easier to form than other sensory modalities.

Two theories have been developed to explain mental imagery. The first contends that a picture-like or “analog” code operates to produce images that retain some of the sensory qualities of visual perception. Relations among images are represented implicitly and simultaneously and each interiorized “sense” has its own type of modality. The second theory proposes a word-like or “propositional” code. Images are descriptions of visual scenes, their relations are represented explicitly and sequentially, and each interiorized “sense” possesses the same modality. Research seems to indicate that both theories have merit. Simple representations use an analog code, while propositional codes seem more apt for richly detailed images. This may be because our working memory can only contain a limited amount of information for complex visual stimuli.

A Jaynesian Perspective on Mental Imagery

Julian Jaynes argued that until about three millennia ago individuals lacked what we take for granted — subjective introspectable self-awareness. When confronted with a novel problem, hallucinated answers and admonishments were triggered that took the form of supernatural visitations. Probably the biggest reason people struggle with understanding Jaynesian psychology is because they confuse sensate-perception with introspection (the latter is what our mind’s eye “sees”; not our bodily, physical eyes). Even researchers commonly conflate perception with consciousness, or they assume that the latter is a mere epiphenomenon of sensation or is not a separate cognitive process in its own right. But sensate-perception (or perceptual reactivity) is automatic and nonconscious, while interiorized experience is a consciousness form of cognition.

If Jaynes is correct, hallucinations still perform an adaptive role in everyday life. However, over time, as hallucinations evolved, their vividness has been watered-down and they are now under volitional control. We call such experiences mental images. In other words, mental imagery is the descendent of ancient audiovisual hallucinations.

A taxonomy of four types can be proposed that teases out order from the roiling, churning, and mixing magma of perceptual, conceptual, and subjective experiences. The first type are perceptions (exteroception, interoception, proprioception, equilibrioception, etc.) which are automatic and nonconscious. Perceptions concern what is (realis). The second type, which like perceptions arise automatically and nonconsciously, are conceptions which are about irrealis (what could be). The third type are superceptions. These describe a layer of experience superimposed over perceptions and built upon conceptions. Superceptions are a mode of supercharged, subjunctive cognition of what might be (surrealis). They subsume three subtypes: (1) introceptions — inner quasi-perceptual, semi-hallucinatory images; (2) extraceptions — audiovisual hallucinations interpreted as divine voices and visitations in ancient times, experienced as transpiring outside but near the individual (peripersonal); and (3) vestigial extraceptions — anomalous behaviors, e.g., hallucinations experienced by schizophrenics and some neurotypicals (voice-hearers). A final type of mentation is coceptions. These describe the coincidence of perceptions and introceptions; such overlapping deludes us into assuming that consciously interiorized experiences are sensory reflections of reality. 

Lessons from Aphantasia

If Jaynes is correct, the ability to evoke mental imagery is not innate but like other features of conscious interiority, learned. In other words, the counterpart of aphantasia, phantasia (imagery) is culturally acquired. If this is the case, we should be able to discern historical differences in the amount of phantasia, and as Jaynes argues, it is very difficult to find accounts in texts and languages of mental imagery before about the twelfth century BCE. Research into aphantasia may offer us clues about mental imagery as being a culturally-acquired ability and help us stop confusing two very different processes: sensate-perception versus conscious, interiorized experience. In other words, studying aphantasia may aid in teasing apart the threads of perceptual, conceptual, and introceptual experiences.

The Mind Is a Machine for Sociopsychological Communication

How are inner speech, self-dialogue, auditory imagery, and hallucinations related? And what exactly are hallucinations? Some have suggested that hallucinations are caused by a monitoring defect in inner speech (also termed inner voice, silent speech, subvocal speech, covert speech, self talk, internal monologue, verbal thought, etc.) (Fernyhough, The Voices Within, 2016). Such a claim, however, ignores the overwhelming evidence concerning hallucinations before about 1000 BCE. Any theoretical linkage must take into account one crucial datum: hallucinations were central to normal sociopsychological functioning. The ubiquity and important role of hallucinations in the ancient world as a mechanism for social control (until about the first millennium BCE). The “monitoring defect” hypothesis confuses matters: Rather than hallucinations resulting from a problem with inner speech, inner speech is a type of watered-down hallucination. This is why, arguably, for some an inner voice possesses agent-like properties or is accompanied by a felt presence, suggesting vestigial bicamerality.

Let’s see if we can disentangle the constituents of a “hallucination‒inner speech‒thought complex” while keeping an eye open for patterns that illuminate the nature of these phenomena. I begin with several premises that guide my arguments.

