The Legend of Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of Westworld

William Indick and Vagish Kottana, in Travis Langley (ed.) Westworld Psychology: Violent Delights (Sterling, 2018).

Excerpt: “The creators of Westworld—both the TV show and the amusement park—needed a guiding theory as a framework for its premise. They found one in Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind. When his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, came out in 1976, it was a surprise hit, making the bestseller lists and earning a nomination for the National Book Award. The surprise was that a book with such an academic title and even more academic content, written by an unknown Princeton University lecturer and espousing such a far-out theory, could have captured the imagination of the reading public—but it did. …”