Audio download of Andrew (Ondrej) Stehlik’s lecture “Polytheism, Monotheism and Beyond.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Julian Jaynes presented an interesting anthropological theory of the origins and development of religion. He based most of his observations on Classic Homeric material with only cursory attention given to a few other regions and traditions. Recent developments in our understanding of the Near Eastern religious milieu and especially the most recent developments in our understanding of the Biblical religion asks for closer attention and assessment since it can provide interesting new perspectives and supportive insights.

Small cumulative advances in the academic study of the Biblical texts (So-called Biblical minimalists also known as the Copenhagen School — Thomas L. Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche together with other scholars, for instance Philip R. Davies) and especially in the discipline of Near Eastern Archeology (Israel Finkelstein, cooperating on popularizing volumes with Neil Asher Silberman) started to accelerate in 1990s. Simultaneously the dating of the final authorship of the Biblical texts has been moved forward by several centuries to the Persian and perhaps even later Hellenistic period (the Persian dating being proposed by Peter Frei). It is now a well-established fact that the Biblical text cannot be used as a direct source for the study of Ancient History. For instance the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs, of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Isaac, the Exodus narrative, the sagas of the unified monarchy of David and Solomon are now viewed as predominantly literary compositions.

The full appreciation of the fact that the Biblical texts and narratives do not relate history in a straightforward fashion is only a negative aspect of the recent development. This development is complemented and greatly surpassed by a positive impact. Religious texts, appropriately understood, can help us decipher, illuminate and understand some of the most fascinating and complex anthropological processes.

For instance, viewed in the ANE context, the Biblical texts preserved (like DNA) remnants of the developmental stages of monotheization of the original (polytheistic) religion. The work of Mark S. Smith from NYU and others ANE scholars like my Edinburgh professor Nicolas Wyatt clearly demonstrates that the Bible contains a substantial part of the North-West Semitic pantheon and mythology. Their publications illuminate the complex and diverse processes which lead toward the final form of the monotheistic text.

Ancient myths were “democratized” and transformed into heroic legends while divine characters were re-named and re-coined as patriarchs and other human characters. The North-West Semitic Pantheon and the characteristics and functions of its original deities were assimilated (god El), substituted (gods Yarich and Shemesh), subsumed and sublimated (goddess Asherah) expropriated and suppressed (god Baal), or inhibited and obscured (plethora of minor deities). Old religious practices were re-framed, re-narrated, hidden, forbidden and/or suppressed.

From a different point of view and with different accents, it can be described with Jan Assmann as a transition from the concept of multiple immanent deities representing natural forces towards a transcendent deity as a guarantor of the natural order. This process was accompanied by a transition from a broadly inclusive natural religiosity to a strictly exclusive supranatural one. We can also observe a simultaneous shift from sacrificial religion to a religion concerned with education and teaching (a shift from orthopraxy to orthodoxy) and from an oral tradition to the written fixation of religion.

I find this new understanding of the development of the Ancient Near Eastern religion surprisingly harmonious with Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind and its transition towards modern consciousness. The theory of Jan Assmann should be of particular interest. Assmann outlines a fast transition/shift from the primary to the secondary religion which cannot be reversed and which he calls the Mosaic Distinction. I would like to suggest that the immanent, natural, oral, inclusive and orthopraxy-oriented religion represents an original (and organic) religion of the bicameral stage and perhaps an early post-breakdown stage. As the process of the breakdown of the bicameral mind deepened, religiosity started to move first slowly, but inevitably, towards transcendent, supranatural, written, exclusivistic and orthodoxy-oriented religion. Breakdown of bicameralism and the disintegration of organic religiosity, are simultaneous and complementary processes. And just like the modern concept of consciousness, any contact between old organic religiosity and new world religions leads to irreversible changes in self-understanding.