The first premise, from which the others derive, is the Jaynesian perspective on bicamerality, its breakdown due to civilizational upheaval about three millennia ago, and the upgrading of human mentality, resulting in conscious interiority. Second, communication comes in two forms: verbalized and non-verbalized. The former is overt articulated speech while the latter is covert unarticulated mentation. Third, thinking is communication and communication is thinking. This is grounded in the psyche’s profound social nature and how it operates as a machine for sociopsychological communication. Fourth, “self” is shorthand for two interacting, dynamic elements of conscious interiority: (1) a “speaker” (active‒subject or “I”) and (2) a listener (passive‒object or “me”). Preconscious individuals lacked these features of consciousness. Fifth, there is no such thing as an inner monologue. The mind only operates in the dialogical mode, i.e., an audience is always present, whether it is others or our own selves. In other words, after a thought arises, it can either be: (1) turned into speech aimed at others (alter-communication) or (2) become a type of self-communication (“I” → “me”). Sixth, even when a thought is transformed into a verbalization intended for others, it still targets two audiences: (1) others (interpersonal) and (2) self (intrapersonal). Though speech is aimed at another person (“I” → “not-me”), in actuality it operates as “I” → “not-me” + “me.” In other words, when we speak to others, we simultaneously verbalize and hear ourselves speak. Such auto-hearing, as we shall see, is actually key to understanding how hallucinations evolved as a byproduct of auditory comprehension.

Below I analyze the hallucination‒inner speech‒thought complex by looking at it through the prism of the aforementioned premises and injecting some much needed historical context.

(1) Proto-Bicamerality: Auto-command

Sometime before the agricultural revolution a type of hallucinatory “auto-communication” developed, i.e., a person would “hear” his or her own voice (or possibly that of an absent clan leader). This was a side effect of language comprehension selected by socio-evolution as a method of behavioral control. This communicative circuitry reminded an individual to stay on task when carrying out repetitive chores, ensuring social order and economic productivity (preconscious individuals lacked a narratizing self that could plan long-term and envision future outcomes). The neurological substratum of this hallucinated speech is early or proto-bicamerality in which the right hemisphere would “speak” (via verbal hallucinations) to the left. The first hallucinations were not attributed to external supernatural entities (gods, ancestors, spirits). Such attribution would come later as societies became relatively larger, multi-layered, and complex by around 3000 BCE.

Hearing ourselves speak is crucial to the present discussion, since verbal hallucinations arose as an outgrowth of hearing language. In other words, hearing and hallucinations are intimately related. And hallucinations “evolved by natural selection as a method of behavioral control” (Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976, p. 134).

(2) Complex Bicamerality: The Gods Speak to Mortals

Proto-bicamerality was adequate for small-scale hunter‒gatherer economies. However, the agricultural revolution, starting sometime around 10,000 BCE, introduced social complexity whose pressures — increased demographic scale, economic specialization, more established social roles — greatly reconfigured hallucinatory auto-communication. As innovative as it was, proto-bicamerality was no match for ballooning social scale. The consequence was a neurocultural adaptation in which controlling voices were attributed to personages further up a widening and towering social pyramid — departed rulers, divinized ancestors, god-kings, the gods themselves. In other words, hallucinated voices became ideologized and the basis for a world of god-governed, priest-administered, temple-dominated, and urbanized theopolities that proclaimed the success of the momentous agrarian transformation. Complex bicamerality had replaced proto-bicamerality.

(3) Physical Speech of Bicameral Individuals

For bicameral individuals, external, articulated speech directed at others would be heard by the speaker. Such auto-hearing (auto-audition) is an obvious but important fact. However, preconscious individuals lacked a self (i.e., a speaking “I” and listening “me” were lacking). In other words, though they could nonconsciously hear their own speech they could not consciously register it. There was no psychoscape in which to experience one’s self-talk.

(4) Conscious Interiority: Inner Dialogue

Though complex bicamerality was more successful in terms of handling social complexity than proto-bicamerality, even the latter neurocultural arrangement could not keep pace with rapidly increasing demographic expansion and close-quarter and concentrated settlements. These challenges increasingly eroded bicameral communicative efficacy between ruler and ruled, among the masses, and most importantly, among the different components constituting the individual psyche. The next step in neurocultural evolution was the learning of a linguistically-constructed innovation, i.e., conscious interiority. Such subjective introspectable self-awareness, evident from around 1000 BCE, helped individuals navigate a new but confusing sociopolitical landscape.

A key feature of conscious interiority is the mental spatialization or the qualia of having a “space” inside one (usually in the head). This imaginary mind-space functioned as the location of what we call inner talk. What this all means is that we should be able to trace a historical trajectory from hallucinated gods to interiorized selves. Voices that in bicameral times were believed to originate externally and were attributed to supernatural beings evolved into internally located auditory imagery that were recognized as coming from one’s self. What is referred to as inner speech, then, is the descendant of hallucinations. The silent production of words in one’s mind — or talking to one’s self quietly — is the successor to an earlier mentality. Intrapersonal communication (broadly understood, “communication with one’s self” includes self-talk, acts of imagination and visualization, remembering, planning, problem solving, monitoring our self-expectations, and evaluations of self and others [McLean, The Basics of Interpersonal Communication, 2005]). Remember, all thought is a form of communication. A person’s own thought does not have to be perceived as auditory imagery, and interestingly, not everyone experiences imagined speech or mental verbalization. Some just engage in pure thinking (“imageless thought”).

