Jaynes, Consciousness, & the Bicameral Mind

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Reviews of Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind :

"This book and this man's ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century. It renders whole shelves of books obsolete." - William Harrington, in Columbus Dispatch

"Having just finished The Origin of Consciousness, I myself feel something like Keats' Cortez staring at the Pacific, or at least like the early reviewers of Darwin or Freud. I'm not quite sure what to make of this new territory; but its expanse lies before me and I am startled by its power." - Edward Profitt, in Commonweal

"When Julian Jaynes...speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence..." - John Updike, in The New Yorker

"He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior." - Raymond Headlee, in American Journal of Psychiatry

"The bold hypothesis of the bicameral mind is an intellectual shock to the reader, but whether or not he ultimately accepts it he is forced to entertain it as a possibility. Even if he marshals arguments against it he has to think about matters he has never thought of before, or, if he has thought of them, he must think about them in contexts and relationships that are strikingly new." - Ernest R. Hilgard (1904-2001), Professor of Psychology, Stanford University

"The weight of original thought in it is so great that it makes me uneasy for the author's well-being: the human mind is not built to support such a burden." - David C. Stove (1927-1994), Professor of Philosophy, in Encounter

"It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between ..." - Richard Dawkins, Oxford University, in The God Delusion

"[Jaynes] has one of the clearest and most perspicuous defenses of the top-down approach [to consciousness] that I have ever come across." – Daniel Dennett, Tufts University, in Brainchildren

Books:

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, viewed by many as one of the most important books of the last century.
At the heart of Jaynes's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is the revolutionary idea that subjective consciousness did not begin far back in human evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by metaphorical language, writing, cataclysm and catastrophe in ancient history and is still developing. The implications of this new scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion - and indeed, our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is "a humbling text, the kind that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how much thinking there is left to do."

Preview
The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
on Google books

Other related books:
E.R. Dodds - The Greeks and the Irrational
Tor Norretranders - The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
Benson & Zaidel (eds.) - The Dual Brain: Hemispheric Specialization in Humans
Judith Weissman - Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices
Bruno Snell - The Discovery of the Mind
Daniel Smith - Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination
Anne Harrington - Mind, Medicine, & the Double Brain

Related authors:
Aristotle
Susan Blackmore
Antonio Damasio
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Daniel Dennett
Michael Gazzaniga
Douglas Hofstadter
William James
Joseph LeDoux
Claude Levi-Strauss
David Lewis-Williams
Steven Mithen
Michael Persinger
Steve Pinker
V.S. Ramachandran
H.W.F. Saggs
Neal Stephenson

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