Novelty of idea and style make this a winner. ( )

If valid, Jaynes’ theory has far-reaching ramifications. ( )

Here's an idea: what if consciousness - self-awareness, the 'I' and that private inner 'space' it seems to inhabit - is no emergent phenomenon, result of millions of years of brain evolution, but a purely cultural one derived from language, via metaphor, and which didn't appear sometime back in the Pleistocene, but recently (very recently, around 1200 BC in Julian Jaynes' estimation)?
   As ideas go, it's a corker. By that date we were already tilling fields and founding the first cities, the Pyramids had been built and the Iliad written - all by non-conscious human beings according to Jaynes. He was no crank though: graduate of Yale and lecturer at Princeton, the nature of consciousness was the lifelong focus of his work as an ethologist. His theory was presented at a meeting of the American Psychological Society in Washington DC (admittedly to a mostly nonplussed audience) and The Origin of..., published in 1976, was runner-up in the USA's National Book Awards' nonfiction category a couple of years later. His theory rests on the brain's division into two hemispheres: earlier than around 1200 BC, instead of the introspective thinking familiar to us today, the right hemisphere solved problems non-consciously, passing on its instructions to the left where they were experienced as hallucinations (particularly auditory hallucinations) which the people themselves interpreted as the voices of gods. The gods, in other words, seemed entirely real to them and directed their lives; the resulting societies were authoritarian, rigidly stratified and stable, almost like those of social insects (think Ancient Egypt). In the Near East though, around Jaynes' critical date, this 'bicameral' mentality broke down due to demographic (and other) stresses, and was gradually replaced by the self-aware modern mind; the resulting societies, this time, were composed of true individuals.
   This book is in three parts: the first outlines the theory, the second examines the evidence and the third considers possible vestiges of the bicameral mind still around today; and if all this sounds like Velikovsky or von Daniken, well it isn't exactly. In Jaynes' case the most common reaction, from academics in particular, has been a sort of head-scratching bafflement. I think this is at least partly because The Origin is beautifully written - even its trickiest ideas are explained simply, clearly, and in prose which a lot of good fiction writers would envy. What criticism there has been has focused mostly on the extraordinary timescale involved, and on Jaynes' interpretation of the Iliad - and anyone interested in Mesopotamian archaeology, or who knows the Iliad well (or the Old Testament, or the Epic of Gilgamesh) will soon see why.
   I can't help wondering, too, how much of the scepticism is a gut-reaction to Jaynes' choice of the term 'hallucinations' (a word which comes with a lot of baggage: drug use, mental disorder) and the idea of Achilles and Abraham resembling schizophrenics. There's also the presence of the Julian Jaynes Society which issues newsletters and books defending and promoting the theory, but which has precisely the opposite effect (on me at least): it makes the whole thing look a bit cultish, like Scientology. My own scepticism comes from a different direction altogether though: another implication of this theory is that, if true, it would mean that only human beings are conscious - something I don't believe for a minute. Apes, elephants, cetaceans, corvids and perhaps others all show every sign of self-awareness.
   Overall, I'm left with the feeling that this isn't all nonsense, that there's truth lurking at the heart of Jaynes' theory; I thought the first chapter, where he outlines what consciousness is not, what it doesn't do, by far the best - I agreed with every word of that. It's just that, from that starting point, he immediately veered off in a direction very different from the one I would have gone in. It's still, though, as thought-provoking a read as I've come across for some time. ( )

I've read this once or twice over the years. The theory strikes me as either genius- like really really genius, think Newton and Einstein or Dirac, or utterly compelling hogwash. Not sure we will know until we can compute us up a person! ( )

Questo breve libro ci introduce al pensiero di Julian Jaynes, lo psicologo americano ideatore di una teoria sulla coscienza molto affascinante, ma anche molto controversa.
La coscienza, cioè il soggetto della nostra mente che rende possibile l'introspezione, secondo l'autore non sarebbe un elemento connaturato alla nostra struttura cerebrale, ma una capacità che gli esseri umani hanno acquisito su impulso delle condizioni storiche.
Jaynes afferma che le nostre capacità mentali, anche quelle avanzate, non necessitano della coscienza per avere luogo. Alla sua comparsa, l'Homo Sapiens probabilmente non aveva alcuna capacità di introspezione, con l'andare del tempo e con il sorgere delle prime società complesse, però, gli umani hanno sviluppato quella che l'autore chiama "Mente Bicamerale". Durante l'era della mente bicamerale gli uomini interpretavano l'attività cosciente della propria mente come degli elementi esterni. Deriverebbero da questa caratteristicale voci degli dei che gli uomini affermavano di sentire durante questo periodo. La mente moderna, quella dotata di autocoscienza, per l'autore, si svilupperebbe molto più tardi. Intorno al 1000 A.C quando appaiono le prime testimonianze scritte dei processi di introspezione.
La teoria di Jaynes è estremamente originale, altrettanto affascinante ma questo libretto non basta per soddisfare ogni domanda che riesce a suscitare.
Sicuramente è un buon punto di partenza per esplorare il pensiero di uno studioso affascinante ( )