Thirty. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (and the next book in the David Bowie Book Club is revealed)
1976, Mariner Books, 504 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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The premise of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is so unsettling, that it takes a while for it to register. It takes a while, in fact, for the author, Julian Jaynes, to explain it thoroughly. I’ll try in less than a paragraph, though — our consciousness, he says, that is the voice in our head that directs us, contradicts us and internally argues with us constantly, is not a factor of our evolution but a social construct that was invented by humanity along with civilisation. And because our mind is constructed to rationalise our experiences, until the point we’ve invented consciousness, we’ve perceived these voices as external to us, and therefore needed to find another explanation for these voices, and we’ve invented another construct — namely, gods and religion.
Jaynes explains thoroughly in the book that both social inventions are actually the result of evolutionary advances in our brain structure — he claims that the two brain hemispheres were initially independent, before the corpus callosum has been developed, and that they had similar processing areas, one of which — in the right hemisphere — caused us to believe we are hearing internal voices as external. Once our corpus callosum — the connecting tissue between the two hemispheres — has developed sufficiently, both areas started complementing each other instead of replacing each other, and the voices have become internal.
The book goes further to explain how this concept manifests itself in today’s world, when people will sometime regress back to two separate hemispheres, which explains, according to him, schizophrenia and other contemporary phenomena.
It is a fascinating book, which explores an idea that is very difficult to grasp and is very foreign to everything we know about our natural and social history. It is meticulously constructed and presents its argument in a very scientific manner. However, its Achilles hill — probably the reason for it not being a stronger link in our scientific progress through the centuries — is that, naturally lacking other sources of evidence that could explain how the human brain worked thousands of years ago, most of the sources Jaynes cites are circumstantial — providing sources, for example, from various ancient writings, including the old testament, which corroborate his theory. It is still a very enlightening book, and is worth reading and understanding at least once — if not for the value of the theory itself, for the way a theory should be presented for the reader’s judgement.
January’s pick for the David Bowie Book Club will be Arthur C. Danto’s Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, where we may discover the beginning of Bowie’s admiration of Andy Warhol — or at least its continuation.
