That's a very interesting observation. I think you are probably correct in that in ancient times the voice was more likely to be that of an authority figure such as the father, chief, or king -- and therefore male. I'll have to see if someone has done a study on the gender of voices heard in halluci...

Thanks for the post — it's an interesting question that I think comes up for quite a few people. The short answer is that learning as well as innovation (think of it as unconscious creative problem solving) can occur without introspective consciousness. Innovations would come as a flash of insight...

Jeff Sandoz has written on this subject in the newsletter, Volume 1, Issue 2.

It seems that auditory hallucinations were a prominent factor in nearly all preliterate societies. What specifically are your objections to the idea? I realize it's not an easy concept to accept initially. I would skeptical of environmental factors as the primary cause due to the pervasiveness of bi...

March 17, 1977 Dear Mark, Sorry I was somewhat abrupt with you the other night on the phone. It was an expression of my concern about Sherri, nothing more. Her friend Kathy had come over and told me, "I think now Sherri is dying." Kathy is very practical and down-to-earth, and I never hea...

That's interesting. It's not entirely clear if the elders were alive or dead (voices).

Interesting! It's a shame someone with a background in Jaynesian theory is not available to study these groups.

Perhaps very tangentially in the sense that it demonstrates that there have in fact been changes to the brain over the course of much shorter time scales than previously thought possible. Gregory Cochran has written on the topic of recent evolution and brain changes with regards to Jaynes's theory. ...

This is a great topic but no I'm not aware of anyone off the top of my head other than H. Wilkinson, other than the use of hypnotherapy (redirecting the subconscious) and cognitive behavioral therapy (redirecting consciousness) in general of course even by those unfamiliar with Jaynes. What ideas do...

Toward A Science of Consciousness Tucson, AZ April 12-17, 2008 Jaynes-Related Conference Talks There will be several talks given by Julian Jaynes Society members during the conference: Robert J. Sawyer - "Consciousness in Science Fiction" Science fiction writer Robert Sawyer will be one o...

See the "The Mentality of Pre-Literate and Pre-Modern Peoples" topic in this forum. I would definitely start with Lévy-Bruhl's Primitive Mentality (available through most larger libraries). I've already posted many of the relevant quotes from the book. There is a lot of information out th...

I attribute the "monotone voice" idea (which has come up before) to one sentence Jaynes wrote: "They were noble automatons who knew not what they did" (p. 75). Jaynes liked this type of dramatic language, and I think it helped to excite people's imaginations about the theory. In ...

It's an interesting scenario, and probably quite possible. One thing however I want to comment on is I think we need to get away from this idea of the "monotone voice." For some reason it is quite common for people to imagine bicameral people as zombie-like or robotic. I don't think this w...

RE: Teaching consciousness. Jaynes talks about this a bit in some of his lectures. The parent cultivates the child's mind-space by talking about what they did yesterday and "going to grandma's house tomorrow," etc. But in general I think the child learns consciousness as a by-product of le...

Jaynes touches on this a bit in his lecture "Consciousness the Voices of the Mind" - I think during the question and answer session (see Audio CDs ). I will leave it at that for now except to say that Prof. Brian McVeigh will be discussing this issue in much greater depth in a forthcoming ...