Julian Jaynes

Abstract

American psychologist Julian Jaynes authored one of the most thought-provoking and debated theories about the origin of the conscious mind. He was born on 27 February 1920 in West Newton, Massachusetts, and died on 21 November 1997. He studied as an undergraduate at Harvard and McGill Universities and received his master and doctoral degrees from Yale. He then became a lecturer in Psychology at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990. At the beginning of his career, Jaynes pursued research in the field of animal behavior, as his theoretical approach was to investigate the evolution of consciousness by studying learning and brain function in various species, from the protozoa to worms, reptiles, and cats. Finding this approach inadequate, he undertook a painstaking analysis through historical texts and archeological data in order to investigate the use of language and metaphor related to the theme of consciousness. This in-depth research culminated in 1976, when Jaynes published his landmark book – The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – which proposed a revolutionary theoretical model for the generation and historical development of consciousness.

Suppose you ask a flashlight in a completely dark room

to turn itself on and to look around and see if there was

any light – the flashlight as it looked around would of course

see light everywhere and come to the conclusion

that the room was brilliantly lit when in fact

it was mostly just the opposite. So with consciousness.

We have an illusion that it is all mentality.

(Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind)