Library Person
Julian Jaynes
American psychologist; argued consciousness is a recent, language-built construction, not an ancient human universal.
Julian Jaynes (1920–1997) worked at Yale and then, from 1964 to 1995, as a research associate at Princeton, after an early detour as an actor and playwright in England. His 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind argued that introspective consciousness is not innate but arises from language and metaphor, and is historically recent — that earlier humans instead operated in a “bicameral” mode, experiencing the commands of one brain hemisphere as external, auditory-hallucinated voices of gods or kings. He drew his evidence largely from close reading of the Iliad and other early texts for signs of this shift in mentality during the second millennium BCE.
Works in the Library
Julian Jaynes BOOK 1976
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes's theory that consciousness is a learned, language-based construction of recent historical origin.
LANGUAGE PERCEPTION MEMORY