As the world monotheistic religions are discovering and deepening this ability of anthropological self-reflection, we are clearly entering a new stage of religious development. A radically new form of religiosity, non-dogmatic, post-transcendent, is becoming possible and probable just like some kind of new reintegration of the human mind and self understanding.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Bill Rowe’s lecture “The Other Origin of Consciousness: Infancy and its Relationship to Julian Jaynes’s Theory.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: There are two origins of consciousness, one in antiquity and one in infancy. In the last decades of the twentieth century research in child development highlighted capacities of the human infant-caregiver relationship uniquely relevant to Julian Jaynes’s theory. One of these is a species specific capacity, present in the first year of life, which enables a close temporal coupling between human infants and their caregivers. The other is the ability of the children, beginning around 3 years of age, to conceptualize other people in terms of mental states. This talk will look at what is shared between children and their caregivers over the period of birth to about 7 years of age. These are, in developmental order, affect, subjective states, social scripts, and mental states. These shared features are highly variable and allow for a wide range of cultural emphasis. From a developmental-theoretic perspective this variability fits Julian Jaynes’s constructivist view of consciousness; it must be learned through other people, it can change over time, and can be different from culture to culture. These capacities can serve as additional constraints in speculations on the nature of consciousness in ancient times. Perhaps, looking at Julian Jaynes’s theory through the lens of child development can help make it feel less distant and more familiar to more people.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Carole Brooks Platt’s lecture “The Right Mind of the Poet” [Inspired Poetry and Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind Theory].

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Julian Jaynes identified the right temporal lobe as the source of the inspired voices of poets and prophets. In a number of studies in the 90’s, Michael Persinger used electromagnetic stimulation to induce a “God experience,” but also did a lesser known experiment with Katherine Makarec where 900 college students answered a questionnaire about their hallucinatory anomalies, a feeling of presence, and their predilections for creative writing. The researchers concluded that intense verbal meaningfulness in the dominant left hemisphere could produce a sense of alien presence in the non-verbal right hemispheric sense of self, along with messages of seemingly cosmic significance. Women seemed more prone than men to what the researchers dubbed the “Muse factor” effect. They linked their finding to Jaynes’s notion that the right or “god-side” of the preliterate bicameral mind could re-emerge in modern times in literary or musical creativity where consciousness is significantly altered. These authors, however, did not explain why their subjects were intensely emotional readers and writers of prose and poetry in the first place. …

… Right-hemispheric language dominance is rather rare. People with atypically lateralized brains are more likely to have mental illnesses or neurodevelopmental problems, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism. They are more likely to experience alien voices, and/or hold paranormal beliefs. While it would be very interesting to put Blake, Milton, or our latter day poets in an fMRI to see what lights up, we are constrained to use psychobiography and poetry itself to hypothesize about their inspired or dissociative tendencies.

Studying the lives and words of great poets and mediums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have concluded that a genetic predisposition to atypically enhanced right-hemispheric or bilateral dominance, combined with childhood trauma and life-long voracious reading, will entrain a sense of presence along with poetic and religious proclivities and telepathic possibilities. Blake and Milton described their experience as direct dictation. Rilke, who experienced perhaps the most traumatic childhood, also claimed direct dictation in some instances. Victor Hugo, W.B. Yeats, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Jane Roberts, all of whom experienced childhood trauma, used techniques such as Ouija boards, séances, possession states or automatic handwriting. To dissociate their creative words and wisdom required another person — a shared coupling with linked minds—to write down the words. There were gender differences too, stemming from both cultural bias and differing neural underpinnings. The male dissociative poets I have studied suffered maternal attachment issues, but tended to erect a hierarchical and self-confirming system to return to homeostasis. The female poets were more often victims of childhood sexual abuse, depression and/or father loss, and were more prone to suicide. However, depressed male poets who have also committed suicide certainly exist. In any case, collaboration between the hemispheres and in creative or therapeutic dyads produced literary genius with a sense of presence along with metaphors for poetry.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Professor Clay McNearney’s lecture “Robert Bellah and Julian Jaynes: An Imagined Conversation.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Julian Jaynes’s ideas are most at home in the prophetic world of ancient Judaism. Robert Bellah, following Karl Jaspers, is probably most dependent upon ancient Greece, but Bellah tries to provide a foundation for his argument from other civilizations as well, including ancient Judaism. In Bellah’s most recent book, Religion in Human Evolution, he works out a tentative position that seems to be quite compatible with Jaynes (though Bellah does not mention Jaynes). This might follow less from the historical data, extensive though that is, than from Bellah’s understanding of biological evolution. Jaynes suggests that even if the biology that lay behind his theory proves to be false and/or misguided, that would not invalidate his theory. In such statements, perhaps Jaynes was relying on a reading of historical and literary data more than biological. This talk imagines a conversation between Bellah and Jaynes that explores their common interests, data, conclusions, and directions for the future.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Eight audio lectures on Jaynes’s theory presented at the “Toward A Science of Consciousness” conference in April 2008 plus 6 tracks of bonus material on consciousness and language.

