150: Julian Jaynes, Part 1 - Hearing Voices

What is consciousness? Julian Jaynes rejects all of the popular answers: that consciousness is thinking, reason, memory, or the capacity for learning. Nor does he think it can be accounted for as a merely accumulative development of "sentience" through evolution. In his controversial work, Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes puts forward the hypothesis that consciousness is generated out of language, and therefore that language predates consciousness. Jaynes' argument has sweeping implications for human history and civilization, and he presents evidence for his case through psychological experiments on consciousness, the neurology of schizophrenia, and through the analysis of ancient texts such as the Iliad of Homer. The shocking claim made in this book is that the Greeks of the Iliad were not conscious in the way that we are, but experienced their volition in the form of admonitory voices - actually, a communication from the right hemisphere of the brain to the left, using language as a kind of code - but which the ancients experienced as the voices of gods.