Of course, bicameral individuals possessed a self-communication of sorts, but conscious interiorization has supercharged how the psyche communicates to itself by positioning a scaled-down society of “I” and “me” “inside” the person. Conscious interiority also introduces a psychological reflexivity that is lights years ahead of chimps recognizing their body in mirrors in a stimulus-response manner. This reflexivity is part of the dynamic relationship between the “I” and “me”; this affords the individual that ineffable sense of uniqueness and separateness from others and the world.

From a practical point of view, the adaptive benefits of internal dialogue are obvious in how it permits us to rehearse possible future behaviors, revisit past events to Monday-morning quarterback one’s performance, and help emotional regulation. But the potential for obsessive self-introspection, distressing rumination, or a running commentary of self-defeating self-statements that can interfere with emotional health is the price we pay for this adaptive capability.

(5) Physical Speech of Conscious Individuals

For conscious individuals, external, articulated speech directed at others would also be heard by the speaker. However, with such self-hearing (self-audition) one’s “me” can hear one’s “I” speak.

The Experientiality of Hallucinations, Auditory Imagery, and Thought

Two dimensions are relevant for appreciating the workings of the hallucination‒inner speech‒thought complex: (1) alien-ness versus selfness; and (2) external versus internal. The first dimension concerns authorization, or who or what affords legitimacy to one’s actions/experiences, i.e., in other words, who is governing my behavior (speech). Is the controlling entity my own “I” or is it foreign to my being, something possessed of an otherness? In the preconscious, bicameral period, control was attributed to supernatural entities (divine authorization), while in postbicameral times an individuated self has taken the place of commanding deities and spirits of the deceased (self-authorization). The second dimension concerns the perceived location of heard speech or unarticulated thought; is it within (interior) or outside (exterior) the person? Another way to view the hallucination‒inner speech‒thought complex is from the perspective of to what degree do perceptual qualities play a role. Obviously auditory hallucinations and inner hallucinations possess the quasi-perceptual qualia of hearing, while “pure” thought does not.

We might also mention that some people report that the quasi-perceptual qualities of their inner voice merges with hearing. In other words, the speaking‒hearing distinction is not necessarily clear, and seems to exist on a continuum of “speech” versus “listening.” From the perspective of the features of conscious interiority, we can posit that inner speaking is more of an active “I” process, while inner hearing is more passive and receptive (“me”).

The Temporal Extension Thesis and the Adaptive Psyche

The human mind is always adjusting, accommodating, and adopting resources from outside itself to expand and improve its capabilities. Such adaptation, if broadly understood, unfolds across different temporal spans. But a glaring weakness of mainstream research psychology is its almost complete neglect of a time-scale that would illuminate how the human mind changes over a few generations or several centuries.

Psychology relies on several time-scales to study how change configures and conditions the psyche. The first is evolutionary or the unimaginably long passage of millions of years. The second is developmental or the stages constituting the trajectory of an individual’s lifespan. The third covers very brief periods when the mind attempts to self-correct when navigating day-to-day challenges. The fourth describes a period during which the psyche’s resilient capacity to self-repair kicks in when challenged by an emotional disturbance or a mental disorder. Overcoming maladaptive behaviors often requires the aid of a mental health care provider.

Historical Changes in Psyche

Psychologists tend to overlook a fifth time-scale that concerns cultural modifications of mentality that is historically driven by growing social complexity. This mid-range type, positioned between evolutionary and lifespan perspectives, is better suited for understanding sociocultural adaptation and can be measured in several centuries (or in some circumstances several millennia). The contribution of Julian Jaynes is relevant here. He argued that about three millennia ago our mentality shifted from one governed by audiovisual hallucinations (the voices of ancestors and the gods) to subjective introspectable self-awareness (conscious interiority).

Despite attention given to evolutionary, developmental, and other types of temporality, much of conventional psychology seems stubbornly stuck in a synchronic view of human mentality. Indeed, a great failing of conventional psychology is its disregard of changes in mentation during historical periods. There are many reasons for this unfortunate view of things that are beyond the purview of this essay, but one reason is the apprehension of being labeled a racist or cultural evolutionist if one even hints about relatively recent historical changes in human psychology.  Note however that discussing changes in mentality over time is not the same as arguing that a certain society is more “advanced” than another simply because its members possess particular kinds of knowledge (i.e., subjective introspectable self-awareness). Ancient civilizations lacked knowledge about high energy physics, astronomy, and germ theory, but no one feels that by pointing these facts out they are being racist or that they might be accused of regarding persons from the distant past as somehow mentally inferior. By the same token, arguing that people in the past lacked the cultural psychological techniques to “picture things in their heads” or “self-introspect” does not mean that they were mentally lacking.  In other words, changes in human mentality mean the cultural construction of new forms of knowledge and belief, not social–Darwinist, racialist-inspired “stages of development.” 

