Anyone here ever hear of – or actually read – The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?
JJ, a Princeton U. (physics, I think) prof wrote it in the mid-1970s. His thesis was that humans used to quite normally “hear the voice of God” before the widescale advent of organized religious and moral doctrines about 3,500 years ago (or about BC 1500). He asserts from piles of historical “evidence” that people were in “direct contact” with “dieties” before the organizers of the first city states began to pitch specific beliefs about how things (supposedly) are to get everyone on the same page.
Jaynes said the differences between “Homer’s” Illiad (the tale of Helen of Troy and all that) and “Homer’s” (because we really don’t know who wrote them) Odyssey are evidence of a sea change in the way people understood what they observed. He suggested that the former presents the tale from the point of view of those voices, and that the latter presents the tale from the point of view of informed and instructed belief. (Not having read either in any depth, I cannot take a position.)
But what’s more interesting to me is Jaynes’s notion that the human brain’s two hemispheres used to operate “together” in a way they have not (in his view, and that of many others; see the following) since the advent of society-organizing religious indoctrination during the millennium from BC 2000 to BC 1000.
Jaynes’s thesis created a minor firestorm on both college campuses and in the mental health field in the early 1908s. Psychologists especially began to wonder if Jaynes had stumbled onto brain function factors relative to schizophrenia and/or borderlinism. But the researchers of that time didn’t yet have the brain-scanning tools they have had since the mid-1990s to look into it. When they did, they found some intriguing circumstances, though nothing to either prove or dis-prove anything Jaynes had offered.
Fast Forward about 30 years to Iain McGilchrist’s The Master & His Emissary .McGilchrist is one of the world’s leading “meta-researchers” (or “librarians,” I suppose) on the field of brain function, especially with respect to the diverse operations of the left and right brain hemispheres. Boiling down McGilchrist’s findings with respect to schizophrenia, it appears that he asserts that, at least in part, schiz may be the result of “too much interconnectivity” between the two brain hemispheres, rather than supporting the notion derived from Jaynes’s work that it may be the result of “too little.”
As I said above, I can’t take a position one way or the other, but I do see from my own meta-research (closing in now on 175,000 pages of material available online and at four major U. libraries; hey! I’ve got bipolar II) that connectivity between the two hemispheres very likely is an issue in the psychotic and semi-psychotic thoughts, “inner voices” and behaviors of borderlines and all manner of schizotypal dxs.