Hypnosis, Bicameral Mentality, and the Theory of Mind
John F. Kihlstrom interviewed by Marcel Kuijsten, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: John Kihlstrom interviewed by Marcel Kuijsten on his many years of research on subliminal perception, unconscious learning, the nature of hypnosis, the nature of the self, theory of mind, and many other topics.
Excerpt: Marcel Kuijsten: So to start with, we recognized coming into this that we have diverging views on certain aspects of Jaynes’s theory, and that this would be part interview and part discussion. I think that this type of discussion helps to further elucidate and advance ideas, and will hopefully give readers greater clarity on some of the finer points of Julian Jaynes’s theory. So I want to state up front that I appreciate both your willingness and your encouragement of this process.
John Kihlstrom: Thank you. For my part, I really appreciate the efforts you’ve made to keep Jaynes’s ideas alive. I don’t think our differences are all that great because we both accept his fundamental insight: that a major change in consciousness occurred not just in evolutionary time, but in historical time.
Kuijsten: Julian Jaynes cites your work in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in his chapter on hypnosis. How did you first encounter Jaynes? …