Julian Jaynes

Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples were not conscious.

Jaynes' definition of consciousness is synonymous with what philosophers call "meta-consciousness" or "meta-awareness", i.e., awareness of awareness, thoughts about thinking, desires about desires, beliefs about beliefs. This form of reflection is also distinct from the kinds of "deliberations" seen in other higher animals such as crows insofar as it is dependent on linguistic cognition.

Jaynes wrote that ancient humans before roughly 1000BC were not reflectively meta-conscious and operated by means of automatic, nonconscious habit-schemas. Instead of having meta-consciousness, these humans were constituted by what Jaynes calls the "bicameral mind". For bicameral humans, when habit did not suffice to handle novel stimuli and stress rose at the moment of decision, neural activity in the "dominant" (left) hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called "silent" (right) hemisphere (particularly the right temporal cortex), which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.

Jaynes wrote, "[For bicameral humans], volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey."^[2] Jaynes argued that the change from bicamerality to consciousness (linguistic meta-cognition) occurred over a period of ten centuries beginning around 1792 BC. The selection pressure for Jaynesian consciousness as a means for cognitive control is due, in part, to chaotic social disorganizations and the development of new methods of behavioral control such as writing."^[3]

Life

Jaynes was born in West Newton, Massachusetts, son of Julian Clifford Jaynes (1854–1922), a Unitarian minister, and Clara Bullard Jaynes (1884-1980). He attended Harvard University, was an undergraduate at McGill University and afterwards received master's and doctorate degrees from Yale University. He was mentored by Frank A. Beach and was a close friend of Edwin G. Boring. During this time period Jaynes made significant contributions in the fields of animal behavior and ethology. After Yale, Jaynes spent several years in England working as an actor and playwright. Jaynes later returned to the United States, and lectured in psychology at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990, teaching a popular class on consciousness for much of that time. He was in high demand as a lecturer, and was frequently invited to lecture at conferences and as a guest lecturer at other universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, Dalhousie, Wellesley, Florida State, the Universities of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Prince Edward Island, and Massachusetts at Amherst and Boston Harbor. In 1984 he was invited to give the plenary lecture at the Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria. He gave six major lectures in 1985 and nine in 1986. He was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Rhode Island College in 1979 and another from Elizabethtown College in 1985.^[4] He died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island on November 21, 1997.

Reception and influence

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was a successful work of popular science, selling out the first print run before a second could replace it. The book was a nominee for the National Book Award in 1978, and received dozens of positive book reviews, including those by well-known critics such as John Updike in The New Yorker, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, and Marshall McLuhan in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Articles on Jaynes's theory appeared in Time^[5] magazine and Psychology Today^[6] in 1977. Jaynes later expanded on the ideas in his book in a series of commentaries in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in lectures and discussions published in Canadian Psychology, and in Art/World. He wrote an extensive Afterword for the 1990 edition of his book, in which he expanded on his theory and addressed some of the criticisms. More than 30 years later, Jaynes's book is still in print.

Jaynes's theory has been influential to philosophers such as Daniel Dennett,^[7] psychologists such as Tim Crow^[8] and psychiatrists such as Henry Nasrallah.^[9] Jaynes's ideas have also influenced writers such as William S. Burroughs,^[10] Neal Stephenson,^[11] Robert J. Sawyer,^[12] Philip K. Dick,^[13] and Ken Wilber. Jaynes's theory inspired the investigation of auditory hallucinations by researchers such as psychologist Thomas Posey^[14] and clinical psychologist John Hamilton,^[15] which ultimately has led to a rethinking of the association of auditory hallucinations and mental illness.^[16] Jaynes's theory has been cited in thousands of both scientific and popular books and articles.^[17]

In the late 1990s, Jaynes's ideas received renewed attention as brain imaging technology confirmed many of his early predictions.^[18][19] A 2007 book titled Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited contains several of Jaynes's essays along with chapters by scholars from a variety of disciplines expanding on his ideas.^[20] At the April 2008 "Toward a Science of Consciousness" Conference held in Tucson, Arizona, Marcel Kuijsten (Executive Director and Founder of the Julian Jaynes Society) and Brian J. McVeigh (University of Arizona) hosted a workshop devoted to Jaynesian psychology. At the same conference, a panel devoted to Jaynes was also held, with John Limber (University of New Hampshire), Marcel Kuijsten, John Hainly (Southern University), Scott Greer (University of Prince Edward Island), and Brian J. McVeigh presenting relevant research. At the same conference the philosopher Jan Sleutels (Leiden University) presented on Jaynesian psychology. A 2012 book titled The Julian Jaynes Collection gathers together many of the lectures and articles by Jaynes relevant to his theory (including some that were previously unpublished), along with interviews and question and answer sessions where Jaynes addresses misconceptions about the theory and extends the theory into new areas.^[21]

Criticism

Jaynes's theories on consciousness and the bicameral mind are controversial. An early criticism by philosopher Ned Block argued that Jaynes had confused the emergence of consciousness with the emergence of the concept of consciousness. In other words, according to Block, humans were conscious all along but did not have the concept of consciousness and thus did not discuss it in their texts. Daniel Dennett countered that for some things, such as money, baseball, or consciousness, one cannot have the thing without also having the concept of the thing.^[22] Moreover, it is arguable that Block misinterpreted the nature of what Jaynes claimed to be a social construction.^[23][24]

Bibliography

• (Contributor) W. S. Dillon, editor, Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), 1970.
• (Contributor) C. C. Gillespie and others, editors, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Scribner (New York, NY), 1970.
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1977, republished with a new afterword by the author, 1990.
• (Editor, with others) The Lateralization of the Nervous System, Academic Press, 1977.
• Contributor of over forty articles to psychology journals, including
  • Psychological Review
  • Journal of Comparative Physiology and Psychology
  • American Naturalist
  • American Scientist
  • Behavior
  • Contemporary Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology^[1]

See also

• Bronze Age collapse, speculated by Jaynes to have been the ultimate cause of the breakdown of bicamerality

Notes

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Julian Jaynes

• Julian Jaynes Society
• The Origin of consciousness..: Summary, selected quotes and review
• Neuroimaging, Auditory Hallucinations, and the Bicameral Mind by Leo Sher, MD
• Schizophrenic Process and The Emergence of Consciousness in Recent History: The Significance for Psychotherapy of Julian Jaynes by Heward Wilkinson
• What It Feels Like To Hear Voices: Fond Memories of Julian Jaynes. Biennial Julian Jaynes Conference on Consciousness, 7-9 August 2008, University of Prince Edward Island by Stevan Harnad