Selects: Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

Introduction

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Host Introduction

1:33Hey there, guys. It's Josh. And for this week's Select, I'm going with our August 2022 episode on the bicameral mind theory. It is mind-blowing, mind-expanding, mind-flabbergasting. It's just a really good episode. It's just really me and Chuck sitting around having a really interesting conversation about some really interesting stuff. So if you feel like expanding your mind right now, I would say this is a great episode to listen to. Enjoy.

Podcast Overview

2:08Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

2:18Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the ongoing, amazing, mind-blowing edition. You've been into this stuff lately. What's going on with you? I don't know. I don't know, man. But yes, I'm definitely into it lately. It's weird. Approaching 50? Existential crisis? I don't know about crisis. Maybe more like pondering, existential pondering. I don't think it's a crisis yet.

2:49I've still got five years till 50, so give me time. Are you 45? I thought you were like 47. I'm 45 and eight ninths. Yeah, you got time. Yeah, great. Thank you for that. But no, there's no like one thing that's making me say like, hey, when did humans become conscious? Or when did humans become intelligent? Or what do we do if aliens come down? Like for some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing to me than it has been in the past lately. I don't know. I got you. But yes, I'm definitely into this kind of thing right now.

Bicameral Mind Theory

3:22And this stuff, what we're going to talk about today, it's based on a HowStuffWorks article that Robert Lamb wrote. And I'm not at all surprised that Robert Lamb is into this. But I just want to note that I've heard about this years and years and years ago and have been meaning to do an article or an episode on it. So I don't want you to think this is something you just stumbled across. This is actually the fruition of years of planning and hope and dreams coming to pass in maybe the best episode we'll ever make.

3:52And of course, Robert and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of the band Chicago. Just to make it clear. There's another Robert Lamb and he was in Chicago? Still is in Chicago. Is that Peter Cetera's stage name? No, Cetera was the bass player and part lead singer along with Robert Lamb who played keyboards and also sang lead on some. And before Terry Kath died, he played guitar and also sang. So they had three singers in the early days of Chicago.

4:23That's just confusing. But none of them are our colleague, Robert Lamb, who along with our colleague Joe have been doing stuff to blow your mind for many, many years. Another great show. Yeah, and I didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that they have their own episode on this, Julie and Jane's Bicameral Mind. I bet they have. And we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology Today, and Frontiers in Psychology. And I'm going to make one up.

4:54Psychology foo young. Okay. I've got two more that aren't made up. Slate Star Codex and a poster named Hazard on the site Less Wrong. That sounds like a great source. It is. Hazard knows what he's talking about. Oh, and one more. I'm sorry. A guy named Joff Ward or Jeff Ward, but you know when they spell it like Joff. Yeah, that guy. On Medium. So all of those combined with Robert Lamb's article that coalesce into, again, probably the greatest episode we'll ever do.

5:24Yeah, and I sort of get some of this. I think you're going to help me out some because I do have some questions that I'll just throw out here and there because at times I found myself reading this stuff and going, yeah, but isn't that just blank? Okay, great. I'll do my best to answer. And you're probably right when you're thinking that. The answer is probably like yes. All right. Well, I mean, I guess we should say then that the whole hypothesis that we're going to be kind of breaking down today is controversial and it's not provable

5:55necessarily scientifically speaking. So it's sort of one of those, I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure. Definitely. Into true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Jaynes in the mid-1970s, of course. Yeah, the year I was born. Yeah, 76, baby. So what he proposed was an answer to a longstanding question. And that was, when did humans become conscious?

6:27Like when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came along like in the earliest archaic humans? Is it something that came along much later than that? And how could we ever possibly answer that? Like what relics have been left in history, in prehistory that would say like, hey, this is evidence of consciousness. And Julian Jaynes took that up and he did it as an outsider, which was a huge strike against him because automatically legitimate scientists are like,

6:58well, I can't build upon this theory. Possibly this man is actually in my field of consciousness studies. But the thing is, is this hypothesis is so well liked. It's just roundly liked. People just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And in fact, there's like a Julian Jaynes Institute. There's like groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And what he says in a very small nutshell is that sometime about 1,000, 2,000 years ago,

7:32humans became conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today. They developed the ability to think about thinking. They developed the ability to think about that other people are thinking. They developed basically what's called subjective introspection. And then as a result of that, they almost automatically gained free will in volition. So what he's saying is that if we went back in time in the Wayback Machine, Chuck, and we met somebody who lived 3,000 years ago,

8:044,000 years ago, they would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans. That's right. And he thinks that it was a learned thing. And the idea that he throws down is that our mind, our brain is, or was rather, very important, was because it no longer is, bicameral, which means split into two parts. And we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres of the brain later on. But in this case,