Even anthropologists who glibly proclaim that the mind is culturally constructed have a difficult time entertaining the proposition that the mind is historically constituted.  They refuse to follow the logical implications of what it actually means to claim that that psyche is a social construction and end up taking a basically ahistorical view of humanity. 

The “Temporal Extension Thesis”

Recently some thinkers have argued that mind must be understood as something “extended,” i.e., the mind is not contained by “skin and skull,” but emerges from interactions with the social environment, tools, and technology (e.g., memory storage devices).  Indeed, such “externalities” properly count as components of psyche.  This “extended mind thesis” (EMT) is a sort of a spatial extension of psychological processes (Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” 1998).  However, we can complement EMT with a “temporal extension thesis” (TET) by arguing that if we take seriously the inherently cultural aspect of psyche, we are forced to acknowledge its historicity; in other words, the mind is extended through time.  This means that during any historical period our understandings of mind rest on prior conceptions. In the same way we understand political institutions, economic systems, and religious ideologies by peeling back their historical layerings and peering into their pastness, so should we approach the mind. This can be done by studying the words that constitute a language’s mental lexicon. It is the very words we use to describe mentation that, though adapting to particular social conditions through time, transmit psychological knowledge to the next generation.

Towards a Stratigraphic Psychology

Such a stratigraphic psychology does not answer all questions about human mentality, of course, but it is a very useful antidote to essentializing and overly-naturalizing something that rests upon cultural historical scaffolding. Adaptation is a foundational premise for understanding the human condition. Coming to terms with its different temporal spans can help us understand our psychological nature. A multi-temporal perspective allows us to see the forest from the trees.  In other words, a historically-informed view permits us to investigate changes in human mentality that more conventional, synchronic approaches miss. 

Cognitive Relativism and Jaynesian Psychology

In Part 1 of “Has Human Mentality Changed?” I discussed how the contributions of Julian Jaynes bolster a radical neuroplastic understanding of the mind, especially if the crucial role of the cultural acquisitions of adaptive cognitive capabilities are incorporated into the analysis of historical changes in psychology, i.e., a neurocultural perspective. Here I want to explore some of the implications of psychic diversity. Three different perspectives illustrate well the significance of psychic plasticity. Though my present discussion is about psychic plasticity as an enculturating (extra-genetic) process, neurophysiological changes cannot be ignored (thus, “neurocultural”).

(1) Psychic Plasticity during the Life Course. Psyche changes over an individual’s lifecycle, from the time an infant is born until a person dies. During a lifetime, new experiences and information alter an individual’s psyche, resulting in an endless series of socializations, desocializations, and resocializations.

(2) Psychic Plasticity across Different Cultures. Different groups, due to socially pragmatic reasons, possess dissimilar ethnopsychologies. These groups may be apparent at the micro-level: families, dyads, small groups, small-scale communities, occupational situations, or at the macro-level (ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, states, etc.). In other words, psychic plasticity assumes there is psychic diversity.

(3) Psychic Plasticity through History. Ignoring history as a source of evidence for psychic diversity and psychic plasticity greatly hinders psychological research. The psychic plasticity of our species is conditioned by history. Certain periods may be characterized by ruptures that produce distinct mentalities functionally adapted to the vagaries of passing time, and different historical periods are characterized by radically different ethnopsychologies. The cultural–historical approach profoundly resonates with Jaynes’s agenda. This has huge implications, since it demonstrates that the human condition and its psychological apparatus are not ahistorical constants. Instead, people are “naturally adapted to change and constitutionally equipped with organs which enable them to learn constantly, people are naturally adapted to change and constitutionally equipped with organs which enable them to learn constantly, to store up new experiences all the time, to adjust their behaviour correspondingly, and to change the pattern of their social life together” (N. Elias, What Is Sociology? 1978, p. 115). What we call human nature, then, is fundamentally and radically malleable. “It should not at all be understood as an all-inclusive immutable state which always remains the same. As such, there is no bench-mark of some universal human condition” (K. Tester, Civil Society, 1992 p. 86).

Psychology: Capital “P” versus Small “p”

Adopting and seriously pursuing a psychic diversity research agenda presents a number of significant theoretical implications. First, it forces us to reconceptualize the relation between society and mind. In other words, psyches differ so much by period and place because of all the varied “social stuff” that constitute mentalities. Being “in society” demands that we recognize the limitations of “Psychology” (single and with a capital “P”). We should be concerned with “psychologies” (plural and with a small “p”), which are products of particular social environments and producers of repertoires of useful tools and tactics used to navigate through the everyday world. Any society (or for that matter, any individual) is equipped with an array of different cognitive strategies which are historically and socially contingent. Recognizing the importance of psychologies allows us to incorporate what are usually regarded as non-psychological (social, political, and economic forces) into understandings of psyche as a sociohistorical formation. Psychologies position the concrete and local (rather than the transcendent and universal) in the foreground of analysis, and teach us that the most interesting aspects of psyche are historically constructed, not neurologically given.

Also various forms of sociopsychological behavior — which for the most part are ignored by conventional psychology — strongly evidence that assumptions about human mentality are woefully inadequate. Consider trance, hypnosis, “spirit possession,” channeling, imaginary playmates, and nonpathological hallucinations among “voice hearers.” While looking for the common denominators that unite humanity is important, taking human diversity seriously is crucial. We need to escape from the intellectual straitjacket that while we are encouraged to speak of cultural diversity and cultural relativism, investigations of cognitive diversity and cognitive relativism are taboo. The assumptions of cognitive homogeneity and cognitive sameness may seem safe, but they hinder explorations of the myriad ways of being human, both past and present. The recognition and depiction of psychic diversity allow us to avoid the aridity and platitudes of a nondescript “common humanity.”

Neuroplasticity and Jaynesian Psychology

The media and scientific journals give much attention to “neuroplasticity” (the brain’s innate ability to form and reorganize synaptic connections in response to learning or injury), “neurodiversity” (variations in the brain regarding sociability, learning, attention, mood, and other various mental functions), “neurotypical,” and “neuroatypical.” From an intellectual historical perspective these terms elicit interest because they call into question, at least in a very general sense, what has been a foundational concept of the social sciences: Psychic unity. Introduced by the anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826‒1905), psychic unity was further conceptualized early in the twentieth century as an intellectual assault on racism by enlightened, well-meaning, anthropologists. Psychic unity is a universalist idea postulating that that human mentality is more or less the same everywhere; it challenged the previously dominant view of social Darwinism that viewed societies climbing a ladder of civilizational progress. At the top were late-nineteenth century industrially-advanced societies whose technological prowess was assumed to grant them superiority. In the case of northern European and American powers, it was assumed that their “white,” Christian identity explained their success (though Japan, which was not far behind the Euro-American sphere in terms of “progress,” obviously did not rely on white racialism and Christianity to account for its achievements). Less successful societies had not acquired the cognitive capabilities to compete with those higher up the ladder of civilization. The premises of psychic unity are still prevalent among not a few psychologists and configures assumptions that restrict research, despite recent interest in neuroplasticity and neurodiversity.

Neuroplasticity, neurodiversity, etc. seem to take the individual as the basic unit of analysis. But what if we expanded the discussion to the societal level and, additionally, give culture, socializing experiences, and historical changes more prominence to add nuance to the theorizing, i.e., rather than neuroplasticity, we could speak of neurocultural plasticity. If there has been one researcher who arguably has done just that, it is the late Julian Jaynes.

Relying on a multidisciplinary approach that resulted in an ambitious archaeopsychological project (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976), Jaynes argued that until about three millennia ago people were preconscious, lacking subjective introspectable self-awareness. Decisions were made, behavior governed, and society managed by what today we call audiovisual hallucinations generated by the right hemisphere and communicated to the left hemisphere (hence “bicameral”).

In the past these experiences were interpreted as supernatural visitations. Jaynes theorized that changes in hemispheric intercommunication and language regions explained differences in mentality. But what is significant in his arguments—and often overlooked or simply misunderstood—is that interhemispheric communications were shaped by cultural and historical forces, not biological evolution. In any case, Jaynesian psychology, and other unconventional, peripheralized perspectives (e.g., the “primitive mind” of Lucien Lévy–Bruhl, 1857–1939), boldly put on the table of inquiry psychic plasticity and diversity rather than psychic uniformity and unity.

What Does Psychic Diversity Mean?

Two caveats. First, psychic diversity, like all ideas, cannot be taken to extremes. Arguably it has animated misguided utopian dreams of political reformers, intoxicated by human perfectibility. Overly-ambitious plans for social re-engineering have turned into the nightmares of socialist and communist systems, still seen in incorrigible holdouts like North Korea. Second, the differences in mentalities throughout history and across cultures are one of degree.

In concrete terms, psychic plasticity means several things. Let’s start with an uncontroversial observation on which we all would agree. People do not all share the same assumptions, opinions, views, beliefs, and sentiments. No two individuals, even if they speak the same language, have been socialized within the same culture, and have had the same experiences, agree on everything. For example, individuals within the same family may have different views and ways of thinking about any number of topics. A daughter and her parents may have widely different opinions about who will make a good son-in-law. As any parent knows, different generational perspectives reveal different minds. This difference in minds become greater between individuals from different socioeconomic classes within the same society. Cross-culturally, these differences grow even greater. Not unexpectedly, moving backward in time increases psychological variation, and greater historical leaps reveal remarkable diversity. Such variability is more fundamental and consequential to an appreciation of homo sapiens than common understandings and the ability to empathize with our predecessors may seem to indicate.

