Hearing Voices, Sensed Presences, and Imagined “Others”
Tanya M. Luhrmann, interviewed by Marcel Kuijsten, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: Tanya M. Luhrmann interviewed by Marcel Kuijsten on her research into hearing voices, sensed presences, imagined “others,” theory of mind, and other related topics.
Excerpt: Marcel Kuijsten: To start with, in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that asked you and eleven other scholars the question, “What book changed your mind?” you answered Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. You said that after finishing Jaynes’s book, “readers find that they think about the world quite differently. At least I did. I think the book crept up on me year by year until suddenly I decided that this odd book I’d read in college had a fundamental insight and had presented to me the puzzle that became my life’s work.” What led you to read Jaynes, what was the fundamental insight that his book provided, and what was the puzzle that Jaynes’s book proposes that became your life’s work?
Tanya Luhrmann: So I did some classics in college, and I think it was in the context of talking to a classics professor — I expect it was Bennett Simon, who is actually a psychiatrist and a scholar of psychiatric illness among the Greeks — who said that Jaynes’s book was a really interesting book that I should read. The reason that it captured my attention was that people have these auditory experiences, and not everybody has them. They are distributed differently in the social world. …