15min chapter

Clerestory (Bryan Kam) cover image

Jaynes, Tolstoy, and Zhuangzi, with Isabela Granic

Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

CHAPTER

Exploring the Bicameral Mind: Ancient Texts and Religious Beliefs

Delving into Julian James's hypothesis, this chapter examines the concept of the bicameral mind theory and its connection to various ancient texts and religious beliefs. It explores how people in ancient times experienced gods as if they were real, the development of rituals and interpretation in religious practices, and the role of language areas in the brain. The chapter also discusses the similarities between auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia and the experiences of normal individuals.

00:00
Speaker 1
And so, I think that's what I think about the bicameral mind theory. And I think that's what I think about the bicameral mind theory. And I think that's what I think about the bicameral mind theory. And I think that's what I think about the bicameral mind theory. And I think that's what I think about the bicameral mind theory. And so he looks at things like Homer, where there seems to be, you know, in this late Bronze Age period, the Trojan War, which is, I don't, I'm going to guess and say it's like 12th century BC or something like that. These people seem to have direct interactions with gods in the Garden of Eden story at the start of Genesis. God seems to be very present in a way that he still is to Cain and Abel, although he doesn't seem to quite know what they're up to all the time. And then, you know, Moses kind of has to, I mean, he appears to Abraham, you know, in this kind of Abraham Isaac situation. But by the time of Moses and the Exodus, there's kind of like quite elaborate rituals and rules about who's allowed to talk to God and who's not allowed to talk to God. And then there's these kind of prophets and, you know, the Tanak, the N in that part of the Hebrew scriptures is Nabayim, which is like the prophets of the Old Testament. And there's a period in the Old Testament where prophesying is considered a good thing. And by the end, it's kind of like we're not doing that anymore. And this is why part of the reason that in the New Testament, Jesus as a prophet comes to become, you know, let's just say you encounter some problems. So, right. Two hiccups. Yeah. He's not universally popular, let's just say. And one of the reasons is that you're kind of not supposed to do this prophesying thing anymore. So there's like that narrative, which is like, okay, it seems like just, and he does focus on the Greek and the Hebrew. So in other words, you know, I think there's this argument in the 20th century about Athens and Jerusalem and the kind of odd heritage that the modern quote unquote West has received, right? These two different sources of influence that are not always compatible, namely ancient Athens and essentially the Hebrew Bible, I guess. And then that, you know, leads into the kind of Christian stuff. But for me, like what's really important to him, I mean, first of all, I think that argument is fascinating. I think it's really important. I think in a certain sense, it's less condescending than the mainstream view, which is to say, if we assume that our current state of mind and way of experiencing is just universal, then we can be a bit condescending about why everyone's writing about gods, you know, a few thousand years ago, because we're saying, well, we all know these things are fake, but, you know, these guys were somehow stupid and pretending or something like that. And I think that's a like more condescending attitude than just to take them seriously and say when they say they heard something from a god that they actually heard something. And it may not be what we put into our own understanding of the word God, but that's a failure on our part to understand what they're saying, rather than just to
Speaker 2
make sure that I've got it. So Julian James's argument is, and it is a bold one, a hypothesis that people have tried to either say is the most brilliant thing on the planet that's ever been written or the craziest bad shit stuff out there. And so his hypothesis is that before a certain period that you've been just outlining, people literally heard
Speaker 1
gods,
Speaker 2
spoke to them, wrote to them, saw them, and just was not some flaky sort of minority of people, and it was not a thing that was conjured through going to places and having to do a whole lot of rituals and then sort of pretending that they're seeing something in front. It's what I liken it to is the five-year-old who has their imaginary friend, but those are only imaginary to all the adults around. For that five-year-old, they are absolutely real. They are being seen, they're spoken to, they're heard, all of it is extremely real. And so is that what you're saying is the hypothesis
Speaker 1
from James to be honest? Yeah, so there's many, many very provocative arguments within this book. But the kind of central one is that before a certain point, people experienced gods as if they were real, just as you say, and that they're not going to be able to do it. That they're not making something up. There is something happening in their experience, right? So you mentioned going to places, and that is the thing that starts to happen, right? So it looks like before a certain point, people may just experience gods all the time, then they become easier to experience in certain places. He spends a long time talking about the fact that the oracle at Delphi is a phenomenon that lasts over a thousand years, and people go to this space. But in the early days, there is no oracle there. It's just Delphi. You just go there and you ask your question directly to the space, essentially. There are trees there that have a special significance. And over that kind of millennium that it's functioning, it has to be built up in order to get the same effect. People need some level of interpretation. There may be these vapors. There's some kind of, you know, there's a professional priestly class coming out of it. And that happens as well in the Old Testament, right? The Levites are kind of this special class of priests that come out, but they're not, you know, they're developed in the Torah. So the overall argument is that, yeah, rather than just saying these are kind of fairy tales that they made up and they know they're fake, it's like, no, they're reporting their own experience, how they experience the world, and that it is full of gods and demons and spirits and whatever, depending on what part of the world you're in. And at the same time that this is not necessarily claim, it's not a claim that some supernatural force is at play, right? This is basically a phenomenological claim saying that the way people used to interpret certain events, especially the event of surprise, was through the appearance of gods in their own experience, right? So let's say I have to make a really hard decision. Now, what would I do today? I'd probably look up a bunch of things on