Consider the reactions one would probably solicit from another person who is being instructed on how to use a computer. Teaching someone who grew up in the same culture and within roughly the same generation as oneself would probably acquire the skills relatively quickly (literacy and its concomitant abilities, manual dexterity and typing skill, basic understanding of office equipment such as electrical sockets, buttons, etc.). This is because there are many understandings—structured by the same cultural, political, economic, and technological forces—that are shared between the teacher and student. Now consider teaching someone from the late Victorian period. This student would undoubtedly be amazed by the computer and its applications. But what if it were possible to go back in time further, say 3,000 years ago, and meet a non-elite, uneducated commoner in Mesopotamia. Though it certainly might be possible to successfully teach this person, it would be far from easy, requiring a very long training period. Consider all the disadvantages the student would face: Illiterate (and thus lacking literacy’s highly-powered concomitant abilities, e.g., alphabetical sorting and ordering, rationalized classificatory schemes, access to vast quantities of data, highly abstract generalizing and manipulation of information, etc.); lack of fine finger coordination; an ignorance of how to utilize office equipment. The instructor—at least in my opinion—would probably conclude that this student was just not difficult to teach, but possessed of an entirely different mentality. Student and teacher would certainly be able to discuss a large range of mundane—and perhaps even not so mundane—subjects. However, because of the historical and cultural gap, they would nevertheless be separated by an unfamiliar sea of knowledge and a profound divergence in cognitive style would exist between them. The ability to communicate does not necessarily equal similar thinking.

In Part 2 of “Has Human Mentality Changed?” I look at some of the implications of psychic diversity.

How the Rev. J. C. Jaynes Influenced His Son, Julian Jaynes

While giving a talk some years ago at a conference about Julian Jaynes on Prince Edward Island in Canada, a member of the audience asked if I thought that the loss of Julian Jaynes’s father at age two in some way shaped his theorizing about hallucinating voices of supernatural beings. It was a fair question. But at the time, being more interested in the singular intellectual achievements of Jaynes himself, to me the question seemed a bit irrelevant. Though I’m still not sure if this line of thinking is completely valid — i.e., in an attempt to replace his missing father, Jaynes came up with the notion of hallucinated voices from authoritative (paternalistic) figures — there might be something there. In any case, acquainting ourselves with some of the writings of Jaynes’s father certainly demonstrates interesting linkages.

A Principled, Purposeful, and High-minded Life

Julian Clifford Jaynes, the son of Charles L. and Martha Jaynes, was born in 1854 in Springvale, Virginia. At the beginning of the Civil War his family moved to Connecticut and then to Wisconsin. The elder Jaynes graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1875. He then worked as a master of a high school in Virginia City, Nevada and also taught in California. In 1880 he entered Harvard Divinity School and graduated four years later. He then became the minister at the First Unitarian Church in West Newton, Massachusetts, and remained there until his death 38 years later in 1922. He was popular and well-regarded by the community. With his second wife, Laura M. Bullard, he fathered three children: Julian, Robert, and Helen.

The younger Jaynes grew up in the large family house that had been built by his father’s congregation in West Newton in 1895. Growing up surrounded by his father’s books, possessions, and community connections, the young Julian absorbed the spirit of the former’s worldview. The young Jaynes had access to the 48 volumes of sermons penned by his father, which undoubtedly inspired him. We can only speculate on which sermons from those many volumes shaped his thinking. However, an examination of the 17 sermons compiled posthumously by the elder Jaynes’s widow in Magic Wells: Sermons by Julian Clifford Jaynes (1922) affords clear evidence of intellectual influence.

The younger Jaynes possessed a deep, rich baritone voice and one can speculate that he had inherited this feature from his father, who was gifted with a “wonderful voice which no one who heard it could ever forget” as well as with an “unusual power off expression.”¹ The younger Jaynes apparently also absorbed his father’s writing style; the latter could make the “commonplace sound like the unusual” so that when delivered as a sermon, “one forgot the manuscript” and the “majestic voice compelled the attention and made one subject to his will. And yet it was not all atmosphere. There was meat for the mind.”² Given that his father’s writings are meditative, soul-searching, thoughtful, it is not surprising that the younger Jaynes himself was inward-looking, pensive, contemplative and drawn to a topic — consciousness — that by its very nature demands a self-introspective, self-examining, and self-reflective attitude.

A “Group of Selves” and a “Larger Self”

Bicamerality, the younger Jaynes’s theory that at one time the left and right hemispheres subserved “two selves” (a following, listening mortal and a governing, commanding god, respectively), may have been inspired by the elder Jaynes’s view that the individual is “not a single homogenous self” but rather “several fragmentary personalities.” The elder Jaynes also speculated about the “presence of the watcher” or who or what stands outside an individual’s “company of selves”: “Are you not conscious of still another self, larger and more inclusive than the others, that seems to be standing outside watching them, counting them, criticizing them, applauding them?” Who or what “does the observing?”³ And who is it that wonders about one’s different facets of selfhood?

