Selects: Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fans, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars related episodes. Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of tontons and wampas on the ice planet hot, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Puja Bha Cho on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Hey 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. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey 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. I'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. But yes, I'm definitely into this kind of thing right now. And this stuff, what we're going to talk about today, it's based on a House Stuff Works 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. And 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? It still is in Chicago. Is that Peter Sattera's stage name? No, Sattera was the bass player and part lead singer along with Robert Lamb who played keyboards and also sang lead on some. And before Terry Cath died, he played guitar and also sang. So they had three singers in the early days of Chicago. That'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. Psychology 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 on medium. So all of those combined with Robert Lamb's article, the coalescent, again, probably the greatest episode we'll ever do. Yeah. 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's 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 necessarily 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 Janes in the mid 1970s, of course. Yeah. The year I was born. Yeah. 76, baby. So what he proposed was an answer to a long standing question and that was, when did humans become conscious? Like 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 of consciousness. And Julian Janes took that up and he did it as an outsider, which was a huge strike against him because automatically legitimate scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory possibly this man is in a actually in my field of consciousness studies. But the thing is, is this this hypothesis is so well liked. It's just roundly like 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 Janes 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 1000, 2000 years ago humans 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 way back machine Chuck and we met somebody, who lived 3000 years ago, 4000 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 our mind, our brain is or was rather very important was because it no longer is. By cameral, 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, he 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 and here's where I get a little tripped up. Okay. Right out 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 to just internally thinking about things like humans do, that instead of that, we were sort of like human zombies and that we were creatures of habit. We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a tee. 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, in 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 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. Don'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, 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 they, these 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 had 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, it 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. Everyone 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. They 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 experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just kind of Julie and Jane's referred to. 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 Jane's mean exactly? How literal was he? Because he used words like automaton. He never called them zombies. Other people called them like zombies. But no one talked about zombies back then, hardly. No, that's true. But, um, well, evil dead had, or not evil dead, living dead, none of the living dead had come out by then. Yeah, but it wasn't like today. Okay, no, no, I know. They're definitely over. 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. They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group. They had feelings about their local ruler. They had feelings about, um, you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't, they, they didn't reflect on their inner life. They didn't think about thinking. They didn't, they, they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness. And in the terms that Jane's is, is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on top of that, he 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 over, over estimate just how much consciousness makes up our, our lives. Okay. How about we take a break? Okay. I'm gonna go rip a bong. I'm kidding. We'll take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about what, uh, lots of other stuff right after this. Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fans. So we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought provoking Star Wars related episodes. Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of Tontons and Wampas on the ice planet hot or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Diary? What times must specksavers eye test? Hi Miriam. It's in 15 minutes. Would you like directions? Great. Exit the bedroom. Pass the dog's basket. Sit at the kitchen table. You have arrived. Enough time to move pickles. Visitors do make him frisky. Some people can't get to specksavers unaccompanied. That's why we offer home visits. Home visits from Miriam's Journey. Savers. Down pickles. Geographical restrictions apply. Find out if you're eligible online. On booking.com it's easy to book your holiday home and thanks to no hidden fees, there's no more. Guys, found a villa. I'm confirming. Where were we? Added fees. We don't do sneaky added fees, so you can go from home to holiday home with no dramas. And relax. On booking.com, finding a holiday home's easy. Booking.com, booking.com, yeah. All right, so I've kind of wrapped my head around what this guy's saying now. I will admit it's a little navel gazey 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, concret and literal in my thinking, because it's not, you know, Friday night in college, at like two in the morning kind of discussion. So I think that's where 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 as... Almost as if they were characters, ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make as characters. And that as these things like connected in the brain, then it created just an effect like a domino effect basically, 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 God saying, God saying, walk around the rock. They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. Yes, but it's... 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 were talking about your own internal dialogue where you think, hey, I should get up and go outside for a second. Like 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. They 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 is 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. But here's the thing. 30 minutes. Here's the thing. It's really important to realize, like you said something that you're a literalist, right? That's actually really appropriate to approach this, because Julian James, 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 really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian, and he took what they were saying when they said things like, you know, the gods told us to do this, that they thought that the gods told them to do this, not that they were using metaphors. 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 that 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 and one stone mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by 500 and give it a year, you have a ziggurat built, that 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 were 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, or why is the form and 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 proposes 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 Jynes, Jynes. Jane's thought about, I love Robert Lam's, Jynes Addixon, Joe can hear by the way. That was mine. Oh, that was yours? No, well, way to go. Thanks. You said Jane's says, and then in parentheses you put, ha. It'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. Because 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? He lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more. Yeah. Because wherever the flashlight looks, there'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? 