8:35he means split into two parts where you have a part that makes decisions and a part that follows and that neither one of them were conscious. And here's where I get a little tripped up. Okay. Right out of the gate. Sure. Is basically, he says that instead of an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates a consciousness, like us talking to ourselves, us saying things like everything from like, you know, hey, get up and go do this

9:07to just internally thinking about things like humans do, that instead of that, we were sort of like human zombies in that we were creatures of habit. We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a T. And whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when like a conscious mind, you would think would speak up, that instead of that, an external agent,

9:37in this case, they thought they were gods, would enter their brain and create an auditory hallucination. Yeah. And that they unquestioningly obeyed that auditory hallucination. And that's what helped them get through novel situations that they didn't have like a, basically a prescribed script for, you know, a mindless automatic thing. Something new came along that got in their way. This god would speak to them and say, go around that rock. It wasn't there yesterday.

10:08Don't worry about it. Just go around it. And it could be one of their gods. It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think one, I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to angels walking beside them. Or, and this is really important later on, it's a big part of Jane's hypothesis. It could be your local ruler, the divine king who's in charge of you and everybody else that you know and love and have ever lived among. It could be that person guiding you in your life too. And the idea is

10:39these people heard this in the same way, like you said, that we hear our own internal dialogue, but they never chalked it up to themselves. It was always coming from the outside. All right. Here's, I guess, where I have my first issue kind of grasping this is there were no gods speaking to them and guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just didn't know it. Yes. Yes. Yes. There was no gods. But to them, and this is a really important point, to them,

11:10it definitely was a god talking to them or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same way that if an actual god got into your brain and like was speaking to you and you responded to it, if you could have looked at their brains lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine, it would respond the same way. So it was entirely real to them. And the same way that a placebo effect has real effects on your body, this would have been the same thing. And then in addition to that, it was culturally supported.

11:40Everyone that they knew believed the same thing, that the gods were talking to them. And so like that just lent support to this idea so that no one questioned it. It was just, that's the way it was. Well, so this, I guess, brings me to, let me macro this out a little bit in my own dumb brain. And it may just be 21st century person thinking that I'm engaging in. But if the idea is that before this, there was no consciousness, but what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness,

12:11they just didn't recognize it as such. Is that the whole point was that if you do not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious? Yes. Because you're not, you're not experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just kind of, Julian Jaynes referred to it. I see what this guy's doing now. Okay. So, but the thing is, is there's like a lot of scholarly discussion on like, okay, what did Jaynes mean exactly? How literal was he? Because he used words like automaton.

12:42He never called them zombies. Other people called them like zombies. But no one talked about zombies back then. No, that's true. But well, Evil Dead had, or not Evil Dead, Living Dead, not the Living Dead had come out by then. Yeah, but it wasn't like today. Okay. No, no, I know. They're definitely overdone today. Automatons. So he called them automatons. And it's essentially the same thing, that they were, they just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about how they felt. They, and this is really important too, Chuck. Of course, they still had feelings.

13:13They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group. They had feelings about their local ruler. They had feelings about, you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't, they didn't reflect on their inner life. They didn't think about thinking. They didn't, they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness. And in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on top of that,

13:44he also goes to great lengths to say, hey, I understand that you're going to get all up in a tizzy, that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious. I'm not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that you overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives. Okay. How about we take a break? Okay. I'm going to go rip a bong. I'm kidding. We'll take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about what, lots of other stuff right after this. Hey everyone,

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16:54Stuff you should know All right.

Consciousness Discussion

17:01So I've kind of wrapped my head around what this guy is saying now. It's, I will admit, it's a little navel-gazy for me. When it comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses, I get a little bit like, what's the word? Maybe I can be a little too concrete or as the French might say, concrete and literal in my thinking because it's not, you know, Friday night in college like two in the morning kind of discussion. Right. So I think that's

17:33where I am now. But I do think it's very interesting in that he, I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting, but I think it's interesting that he thought around the first or second millennium BC is when things to him changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of, well, eventually language, but specifically metaphor which is to say that all of a sudden we could make analogies in our brain, we could link things together, we saw ourselves

18:04as almost as if they were characters, ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make as characters. Yeah. And as these things like connected in the brain, then it created just an effect like a domino effect basically. Yeah. Where all of a sudden we could work out our own solutions or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions and then it wasn't

18:34God saying, a God saying walk around the rock. They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. Yes, but in part of that that also required them to be able to reflect on the idea like you said that they were able to now make their own decisions, right? And you said something earlier where you're like, you know, you're talking about your own internal dialogue where you think, hey, I should get up and go outside for a second.

19:01Like, that's different, right? You're thinking about you, yourself, and you realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time would have thought is get up and go outside and they would stand up and go outside without questioning because God had just instructed them to do that so it must be important. And they didn't think about where it came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves and they didn't reflect on it.