the internet, maybe talk to some friends, maybe go for a walk or whatever. But like, what I probably wouldn't do is like have gods appear to me and like have them speak to me and, you know, basically one of them tell me to do this and the other one tell me to do that or something like that. But James is saying that's what used to happen is if you felt conflicted, like you would have this kind of, you could call it a hallucination, but that makes it sound like somehow less than what we experience, which arguably is also just a hallucination of a different type. We can get into that more later. But I think for me, what I love about chains and what's most important to me about his work, there's two things. One is just the assumption that the way we see the world now is not really compatible with how we used to see it. And even over fairly short periods of time, like a few thousand years, it could change so unrecognizably that we like completely misunderstand what's being said, even when it's kind of the same geographical area and it has this continuity with the culture that we're talking about, right? You know, we have this kind of connection to the past few thousand years in Eurasia, for the most part. And so if that's the case, one thing is these things must change very quickly and they must be very culturally specific. So it's probably the case that we couldn't even conceptualize. It would be like far crazier than any psychedelic trip just to be in a culture that is now even recently extinct, right? Like a hundred years ago was a thing and now it's died off. And were we somehow to enter this culture in like a very full way that it just would not be recognizable at all? Right.
Speaker 2
And this is the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Speaker 1
Well, the breakdown is the idea that, yeah, so the bicameral mind is just saying that there's two rooms, kind of like these two hemispheres, right? And that now we say, oh, well, all the language areas are in the left side of the brain, right? You have vernica's area and brocaus area and these other things. It's of course not as simple as we used to think it was, but there are these, you know, parts of the brain that if you get a lesion there, it knocks out speech, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. And so they do seem in under whatever normal development is under most people that if you knock out these areas, it impacts speech. And so then we call them the speech areas. Now, Jane's is really interested in the fact that these structures also exist in the right hemisphere. And that they don't seem to be used, but interestingly, if you apply current to them, people hear voices. So it's like, we maybe don't use them anymore, but that doesn't mean that they serve no function. And then there's this also kind of idea. I'm not sure that it strictly comes from Jane's. It might even predate him. Although he does make it explicit, which is that the corpus colossum is new, right? Like most animals don't have this. And it may some have argued that it's like more about inhibition than it is about transmission, I guess. But he kind of thinks that like, what if what's going on is a linking across these and you need some kind of high efficiency way to get across this bridge. And he kind of postulates that language develops out of this need to connect these two antithetical positions, right? So language itself might be the mechanism by which we, one hemisphere communicates to the other. I have no idea whether anyone thinks that's remotely true. You're reading my Gilchrist, does he address any of this or?
Speaker 2
He does, he does. And there is definitely the overall story that you started with around inhibition is really important that the corpus colossum is doing mostly like dampening down of each of the hemisphere. So the other can kind of take over intentionally and their style of attending and apprehending the world. I wanted to even just before we get more into that part to just give people an understanding of what you are saying in a very concrete way around how these minds, you know, around the Bronze Age and before, how they functioned and how real these gods' voices were. Right now we have really good modern science that can look at areas of the brain that light up for different types of populations of people who are experiencing different types of brain damages or brain differences. And so one of the most fascinating studies that I know of in schizophrenia was that they did this great controlled study where they asked people who were suffering from schizophrenia to go into an fMRI and to imagine that they are hearing the voices that they usually hear when they are hallucinating. And so they are scanning their brain, they see the brain centers there. And then they wait for a while and they ask the person when you actually hear these voices, let us know. And so they indicate by a button press or whatever it is that they are now hearing the actual voices. And the freaking fascinating part is that these people are when they are imagining the voices, nothing interesting or nothing different than the normal brain in comparison is happening in terms of lighting up or activation. But when they are actually reporting that they are hearing the voices, these hallucinations, the auditory system is being lit up. The hippocampus, the occipital lobe, these exact areas that for you and I who don't normally have these auditory hallucinations, or maybe, but normally, these are exactly the areas of the brain that light up for us when we are hearing people talk to us. But when we are talking to each other right now. And so, schizophrenics having auditory quote unquote hallucinations are having the same experience in the biological underpinnings of the same thing. So I find that so important because what is the difference? What is the hallucination? Where are we going to suppose the hallucination is? The brain is picking up on information somehow that is the same. And so I just, that to me is really important because it's really easy to go. These ancient people may have had very different brains than we had. But they're even that close to us now in terms of how we can think about brain functioning.
Speaker 1
Well, Jane's writes about this and I think McGill-Kris might as well, which is the fact that if you just poll normal people without schizophrenia, have you ever heard a voice that you know could not have been present? Things like that. It's a pretty high percentage of people or like higher than you would expect. I think it's like 40% or something like that. At some point in their life, people are like, yes, I've heard a voice, which is either something that warns you, says, don't do this or do that or whatever. And they experience it as an auditory event, which is not that they think it's in their head, but they actually hear it. And the report rates of that are fairly high. I'm just making up a figure, but I remember being surprised by that as well.
Speaker 2
Absolutely.

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