Contains over 4 hours of lectures, interviews, and bonus material on Julian Jaynes’s theory and related topics. Each lecture has been carefully edited to improve the overall quality.

Contents:
1. Jan Sleutels, Ph.D. – Recent Changes in the Structure of Consciousness? (19:29)
2. John Limber, Ph.D. – Consciousness is Just A Word: Julian Jaynes & Contemporary Psychology (24:09)
3. Brian J. McVeigh, Ph.D. – Ancient Religions (14:45)
4. Marcel Kuijsten – New Evidence for Jaynes’s Neurological Model (25:48)
5. Brian J. McVeigh, Ph.D. – Julian Jaynes & Neurotheology (20:19)
6. John Hainly – Mythological Consciousness: Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind & Vico’s Imaginative Universals (18:50)
7. Brian J. McVeigh, Ph.D. – Elephants in the Psychology Department: Hypnosis & Spirit Possession (23:18)
8. Marcel Kuijsten – Bicameral Dreams vs. Conscious Dreams (5:00)

Bonus Material:
9. Astrea Magazine Interview with Marcel Kuijsten on Julian Jaynes’s Theory (46:11)
10. Thought and Language: Part 1 (28:56)
11. Thought and Language: Part 2 (11:08)
12. Thought and Language: Part 3 (17:20)
13. Voices Inside You (12:53)
14. Thought & Language excerpt (10:08)

All files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the files.

Audio download of Dirk Corsten’s lecture “The Origins of Voices: Life History and Voices & Lessons for Recovery”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Julian Jaynes’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind inspired an emancipatory approach and the emergence of international hearing voices networks and eventually Intervoice, a global emancipatory organization for voice hearers and their allies. From our perspective hearing voices is viewed as a personal but normal experience that people (can) learn to cope with. Voices make sense in the context of the voice hearer and his/her personal history. Understanding this process gives the opportunity to improve the relationship between voices and voice hearer and solve underlying problems. I will describe how we systematically make sense of these voices and support recovery by engaging with the voices. Several examples and a research project will be presented.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Elisabeth Bell Carroll’s lecture “A Vestige of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Rick Strassman states in his essay, “Endogenous Hallucinations and the Bicameral Mind,” that DMT or N,N-dimethyltryptamine is a potent endogenous psychedelic found in the human body. Further, Strassman observes that the DMT and bicameral states have in common at least two characteristics: (1) previously unknown information is communicated and (2) there is an abiding certainty that the presence conveying this information is an independent other, existing externally. I have lived with temporal lobe epilepsy since childhood, and I examine my own auditory and visual hallucinations in the light of Strassman’s research, noting that the biochemistry of the spiritual experience may have bearing in my case. Indeed, I may have been able to manage my active relationship with the divine from ages 4-17 due, in part, to the relational nature of the DMT state, as I interacted in a perceptible environment with a free-standing independent other, who was hallucinated yet impossible to resist.

Further, I examine the sequential stages of Julian Jaynes’s bicameral-mind theory as they correspond to my own experiences of hearing the voice of an authoritative god. I was age 4 when my appendix ruptured. As our family priest anointed my body in a rite hours after surgery, Jesus appeared in the hospital room, leaned close and said, “Good night, Elisabeth.” Jesus spoke to me from time to time until I was 17, yet that summer He abandoned me. In my daily journal, I named this loss the Blessed Withdrawal of God. Although I had lived with petit mal seizures ever since the appendectomy, my parents had never consulted a physician about my malady. At age 17, I sought out a medical doctor (an oracle), hoping to awaken a lost certainty, wondering if the freeway to the consciousness of God had been opened by my seizures. Via a form of recapitulation theory, I present the Jaynesian stages as congruent to my own growth into subjective consciousness.

