Two Origins of Consciousness
Consciousness has two origins, one in history and one in childhood. The first one we struggle to get even a glimpse of, the second we can watch emerge. …
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JJS Publications
A complete listing of articles published in Julian Jaynes Society books.
The Ancient Dark Age
Within a period of forty or fifty years “at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city or palace in the …
Read MoreVoices Become Gods
At the open-air Natufian site of Eynan, just north of the sea of Galilee, at around 9000 B.C.E., there is a burial tradition like nothing ever seen …
Read MoreAlone in the Country of the Mind: The Origin of Julian Jaynes (Interview)
There is another kind of life, one not much lived anymore: a life of privacy and contemplation, a life sustained behind a single purpose pursued through decades.
Read MoreEchoes of the Gods: Towards a Jaynesian Understanding of Rhetoric
If Julian Jaynes had done nothing but write Chapter 2 of Book I of “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” rhetoricians …
Read MoreRomanticism, Bicamerality, and the Evolution of the Brain
The central question of the modern poet vis-a-vis poetry is summed up by Frost in “The Oven Bird”: “what to make of a diminished thing.” Stripped of his …
Read MoreGreek Zombies: On the Alleged Absurdity of Substantially Unconscious Greek Minds
Even if Kant is right in his analysis of consciousness, this does not necessarily invalidate Jaynes’s claims about the mental life of earlier cultures…
Read MoreThe Self as Interiorized Social Relations: Applying a Jaynesian Approach to Problems of Agency and Volition
A self is an internalized conceptualization of agency, imported by socialization processes through the use of metaphoric mind-words “into” our heads. …
Read MoreIntroduction to Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness
It has now been 30 years since Julian Jaynes first published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In it he presented his …
Read MorePsychologist Concentrates on How We Think (Interview with Julian Jaynes)
Jaynes believes his research will prove helpful in dealing with schizophrenics, “because that’s what schizophrenia is: people hearing voices that tell …
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