The Voice of God
The human brain consists of two hemispheres linked by a thick band of connective tissue called the corpus callosum. The two hemispheres are not identical. In right-handed people, the left hemisphere is dominant and controls the right side of the body, while the right hemisphere controls the generally weaker left side of the body. Bicameral means "two chambered" and provides a good way of describing the human brain with its two distinct but connected hemispheres.
The left hemisphere is normally considered the seat of language and logic while the right hemisphere is the province of art, mathematics and music. Autistic savants can show bewildering technical expertise in art, mathematics and music while often being regarded as backward in relation to language, logic and empathy. It has been speculated that these individuals suffered left-brain trauma in the womb due to an abnormal response to testosterone, leading to right-brain dominance. People who have suffered strokes in the left brain have been known to undergo remarkable transformations and discover high-level artistic, musical or mathematical skills that were not in any way evident previously.
The left-brain is characterised as selective, focused, methodical. It filters information to allow the "big picture" to be seen. The right brain, on the other hand, deals with all of the detail ignored and filtered by the left brain. Ours is a left-brain "big picture" society, but that doesn't mean it was always so. Julian Jaynes's radical hypothesis is that what we regard as modern consciousness is intimately connected to the evolving dominance of the left brain and, particularly, to the development of language and writing. Before that, the right brain was in charge and what we regard as consciousness simply didn't exist. In fact, Jaynes speculates that human consciousness as we now understand it has existed for only about 3,000 years.
What existed before consciousness was the "bicameral mind". Jaynes argues that human beings, as they started to learn rudimentary language, began to undergo a form of auditory hallucination when they were stressed. They would hear a voice in their head commanding them what to do: "fight", "run", "drink", "rest", "hunt", "shelter" etc. The hallucinated voice was that of the tribal chief or some authority figure. The person carried out the command unquestioningly. No consciousness existed to allow the command to be pondered, challenged or contemplated. It was simply executed robotically. Even when the tribal chief died, his hallucinated voice would still be heard for a long time after. In this way, it would seem that he wasn't actually dead. Was the tribal chief promoted to the status of "god" at this time? (This was the origin, Jaynes suggests, of the belief in life-after-death and therefore the human religious sensibility.) As society grew more complex, additional voices arose to reflect additional chiefs and gods.
The bicameral human mind had an inbuilt master-slave structure: one part of the brain barked orders, and another part carried them out immediately. This permitted a rapid and decisive response in crisis situations. It is a more sophisticated form of animal behaviour, most of which is pre-programmed and instinctual. Animals don't reflect on their behaviour and don't take time to decide what to do, and nor did the bicameral mind.
According to Jaynes, the hallucinated voice(s) arose in the right hemisphere of the brain and was heard in the left hemisphere. The right brain was the master that issued executive commands and the left brain was the slave that dutifully followed them. From this originated the human propensity for master-slave relationships.
Jaynes thought his model provided an insight into hypnosis. The authoritative voice of the hypnotist becomes that of the right-brain master that once spoke to human beings. The left brain reverts to its old slavish instinct and mindlessly obeys the master's commands.
In a TV show featuring British illusionist Derren Brown, he rang a public call box and waited for someone to answer. As soon as a person picked up, he shouted, "Go to sleep!" Amazingly, many of those who answered the phone were filmed immediately slumping to the ground in a deep sleep. Brown's explanation was that these people were extremely suggestible. He pointed out that most people would ignore a ringing phone in a public call box, assuming it was a wrong number and knowing it definitely wasn't for them. Those who do answer are almost Pavlovian in their behaviour - they feel compelled to pick up a phone if it rings, no matter what the situation is, as if they have been conditioned since birth to do so and have no conscious choice. Is "suggestibility" a vestige of the old bicameral mind?
(In the 1960s, it was rumoured that the CIA carried out research on "voice control" as part of their top secret MK-Ultra project. The idea was to use a form of auditory hypnosis via the telephone to gain control over the person at the other end of the line. An agent would use subtle vocal commands and specific acoustic tones to bring the listener under his influence and then manipulate him for the desired purpose. It was hypothesised that the right hemisphere of the brain was more impressionable than the left and could be targetted.Once it had been brought under control, it could be used to direct the left brain. Afterwards, the subject would be made to forget what had happened. This procedure is entirely consistent with Jaynes's theory. Prohibition A, freely downloadable from this site, is about brainwashing and mind control techniques used by the American Intelligence services and relates a hypothetical plot to install a fully brainwashed person as President.)