According to the elder Jaynes, we often forget that there is something watching us from the outside. But then sometimes the “presence of the watcher is seen and felt. There are other times when the watcher seems to be on the guard all the time, and while the lesser personalities are having their way, is continually sounding the word of rebuke or encouragement. What is it? You may call it conscience, or moral sentiment — anything you please.” He called this the “larger self.”⁴ It gains control over the lesser selves and like a superego, subdues our evil propensities. Perhaps the younger Jaynes came to understand the “larger self” as the authoritative, admonishing, and commanding supernatural visitors generated by the right hemisphere — counseling gods, meddlesome ancestors, or a thundering Yahweh.

The elder Jaynes uses the examples of the “true self” of the Buddha, the daimon of Socrates, and how Paul’s conversion was in fact his discovery of his own “larger personality.”⁵ The elder Jaynes rewords the statement of Jesus about how he has come to do not his own will but that of God: “‘I am come not to serve the little desires and fears and prejudices of Jesus the Nazarene carpenter, but I am come to try to realize the great vision God has given me to see — I am come to be true to my diviner self — to work but the grander possibilities of my soul.’”⁶ The elder Jaynes had Jesus pleading the “liberation of God in man.”⁷ 

For the elder Jaynes, the story of the Prodigal Son described how when we make moral decisions, we are returning to our real or larger selves; in the end the Prodigal Son learns that he had merely returned to himself. It is a parable about the “soul finding its own — coming to itself.”⁸ It is not completely clear what the elder Jaynes meant when he wrote that the “thing that said ‘I’ and ‘me’ in the old days was not the actual ‘I’ and ‘me.’ The reality has now come into its own, and the ‘I’ and ‘me” are pronounced by the same lips, but rise up out of a different and nobler spirit.”⁹ But intriguingly, when delineating the features of conscious interiority, the younger Jaynes listed the observing analog “I” and the observed metaphor “me.” The elder Jaynes may have been articulating how the human mind operates as both perceiver (“I”) and perceived (“me”), producing that indefinable sense of personal self-reflexivity and separateness from the world and others that no one else shares.

The attention to the self that the elder Jaynes highlighted is also evident in something I like to remind my own mental health clients: “One of the great arts of living is to know how to enjoy one’s self, to be alone and yet have company, to be destitute and yet have the abundant resources of the spirit.”¹⁰  

From Soul to Mind: Replacing Religion with Psychology

As traditional religion has been eroded by the Enlightenment, modern psychology (along with science) has become a great intellectual enterprise that has sought to soothe our existential longings for certainty. So it should not be surprising that out of the spiritual impulse of the late 1800s and early 1900s, psychology emerged as a way to reconceptualize the soul as the mind. The elder Jaynes touched upon this idea when he wrote about what was called the “new psychology” (i.e., a scientific versus a more traditional philosophical psychology). He pointed out that a “great group of men” are “prying into the secrets of personal consciousness and trying to understand the complexities of the human soul.”¹¹ It seems that by the nineteenth century the vast innerverse of each individual was increasingly being probed, surveyed, and dissected. The elder Jaynes noted a “new kind of awe and reverence” in the air toward our psychic contents as “we discover that there are heights and depths of personality yet unexplored, and that in every individual there are mysteries of the past and possibilities for the future that stretch both ways toward the still greater mystery of the supreme and universal life.”¹² Indeed, the human soul has “something about it that suggests infinity.”¹³ This resonates with the younger Jaynes’s focus on the spatialization of psyche — since space suggests a horizonless expanse — as a key feature of conscious interiority. 

Almost prophetically, the elder Jaynes warned about “so many spiritual fads and fancies” inspired by the new psychology which was like a “new tract of earth that has emerged for the first time above the ocean. No sooner is it safely established in the sunlight, that all kind of vagrant seeds root themselves in its soil and strange sea-monsters bask upon its shores.”¹⁴ This, of course, still characterizes today’s social landscape, populated with cult-like organizations, dubious self-help movements, and precooked questionable psychotherapeutic remedies.

“Moving Forward from More to More”

Another theme the younger Jaynes imbibed from his father was evolution. Here we must tread carefully. The younger Jaynes had the benefit of more recent evolutionary theory at his disposal. And like many of his contemporaries, he did not accept a social Darwinist view of humankind’s inevitable and continuous climb up a ladder of moral progress. Nevertheless, if broadly understood, the relentless development of the human species threads through the thinking of both father and son.

For the elder Jaynes there is an exorable march “onward through the vast, unchartered realms of being — onward and upward forever!”¹⁵ We “have been evolving angels out of savages, educating the primitive passions, developing the hidden resources of the spirit.”¹⁶ The views of the elder Jaynes on “progress without end,” while spiritual, also take a this-worldly form: He mentions the philosopher and social Darwinist Herbert Spencer and links “eternal progress” to American democracy.¹⁷

The secret of happiness, then, is found in the “growing and expanding life.” A “stagnant pool” lacks music. It “simply stands still, while mosses prey upon it and reptiles make it their habitation.” A running brook “sings as it passes through sunshine and shadow.” It is going somewhere and is growing stronger and larger all the time. But the stagnant life, the “unprogressive mind, the indolent soul, becomes sick of itself.” Looking upon the same thing it becomes “bored and unhappy.” Motion is the real joy of life as this involves “changing experiences and new visions.”¹⁸

Accomplishing Something “Superbly, Tremendously Great” in This World

While the elder Jaynes was respectful of religion, he put great purchase in how science can advance human society. Perhaps this was rooted in the more optimistic spirituality of the elder Jaynes. A hopeful, expectant, and enthusiastic attitude characterizes the elder Jaynes’s view of our “supreme satisfaction of life” and our place in the cosmos. There is a “sense of growth, of expanding day by day into larger self-expression, into the keener appreciation, into wider circles of helpfulness, into clearer vision of the humanity of God and the divinity of man. The world, too, expands and becomes the warm body of the Great Oversoul, and life tense with sacred privilege.” We are not “flies on revolving wheels,” but “co-partners in the divine business.”¹⁹ For the elder Jaynes, the world is a vast field into which we are born. “We come with the dignity of noble birth. We come with the gifts of infinite capacity. We come with hearts innocent and clean, with powers waiting to be made virile and strong, waiting to be dedicated to the high emprise of improving the world and winning the things that cannot perish.”²⁰ The individual, after all, is a “son of God” and a “citizen of this majestic and splendid Universe.”²¹

Coming Full Circle

A few of the themes that the elder Jaynes dealt with — a larger, hidden self that can help us along, a confident sense of personal growth, and something inherently good about the deepest layers of our psyche — are echoed in the younger Jaynes’s faith in positive psychology. Though he did not devote his energies to developing a positive psychological dimension of what he understood to be conscious interiority, a few tantalizing quotes of his strongly suggests that he had an optimistic opinion of the power of the mind to improve itself. He believed there is an “enormous future in people realizing how much they can control themselves, and how much perhaps they can change themselves and change their way of thinking. We all know the concept of psychosomatic disease; well let’s reverse that to psychosomatic health.”²² He hoped that consciousness can “develop into perhaps better kinds of self-control, until, for example, those of us who want to give up smoking can just make a decision to do so, and that’s all there is to it. I think we might be able to train consciousness so that we are suggestible to ourselves to a greater deal.”²³ Learning how to become more suggestible allows more control over behavior than is possible with ordinary, everyday consciousness.

In 1981, Jaynes was invited to give a Sunday sermon — “The Magic Wells of Consciousness” — at the First Unitarian Society in Newton, Massachusetts. Four years later he was invited to speak at the 100th anniversary of his father’s ordination and read a sermon that his father had given called “A Religion of Selfhood” a century before. This sermon has a surprisingly modern-sounding title. It captures well our transition from a species lorded over by supernatural beings to one that is on a relentless journey inward, heralded by advances in neuropsychology and expanding psychoscapes. We are darkly obsessed with consumerist promises of self-indulgence and self-gratification as well as the self-absorption that quick-and-easy psychotherapeutic fixes encourage. And yet we are also attracted to the potential of shining personal liberation and that which “measures the advance of man up to the stairway of the ages.”²⁴

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Endnotes

1. The Christian Register, June 22, 1922.

2. Ibid.

3. J. C. Jaynes, “On Becoming One’s Self.” In Magic Wells: Sermons by Julian Clifford Jaynes. Boston, MA: Clara B. Jaynes, 1922, pp. 169, 171, italics in original.

4. Ibid, pp. 171‒172.

5. Ibid, p. 173.

6. Ibid, p. 174.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.  

10. Ibid, “Alone,” 1922, p. 270, italics in original.

11. Ibid, “Coming To One’s Self,” 1922, p.168.

12. Ibid.  

13. Ibid, “To Be Not To Be,” 1922, p.124.

14. Ibid, “Coming To One’s Self,” 1922, p.168.

15. Ibid, “A Little Child,” 1922, p. 34.

16. Ibid, “Jeremiah And Human Nature,” 1922, pp. 25‒26, italics in original.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid, “A Little Child,” 1922, p. 284.

19. Ibid, “To Be Or Not To Be,” 1922, pp. 124, 126.

20. Ibid, “Where Hast Thou Gleaned?” 1922, p. 76.

21. Ibid, “A Little Child,” 1922, p. 35.

22. Julian Jaynes, “Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind: McMaster‒Bauer Symposium Discussion.” In The Julian Jaynes Collection, Marcel Kuijsten, ed. Henderson, NV: Julian Jaynes Society, 2012, p. 319.

23. Julian Jaynes, “The Consequences of Consciousness: Emory University Discussion.” In The Julian Jaynes Collection, Marcel Kuijsten, ed. Henderson, NV: Julian Jaynes Society, 2012, p. 345.

24. J. C. Jaynes, “Coming to One’s Self.” In Magic Wells: Sermons by Julian Clifford Jaynes. Boston, MA: Clara B. Jaynes, 1922, p. 172.