Hospital policy guidelines in 1954 were not child-centered as they are today, and parents were often advised against visiting an inpatient child. For weeks after surgery, I was pinned to the sheet of my crib to allow intravenous liquid to flow evenly. Jesus visited my cribside and spoke to me, in lieu of my parents, and I relate this coping resource to the phenomenon of sensed presences during extreme and unusual environments (EUEs), the research of John Geiger and Peter Suedfeld. Additionally, in my home the child who experienced auditory hallucinations and visions of God was not pathologized or medicated. A fervent Irish-Catholic family, we were uncritical of each other’s personal nearness to God, so in that regard, I hypothesize, we were like a family in bicameral society. Above all, I hope to show what it was like to have a stalwart knowing Other break into my private consciousness.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Gary William’s lecture “Consciousness Behind Closed Doors: Julian Jaynes and the Refrigerator Light Problem.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: One question we might have about consciousness concerns its pervasiveness during waking life. We can divide views of pervasiveness into two broad camps: thin and thick. Julian Jaynes famously defends a thin view, arguing that consciousness is more fleeting than it is pervasive. On thick views, consciousness seems pervasive because it actually is pervasive throughout our waking life. On thin views, in contrast, humans are often fully awake, alert, and intelligently performing tasks without the presence of consciousness. Most people find the thin view unbelievable given the reasonable thought that if it seems like consciousness is pervasive, then it is pervasive. However, Jaynes argues this sense of pervasiveness is an illusion. In a memorable analogy, he likens our delusional belief in pervasiveness to a flashlight casting its beam about a dark room, and thus concluding light is everywhere. Analogously, we could ask whether the refrigerator light is always on even when the door is closed. A philosophical puzzle known as the “refrigerator light problem” arises when we try to decide between thin and thick views using introspection alone. In other words, if we cannot appeal to introspective evidence to decide between thin or thick views, how should the debate proceed? What evidence would settle the debate? Having set up the refrigerator light problem, I analyze several possible solutions as well as their prospects and implications for Jaynesian theory.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Rabbi James Cohn’s lecture “A Jaynesian Philology: The Bible as a Written Record of the Dawn of Consciousness.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: In 1976, Julian Jaynes hypothesized that our ancestors were acculturated to understand their mental life in terms of obedient responses to auditory prompts, which they hallucinated as the external voice of God. Although these “bicameral” people could think and act, they had no awareness of choices or of choosing — or of awareness itself. Jaynes claimed that one could trace this cultural transformation over the course of a scant millennium by analyzing the literature of the Hebrew Scriptures (“Old Testament,” OT). Jaynes himself, however, was not skilled in Hebrew or cognate languages, and was forced to rely on translations and secondary sources. This presentation tests Jaynes’s assertions by examining passages from the OT text, as seen through the lens of the Documentary Hypothesis and modern critical historical scholarship. The writers of the oldest texts had no words in their cultural lexicon to correspond to our words such as “mind” or “imagination” or “belief.” Translations into English that employ such mentalistic words are misleading. By sharp contrast, in the later OT texts, a lexicon of rich interiority appears. The writers have become acculturated to experience mental life as a rich introspective consciousness, full of internal mind-talk and “narratization,” and perceiving their own actions as the result, not of obedience to an external voice, but of self-authorized, internal decisions. This presentation explores the relationship of introspective consciousness and language; the disappearance of prophetic voices in biblical literature over a specific time frame; the question of when and why a theory of mind arose in human development; and the appearance of vestiges of earlier mentalities in modern mental life.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

(Please note: This is an audio lecture, not an e-book. If you are looking for Rabbi Cohn’s book, you can find that here: The Minds of the Bible)

Audio download of Professor Jan Sleutels’s lecture “The Contingency of Mind: Situating Jaynes in the Changing Landscape of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Philosophy of mind in the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by various forms of reductionism and cognitivism. Despite many differences they shared a basically essentialist outlook, holding (mostly implicitly) that mental states, processes, properties, and competencies are properly analyzed as natural kinds. In keeping with this basic presumption, philosophers and cognitive scientists tended to dismiss historical and cultural considerations for purposes of understanding the nature of the human mind.