Is schizophrenia, where people hear voices ordering them to do things, a reversion to the old bicameral mind? Are the "imaginary friends" that some children create also a product of the ancient bicameral mind?
Are young children conscious? How many of us can remember even one detail of our earliest years? Yet we clearly did things, despite not being conscious in any way that we can recall. Perhaps we were guided by a bicameral mind in our childhoods, with our parents' voices the ones we hallucinated in our heads to tell us what to do when our parents weren't physically around. We can't remember this phase of our lives because we had no consciousness to organise memories for us. Children in infancy exhibit similar traits to autistics; they don't understand concepts such as deceit and empathy. Nor would people with bicameral minds have understood these concepts. Are autistics operating according to a form of bicameral mentality?
Is a charismatic leader with hypnotic language skills - someone like Hitler, Mussolini, Martin Luther King, Billy Graham - taking the role of the hallucinated voice of the tribal leader or god of bicameral times? Is that why they inspire such devotion and can command vast crowds? At huge election rallies, are human beings reverting to their vestigial bicameral selves? Is that why they love strong leaders, why they love authority, why they love celebrities and the super-rich? Have they placed these people on a par with the old bicameral gods? Is a lynch mob a manifestation of a collective bicameral mentality kicking in? - a leader commands and the mob mindlessly obeys. Is the office hierarchy where people feel compelled to obey their inept managers a throwback to bicameral thinking? People say they're scared to lose their job if they disobey. They're obviously much less scared of losing their self-respect.
When Moses went up to the summit of Mount Sinai and encountered Yahweh, when Mohammed went into a mountain cave and encountered the Angel Gabriel, when Jesus spoke with his heavenly Father, were they all exhibiting "bicameral episodes"? Such episodes are thought to be more frequent if people have been fasting, meditating, isolating themselves from others. In short, if you go into the wilderness for forty days, you markedly raise the chances of having a bicameral episode. Are such episodes the basis of the "divine revelations" of Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Is the "Word of God" the same as the "Voice of God"?
In a famous experiment by Benjamin Libet, strong evidence was provided that consciousness may often consist of retrospective rationalisations of events that have already been decided by the brain i.e. free will might be illusory. But another explanation is possible. Perhaps the older bicameral mind acts before the conscious mind, except the hallucinated voice is silent. The conscious mind then rationalises the event as its own work.
Did empathy - our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and imagine what they would feel and think - evolve from the old bicameral mind and the new conscious mind trying to understand each other and seek some mode of cooperation and mutual understanding? In other words, empathy was, according to this view, originally internal before being extended to others, and may derive from our twin-chambered brain. We can run a simulation of the person with whom we are empathising in our right brain, while comparing and contrasting with our "selves", located in the left brain. This is a capacity that evolved from the older bicameral mind. Whereas in the past, the right brain issued the "voice of god", and the left brain obeyed, the left brain can now create any voice in the right brain and treat it as if it were a separate individual. The simulation can become so powerful and vivid that the created voice might eventually seem real. Some novelists have claimed that their fictional characters take them over and write the book on their own, without the author's conscious involvement. These novelists say they could imagine placing the character in any situation outwith the context of the novel, and know exactly how the character would behave. This is consistent with a bicameral mentality, with a created character taking on a voice and life of its own.
Is our love of acting and role play, of story-telling and fantasy, of impersonating others, of assuming an identity for computer games, of having an avatar in a virtual reality world like Second Life, related to the inbuilt existence of a twin nature arising from the left and right brain, and from the modern conscious mind and the old bicameral mind? Studies have shown differences between how men and women use their right and left brains. Are women more prone to submissive and compliant behaviour because they are more bicameral then men? Is the human obsession with opposites, with binary logic, related to bicameralism? Is the "double", the doppelganger, the shadow, the "other" all intimately connected with bicamerlaism? Does the ultimate root of good and evil lie in bicameralism? There is virtually no arena of the human condition which couldn't be considered as some kind of bicameral phenomenon.
Is the human race as a species prone to individual and mass hallucinations because of bicameralism? Can humans create such powerful simulations of other "voices" that they effectively conjure gods, ghosts, spirits, vampires, werewolves and a whole gallery of supernatural beings out of their imaginations and then believe they are real? Are mediums (those ones who aren't outright charlatans), so skilled at simulating the thoughts of a dead person about whom they have collected a few details that they can accurately describe how that person might have behaved when he was alive? Is that why they seem so convincing? Are people who have uncannily accurate intuitions about other people running incredibly powerful simulations of those others in their mind? Or is something else going on?
