Julian Jaynes

Psychologist, Author

1920 – 1997

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Who was Julian Jaynes?

Julian Jaynes was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 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" hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called "silent" hemisphere, which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.

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Born
Feb 27, 1920
Newton
Nationality
  • United States of America
Profession
Education
  • Harvard University
  • Yale University
  • McGill University
Died
Nov 21, 1997
Charlottetown

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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