New Evidence for Jaynes’s Neurological Model
Marcel Kuijsten interviewed by Brendan Leahy, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: Marcel Kuijsten interviewed by Brendan Leahy on the evidence the fourth hypothesis of Julian Jaynes’s theory, his neurological model for the bicameral mind.
Excerpt: Brendan Leahy: Can you explain Jaynes’s fourth hypothesis, his neurological model for the bicameral mind?
Marcel Kuijsten: Yes, it was Jaynes’s conjecture as to the neurology of bicameral mentality. I say conjecture because the technology simply was not available in the late 1970s to test this hypothesis.
So in right handed people, our language ability resides in two areas of the left temporal lobe called Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. In left handed people, the dominant hemisphere for language can be reversed, or language can be more evenly distributed between the two hemispheres. But for sake of simplicity, for this discussion we’ll assume that we’re talking about a right-handed person. The hemisphere for language, in this case the left hemisphere, is often referred to as the “dominant” hemisphere, with the right hemisphere referred to as the “non-dominant” hemisphere. This terminology can be somewhat confusing, but it is simply referring to the hemisphere’s dominance for language.
Jaynes reasoned that if we’re processing language and speech comprehension in our left hemisphere language areas, then auditory hallucinations were likely being generated from the temporal lobe areas of the non-dominant right hemisphere. This makes intuitive sense, as these are the only other plausible speech areas in the brain. …