Among the factors that contributed to this ahistorical bias, three are particularly noteworthy. First, the primary concern of analytical philosophy was conceptual analysis. In the philosophy of mind this took the form of analyzing the conceptual apparatus of folk psychology, trying to establish necessary connections between folk concepts and their cognitive and neural conditions of use. The logical nature of this approach made it non-historical in principle.

Secondly, both cognitivism and reductionism endorsed the idea that the human mind supervenes on the biological brain, which was presumed to be responsive only to pressures on vast, evolutionary timescales. Brain architecture must have been substantially the same throughout most of human history. Hence, the nature of mental states, processes, properties, and competencies must have remained the same as well.

Finally, moral considerations made it hard to think otherwise. According to a long-standing Western tradition, the mind is the seat of human dignity and man’s defining characteristic. From that perspective, changes in the nature of conscious minds on anything short of an evolutionary timescale would seem to compromise the moral unity of mankind. Even if animals and early hominids can be excluded from our peer group (to which some would strongly object), drawing the line any closer to home is insufferable.

Looking back on the intellectual landscape of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, it makes perfect sense that Julian Jaynes was considered a maverick. There was simply no place for his historical approach to consciousness (Jaynes 1976). His theory was rejected on apriori grounds as conceptually incoherent, biologically impossible, and probably also morally suspect (cf. Sleutels 2006).

Today the situation is quite different, however. In the late 1990s the landscape started to shift towards a view of the mind as being contingent upon a variety of external factors. The so-called EEE approach (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted Cognition) drew attention to the ecological and cultural context of psychological competencies, while varieties of the Extended Mind hypothesis pointed up the importance of external tools (including language technologies) for the development of cognitive skills (Clark 2008). Critics of evolutionary psychology are questioning the presumption of psychological continuity that goes with essentialism (Sleutels 2013), while philosophers such as Hutto (2008) argue that our current self-understanding as thinking, conscious agents (our ‘folk psychology’) is contingent on socio-cultural practices.

In this paper I will situate Jaynes’s view of the origin of modern consciousness in the newly emerged landscape. I review some of the most pertinent developments in the philosophy of mind, including work in cognitive archaeology (Malafouris 2008) and so-called ‘radically enactivist’ theories of mind (Hutto and Myin 2013). I conclude by proposing a general argument for the contingency of mind that underscores the importance of Jaynes for future research.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

A 90-minute audio recording of a lecture by Julian Jaynes, titled “Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind,” presented at Tufts University on October 14, 1982, plus bonus material.

Contents:
1. Introduction (5:13) (free preview)
2. Consciousness Defined – Part 1 (14:32)
3. Consciousness Defined – Part 2 (15:44)
4. The Bicameral Mind (15:45)
5. The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (13:37)
6. Overview of Jaynes’s Neurological Model (6:09)
7. Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind / Question & Answer Session (19:26)

Bonus Material: Voices of the Mind
8. The Voices In My Head: Lecture (14:15)
9. Hearing Voices Part 1: Discussion with Voice Hearers & Clinicians (29:42)
10. Hearing Voices Part 2: Discussion with Voice Hearers & Clinicians (30:03)
11. Hearing Voices Part 3: Discussion with Voice Hearers & Clinicians (23:58)
12. Hearing Voices In Your Head? (11:23)

All files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the files.

Audio download of Malcolm David Lowe’s lecture “How Languages Create Mind Space and The ‘Analog I’.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: The idea that consciousness is built on the back of language is one of the four pillars of Julian Jaynes’s (JJ) ‘preposterous hypothesis’ advanced in his epic work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (OC). JJ discusses at length how metaphor has the capacity to generate mind space. It is a central theme of his book and one that you are probably quite familiar with. In this paper, I intend to turn back the hands of time and suggest that while metaphor may have expanded a mind space that already existed, it is an ancient design feature of language itself that first gives rise to mind space and the ‘analog I’.

Before I can do that, however, there is one obstacle that I have to address and it has to do with the way we perceive language. For over three hundred years, we have studied the forms of language — its sounds, morphology, words, grammar and syntax — in much the same way that an entomologist pins down a specimen for examination. It’s called the scientific method. In the process we have turned languages into assemblages of desiccated specimens. But languages are more than that. They are dynamic living systems which, while always in flux, exhibit a definite architecture. In other words, they are more than the sum of their parts. At any given point in time they represent a complex coherent system of meaning/sound relations. Changing the reductionist lens for a more holistic one will allow us to view language in an altogether different light and one that is more receptive to my line of inquiry.

While every language weaves the threads of meaning and sound together in its own way to produce a unique and intricate tapestry, the operational logic at work in the unconscious does not change in the lifetime of a language system. Thus there is a direct lineage between the present day variety of a language and the emergent system at its genesis. If this were not the case, how could we account for the continuity of English through such radically different forms as are represented by Old English, Middle English and modern English? So when we look at the patterns generated by sound and meaning in any language, we are looking at a very ancient architecture. It precedes all the trappings of syntax, in its narrow sense, and grammar, both of which represent later developments in the life of a language. But here we run into a problem. We cannot see this architectural detail because the threads of sound and meaning are woven together in an unseen matrix in the unconscious. Fortunately for us, however, although the matrix is not directly accessible to our conscious mind, its architecture can be discerned by looking at the meaning/sound patterns manifested in words, which carry this ancient DNA in their architecture. Each of the word pairs listed on page 3 of this abstract confirm that there is such a level of meaning operating in the background of words. Words are simply downstream expressions of this generative matrix of sound and meaning. At first it may seem like we are just playing word games here, but once you start to see the underlying sound/meaning patterns behind the words, the pervasive nature of these patterns becomes increasingly obvious.

There are a number of different explanations you could posit for these sound and meaning correlations. One is that the examples offered are, in the words of linguist John McWhorter, “the result of largely random accretions through the millennia….” Another explanation is that the patterns are interesting but not significant. A third approach, and one that I will advocate for, is that these are not chance correlations and, further, that they are extremely significant. I will argue that far from being “random accretions”, these twinned pairs of meaning and sound point to a basic organizing principle of language, to wit that meaning is organized in polarities. To couch this in other terms, if you were to be magically relieved of your ability to think in terms of polarities — in other words, if you could no longer contrast “up” with “down”, “left” with “right”, “male” with “female”, “black” with “white”, or “me” with “not me,” then you would no longer be conscious in the Jaynesian sense. I will attempt to convince you, with the aid of the specific examples mentioned, and others, that polarity of meaning is what creates the “other” described in the quotation at head of this abstract. Without it there would be no mind space and no ‘analog I.” Accenting this perspective on language opens up a whole new window of understanding into the nature of language and languages, and portends a fundamental realignment in our thinking about the origins of language and consciousness.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Dr. Martin Kommor’s lecture “The Role of Self-Reflection (and Reflective Supervision) in the Development of Psychiatric Residents.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Psychiatry especially since Freud has emphasized the importance of insight and the practice of self reflection (SR) whether for patients undergoing talking therapy or residents undergoing training. Does SR, however, help residents become better clinicians? How so? In what fashion? It may be by enhancing empathy. It’s been demonstrated that a) medical students become less empathic as they go through medical school and b) that clinicians perceived by their patients as highly empathic are more likely to achieve patient compliance in the management of chronic illness. Does more SR produce more empathy? How? Do residents in fact get training in SR? What exactly do we mean by SR? By SR training? How does SR compare to empathy, introspection, meditation and more recent concepts like mentalization or reflective function? How and when does SR occur over the life span? What promotes its development? What interferes with it? How does it “work” neurophysiologically? These are some of the questions I will be addressing during this presentation. Some I hope to answer thoroughly. Others will be more speculative if not sketchy. Nevertheless, I hope to stimulate your curiosity on this subject. It certainly has stimulated mine.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Professor Martin L. Lenhardt’s lecture “Expansion of Jaynes’ Wahee-Wahoo Hypothesis for Speech/Language Evolution.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: Jaynes’s paper entitled ‘The Evolution of Language in the Late Pleistocene” presented at the 1976 New York Academy of Sciences meeting summarized his views on speech/language evolution. Jaynes received considerable criticism, chief of which was directed at his relatively later date of the emergence of speech in our species. Jaynes started with alarm calls, which likely existed in some form in prehuman primate species. His specific example was a warning cry of wha which changes in intensity with the threat level and can be directed to specific (moving) objects. An specific approaching dangerous object might elicit a cry of wahee whereas the same departing object might elicit a more relaxed vocal gesture as wahoo. Although Jaynes never specified the wahoo would likely be longer in duration with a falling pitch contour. The wahee would likely be shorter in duration to accommodate more calls per breath in an excited state which would likely be characterized by a flat or rising pitch contour. These contours have linguistic meaning today and are one of the first discernible by infants and processed on the right side of adult brains. It would appear there was a fitness advantage for individuals developing a vocal alarm system of this nature. I will argue in this presentation it is the complex acoustical nature of these calls that was selected for but not, as most suggest for communication, but as an aid in auditory localization within a social group. Jaynes’s concept that the call endings later separated from the calls to become modifiers is reasonable in the sense that hee and hoo were functionally distinct and have a specific auditory neural substrate.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Ralf Funke’s lecture “The Dangerous Metaphor: Wittgenstein and Jaynes and the Rise of Neobehaviorism.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: In 1984 Julian Jaynes gave a lecture in Kirchberg entitled “Four Hypotheses on the Origin of Mind.” The first of these hypotheses, and most interesting from a philosophical point of view, states that subjective consciousness is a social construction dependent on language, built upon metaphors of behavior in the physical world. Wittgenstein would perhaps have been in sympathy with Jaynes. He too thought that consciousness is not some “private theatre.” Inner processes at the bottom of conscious thought, accessible only to the individual, he called a “dangerous metaphor.” Like Jaynes, Wittgenstein held that language is logically prior to consciousness and when he claimed that dogs cannot be hypocrites but also not sincere, Jaynes would certainly have agreed. And like Jaynes, Wittgenstein was not afraid to be accused of behavioristic tendencies.