19:32They just obeyed it. That's Jane's position and that if you compare those two things, you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life and it's so different, he said, that this is, that what we understand as consciousness just wasn't around until a couple thousand years ago. Okay. I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in this pool. Okay, good, good. For the next 30 minutes. Here's the thing. It's really important to realize, like, you said something that you're a literalist, right?

20:02That's actually really appropriate to approach this because Julian Jaynes, one of the very radical things that he did was he took the ancients literally because when he started looking around, and we'll talk more about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it at least. And he was an expert in ancient languages, right? So he was, it was really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian and he took what they were saying when they said things like,

20:33you know, the gods told us to do this, that they thought that the gods told them to do this, not that they were using metaphor. So he took them literally on their word and that is a real departure from anybody else who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying. Yeah, and I think it's also something we should point out now, even though it comes up later in our research, is that when you think of an, I guess, an automatic society or a society of automatons, that's not to say

21:03that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful, you know, ancient civilizations that existed, but I think his contention is that it was a hive mind all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished and not the conscious mind. Right, and he didn't, I don't think he ever used it as like, I don't think he ever explicitly said that it was an emergent property of a hive mind but that's kind of what he was describing, kind of like if you take one stone cutter

21:33and one stone mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by 500 and give it a year, you have a ziggurat built. That's just, that's just all those people knew what to do, they knew their position and their place and they just did it and so yeah, you could totally do that with people who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious. You could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this, this work is not suited for me, I should be doing something else

22:04or why is the foreman being so mean to me today like they didn't think like that under Jane's hypothesis so they would probably get the work done more efficiently at least more quietly I would guess. Oh, I mean consciousness proposed her brought along a whole host of problems. It's true. I imagine if you're the ruling class I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned about what, what is it, Jane's? Not Jines, Jane's?

22:35Yeah. Jane's thought about, I love Robert Lamb's Jane's Addiction joke in here by the way. That was mine. Oh, that was yours? Mm-hmm. Oh, well way to go. Thanks. You said Jane's says and then in parentheses you put ha.

22:52It's a very good joke. But what Jane said was that, and it's something you mentioned earlier was that consciousness, I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that is, can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels. Yeah. And this is from the actual book in 1976 and it's a little, little mind-blowy. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of. Mm-hmm.

23:23Because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. It's like asking a flat, and this is where it kind of comes home to me. It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. So, that's where it comes home to me is when you, and hey, it's metaphor, so how about that? Mm-hmm. He lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more. Yeah, because, you know, wherever the flashlight looks,

23:54there's light. There's light. Yeah, and his point is is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness, but that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place. And, yeah, Robert Lamb uses a really good example of unloading a dishwasher, right? Mm-hmm. Like, when you're unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people who put, like, all of your knives in one place, all of your forks in one part of the basket, all of your spoons, and so on, right? Yeah. A maniac, in other words. Sensible human. Uh-huh.

24:24If you do it like that, it's, you can, you can just be on autopilot because you've done it so many times, but when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm. That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And so, in the bicameral mind, God would have said, I command thee to pick up thine fork, butterfingers, and you would lean over and pick up the fork, and that was that. Instead, you might not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically, but it's still out of the norm.

24:55It's still different, and you have to kind of think about it a little more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take that dishwasher metaphor, Chuck, and you realize that three, five, nine thousand years ago, there were no dishwashers. There was no ice cream scoop. There was no cookie scoop. There was no avocado splitter. There was nothing like that. Wait, what's that? Is that a thing now? Yeah, you don't have one of those? No. Oh, I'll send you one. You're missing out. It's a multi-tool for cutting avocados,

25:27getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you scoop them out. They're essential, as a matter of fact. All right, I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these. Okay, I'm going to get you one for Christmas. All right. Okay. So, the point is that, like, there wasn't a big variety of stuff. So, there wasn't that many novel situations. Like, we encounter novel situations, like, almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis of James' hypothesis, that the reason

25:58that consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis. So, maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every 30 seconds. Or, maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind of evolved out of that. But the point is, life was much less complex back then, so you could have something like a bicameral mind. You could have somebody who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't been introduced to enough

26:28experience in life. And with that experience came the fork falling on the floor, in other words? Yeah, or, you know, there's a lot more dishes to put away and much more different dishes to put away rather than just forks. You know? Okay, sure. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Or you have one fork and you just carry it with you everywhere, you know? Like, you don't have to think about it. There was just less stuff to think about, is what I'm saying. Well, now you're speaking my language because if I had it my way, every member of my family

26:59would have one fork, one spoon, one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate. Yeah. And they were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away. Man,