Some patients suffering from a hallucinated personality claim that the hallucination knows more than they do. What does that imply? It could be argued that the right brain, with access to all of the detail that the left brain filters out, may well seem to have greater knowledge. It retains all of the facts that the left brain has long forgotten.
Some people have had "split brain" operations involving the severing of the corpus callosum. Could that result in a person developing two "selves"? Not nearly enough scientific research has been conducted on split brain patients. They could hold the key to persuading the world about the reality of the bicameral mind.
The word "paranoia" literally means having another mind alongside one's own. That is exactly what the bicameralism is.
Does multiple personality syndrome (MPD) - when one personality seemingly divides into two or more - derive from bicameralism? (Prohibition A shows how MPD could be used to manufacture "Manchurian Candidates" - perfect mind-controlled assassins.) Regarding those people who can provide vivid details of past lives when they are under hypnosis, are memory traces of buried "voices" being accessed? (If someone living in America who had never left the country were able, under hypnosis, to successfully reveal the location of an ancient artefact that had been buried in France for hundreds of years and state that he himself had hidden this object in a previous life, how could any mainstream hypothesis account for this?) Is "speaking in tongues" a bicameral phenomenon? (If someone were to speak fluently in an ancient and "dead" language which they had never previously encountered and of which they could have no possible knowledge in conventional terms, how could any mainstream hypothesis possibly account for this?)
The Muses who are said to guide poets, writers and artists - are they actually bicameral voices? Tourette's Syndrome - is that an inner bicameral voice suddenly erupting uncontrollably? Being "possessed" - is that really a description of an old bicameral voice coming to the surface? In an exorcism, is a bicameral "demon" being expelled? The famous ancient Greek Oracle at Delphi - was the priestess vocalising the thoughts of a hallucinated god?
In ancient Rome, an individual's "genius" was his guardian and guiding spirit. This "genius" could easily be interpreted as an echo of the bicameral voice of old. Socrates, when he was on trial for his life, spoke of a daemon that helped him in difficult times. He described it as, "…a sort of voice which comes to me and has done so since my childhood; and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on." John Milton referred to a "Celestial Patroness" who guided his poetry. William Blake seemed to live his life amongst a plethora of visions and auditory hallucinations. Wagner reached his creative peak when he searched inside himself for his musical ideas rather than looking to the outside world. Mathematician Françoise Chatelin heard a voice which, he claimed, instructed him in a new way of understanding numbers.
Is the condition of bipolar disorder (manic depression), from which many artists suffer, connected with bicameralism? During the manic phase, the person is consumed with activity, passion and creativity. Is that when he is being guided by an inner voice, silent but still directing his actions, reminiscent of the bicameral voice? The depressive phase would kick in when the "voice" or inner conviction vanished and the person was left to his own devices once more. He would feel bereft without the certainty and direction provided by the inner voice.
Some people might speculate that the vestigial bicameral "voice" could be equated with the Jungian "Shadow" aspect of the personality, or with the Freudian "Id". What is referred to as the "unconscious" may actually be the interplay between the modern conscious mind and the ancient bicameral mind. In certain situations, particularly stressful ones, the bicameral mind may come to the fore since it is far more decisive and quick-acting than the conscious mind.
When intoxicated people find that they can get home from a bar yet not have any conscious recollection of a single part of their homeward journey, they sometimes say they were on "autopilot", but perhaps it was their old bicameral mind that took over and guided them safely home. What about sleepwalkers? Have they been taken over by their old bicameral voice and then remember nothing about it when they wake up? As for dreams, human beings really have no idea what takes place in the dreamscape. People are woken up in order to report what they have been dreaming about. However, that involves their normal conscious mind kicking in and then trying to rationalise the few fragmentary images it can remember. It is possible that the dreamscape is where the old bicameral mind has much more say than normal, and tries to communicate messages to our consciousness, most of which are promptly forgotten unless they are particularly vivid? Jaynes thought that bicameral humans didn't really dream at all. Since they had no sense of "self", they could never imagine themselves in other times, places and situations, as modern, conscious humans do when they're dreaming. Rather, a bicameral person continued to experience the same sort of hallucinations in sleep as when awake i.e. voices speaking to them, accompanied, perhaps, by images of dead tribal chiefs, gods, heroes etc. Jaynes also speculated that the sexual encounters of bicameral people were boring and infrequent since they had no fantasy space to go to in their minds to spice things up. In many ways, bicameral humans are as far from modern human beings as Neanderthal Man.