All audio files are in mp3 format. Upon payment you will receive a link to download the file.

Audio download of Ted Remington’s lecture “Jaynes, Metaphor, and the Rhetorical Structuring of Consciousness.”

From the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies.

Summary: 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 (OC hereafter), rhetoricians would be in his debt. In this chapter, Jaynes offers a detailed explanation of how metaphor — a preoccupation of rhetoric from its beginnings as a discipline in ancient Athens — works on a tactical, cognitive level. Even without this broader context of his argument in OC, Jaynes offers rhetoricians a helpful vocabulary with which to talk and think about metaphor, one that builds on work done in the twentieth century by students of rhetoric, particularly I.A. Richards, whose The Philosophy of Rhetoric is one of the most influential works on rhetoric that have appeared in the last 100 years.

But of course, Jaynes’s discussion of metaphor is but the groundwork for his argument that human consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon intimately tied to language use and metaphor. If Jaynes’s specific thoughts on the workings of metaphor are valuable in and of themselves to rhetoricians, the consequences of these thoughts and the larger use to which Jaynes puts them offer untold riches to those of us who wish to more fully understand the role rhetoric plays in the world.

In this presentation, the author suggests that we can see Jaynes’s treatment of metaphor as a continuation of a line of thought that emerges from Richards’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric. While never citing Richards in OC, Jaynes advances two of Richards’ main arguments: that metaphor plays a much more central role in thought than it is traditionally given and that a more exact vocabulary is necessary to understand how metaphor works as a way of structuring our understanding of the world. The author points to ways in which Jaynes advances Richards’s thought significantly, particularly in his discussion of the role of the paraphrand in metaphor. This puts an even greater emphasis on the rhetorical nature of metaphor.

Second, the author suggests that Jaynes’s work links a line of thought on metaphor dominated by poetic/rhetorical thought (e.g., Richards) with a growing interest in metaphor that emerges over the course of the twentieth century in the fields of linguistics and psychology. As such, Jaynes’s treatment of metaphor is a particularly powerful and important instrument in thinking about metaphor.

Lastly, the author concludes by suggesting that, put in the larger context of Jaynes’s ideas about consciousness, his treatment of metaphor opens up opportunities to better understand how the study of rhetoric intersects with the study of consciousness, and suggests a central role for rhetoric in defining who we are.

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