The Bicameral Mind Explained
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 second hypothesis of Julian Jaynes’s theory, the bicameral mind.
Excerpt: Brendan Leahy: What were the origins of the bicameral mind? How did the bicameral mentality come about?
Marcel Kuijsten: So roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years ago we have the beginnings of language. There is a lot of speculation around the actual date, and no one really knows for sure when language began. But as our use of language developed, Jaynes argues that the brain began using language as a tool or vehicle to convey knowledge and experience from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. This occurred in the form of what today we call auditory hallucinations. What Jaynes proposed is that, during an auditory verbal hallucination, the language areas of the non-dominant hemisphere become active, facilitating the transmission of information to the dominant hemisphere across the corpus callosum, via language. …