There is a group called the "Hearing Voices Movement" which claims that between 2% and 4% of the population regularly hear voices, but only about one third become mental patients. In other words, there are people who hear voices and yet manage to cope with them and function normally. John Nash, the Nobel Prize winning economist, eventually managed to control the voices that had tormented him all his life.
There is a phenomenon known as the "Third Man", derived from T.S. Eliot's poem Waste Land:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
But when I look up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.
The idea is that in times of extreme stress, a presence can manifest itself and guide a person out of danger. Many people in life-threatening situations have described such a presence giving them direct instructions. Frequently, they attribute it to divine intervention. Many mountaineers, marathon runners and people doing extreme endurance sports have reported Third Man encounters. Scientists typically assert that oxygen deprivation is leading to deterioration in brain function, leading to hallucinations. However, the people undergoing these experiences seem not to be going into a chaotic, unfocused, disconnected state that will lead to their death, but the precise opposite. Why would a hallucination be so helpful and so specific in its advice? According to Jaynes's theory, what is happening is that the left brain is surrendering control to the right brain and the old bicameral mode is being restored during the crisis.
Jaynes's theory is massively speculative but it seems to convincingly address many issues that are inexplicable within the parameters of alternative and more conventional hypotheses.
There is no mystical element in Jaynes's thinking. He is rationalising a wide range of phenomena according to specific differences between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, leading, he thinks, to hallucinated voices (and perhaps hallucinated bodies too). These hallucinations are, he proposes, the basis of humanity's religious beliefs.
Jaynes's hypothesis, as it stands, is one that should speak loudly and persuasively to atheists. Even though they reject the concept of God, they may see the possibility of "expanding their consciousness" via getting in touch with the strange landscape of the right brain, full of creativity, mathematical, artistic and musical potential, and vast resources of unfiltered data that, if it could all be accessed under certain conditions, might provide amazing insights and extra capabilities. Wouldn't we all want access to an inner voice that could help us in times of danger, or that could revolutionise our perception of reality? Just as humanity underwent a remarkable transformation when it evolved from the bicameral mind to modern consciousness (in Jaynes's theory), so it could take another radical leap if modern consciousness could selectively tap the old bicameral mind.
But there's another possibility that Jaynes never considers. What if the bicameral hallucinated voices aren't hallucinations? What if they're real? What if the voice is that of the divine spark? What if it was the divine spark that guided humanity from its ape ancestry to modern consciousness? That would be one way of accounting for the staggering difference between humans and all other animals.
What if the divine spark has full memory of all of its previous incarnations, and these memories can be accessed under hypnosis? (Plato, an advocate of reincarnation, argued that all true knowledge involves recollection. We are not discovering anything new…we are simply remembering what our soul knew when it was part of the divine order.) What if glossolalia - speaking in tongues - is actually a manifestation of the native tongues of previous incarnations? What if some incarnations go back to the very dawn of humanity and know exactly what happened back then? What if they know the truth of the "Garden of Eden" and all the other Biblical events? What if they know the identities of the archons? What if they deliberately became silent, as part of a greater plan, once they had brought humanity to consciousness? The combination of reincarnation and a hidden voice that can be accessed in certain circumstances is nothing short of a way to bring the whole of human history alive, to reveal all of the moments once thought lost in time. And what if the divine spark also offered glimpses of the divine order, and the uttermost secrets of the universe?
Jaynes's proposal could be treated as a mystical theory providing direct evidence of the divine spark located, in effect, as a separate personality in the right hemisphere of the human brain - divinity inside man - or as a rationalist's account of how we might think the divine exists even though it is only a sophisticated hallucination produced by brain wiring.
Jaynes's theory permits the religious to glimpse the divine spark, and atheists a higher self. In that way, it can unite both factions in the pursuit of a higher humanity with massively expanded possibilities.
Those who might speculate that the Illuminati's path to enlightenment is concerned with gaining reliable and consistent access to just the sort of inner voice of wisdom, command and revelation that features in Jaynes's theory would be on the right track. But on that subject we can say no more.
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time is come."
Victor Hugo
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Schopenhauer