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? A maniac in other words. Sensible human. If you do it like that, 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, butter fingers. 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. It'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, 9,000 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 know. 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, getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you scoop them out. They're essential as a matter of fact. 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. So the point is that there wasn't a big variety of stuff. So there wasn't that many novel situations. Like we encounter novel situations almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis of James's hypothesis, that the reason that 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 experience in life. And with that experience came the fork falling on the floor, in other words? Yeah, or there's a lot more dishes to put away and much more different dishes to put away rather than just forks. 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 that. 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 would 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, every time I hear one cup, I'm like, there's a joke in there somewhere. But even if I could come up with it, I wouldn't be able to say it. Oh, yeah, that's true. All right. So now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit more about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing about this change. And so what James was throwing down in 1976, besides apparently a bunch of roach clips, was the emergence of agricultural societies kind of changing everything. And that all of a sudden we are not living in groups of 10 or 12 people that are hunting and gathering where even if there was sort of a leader within that group, it was very easy to disseminate information and follow that leader. Once we started settling down, planting and growing things, engaging in trade with other peoples, that did a lot of things that complicated every process. And it meant that societies were much, much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily speak directly to people anymore. Yeah. So another part of... And not to specific people. Like they could lay down and edict and that would get disseminated in other words. Right. So like I've read before back when I was an anthropology student that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no more than 30 people. Like that was the absolute max. And once you reach that, you'd split off into two different bands. So yeah, like the person in charge was like part of your moment to moment life. And if you're suddenly in a civilization and you're building a ziggurat for somebody, he's probably not daining to talk to you. And part of Jane's hypothesis is that this bicameralism emerged from all those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk to other people that we started to need direction from the gods more and more. And it started to kind of get faster and faster. But in the meantime, it was a form of social control because one of the people you could think was talking to you was that local ruler who you were building the ziggurat for. So that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population in check. Right. And as they got bigger and bigger and they started trading with people like we were saying, that was sort of the beginning of the end for his, not his bicameral mind, but the bicameral mind. And one of the biggest problems with all of that was when we started writing stuff down. Because all of a sudden these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on what to do, there was now stuff down on paper that you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around and post on the, you know, on tablets at the walls of the city or whatever. And that was all of a sudden you weren't waiting around for a god to tell you what to do. You could just go read that tablet. Yeah. So the power that we gave to the gods' commands were kind of transferred to the written word. And yeah, that seems to have been like the death knell for the bicameral mind, right? And there's something really interesting that's worth pointing out. James apparently didn't have any hypothesis on what came before the bicameral mind, because he said it started as a result of the increasing organization that agriculture brought along and that there wasn't bicameral minds before then. But he doesn't say what was before then. And people even asked him like, okay, what about, you know, hunter gatherer societies that are still around today? You know, where would they have gotten consciousness? And he never really answered that. But it's definitely worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he basically says bicameralism, or the bicameral mind, I should say, bicameralism is the Senate in the house. But the bicameral mind lasted from the advent of agriculture about 11,000 years ago, till about 2,000ish, maybe 1500, or no, 3,000ish years ago. So it was about a 7,000 year span of bicameral mind. And then as life got more and more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he says is that language, in particular the written word, but also language got more and more sophisticated. And as it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential for us to start thinking in metaphors. And metaphors, as you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way we think in Julian Jane's mind. And there's actually a lot of support for that, Charles. May I? Oh, please. So that post by hazard on less wrong. Oh, yeah, let's see what hazard has to say. It's called consciousness as metaphor, what Jane's has to offer. And what hazard says is that like hazard just puts out like a paragraph from like an economic report. And it's about recessions in Europe. And it talks about Germany plunging into recession, or the UK falling deeper into recession, or France emerging from a recession. And what hazard points out is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as a three dimensional physical thing that we can entire nations can move into and out of. That's not true. Recessions aren't three dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge from them. You can't fall into them. But we just think about it like that. And that's metaphor. So we think in metaphors so frequently, we don't even recognize it anymore. And that was Jane's point that when we gain the ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious. We started thinking for ourselves. We became capable of introspection. And it was the evolution of language that led us to that point. Like basically, it just we just hit a threshold where suddenly language is sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts in our brains and in turn, it unlocked consciousness. I mean, that makes sense because, you know, and a metaphor is literally not literal. And if you were, if you did, if that was not a thing yet, then it chibes with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up to that point. Yes. And that would have been a pretty seismic shift. If you can compare like with like, you know, all of a sudden. Yeah. And you even see this in like like movies that are trying to emphasize how backwards or back in time, you know, some group is and they emphasize it by having that group take everything literally, usually the comic effect, like in Kingpin, when Randy Quaid was an Amish person, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He took everything literally and it was hilarious, hilarity ensued, but it was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was, he couldn't engage in metaphors. He didn't think like that. That's actually based on, I don't know whether on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian Jayne's hypothesis. Yeah. And you know what? That's a nice segue to children because when you have a human child, it's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years and that they don't understand metaphor. They don't understand, certainly don't understand things like sarcasm. And you have to change the way you talk to little kids because they do take everything so literally and think so literally. And children are referenced with Jayne's, the idea that I think what age like kids up until the age of five basically don't really have much of a human consciousness. And it's, and you know, the idea that children are just little narcissists walking around is a fun joke, but it's true because they don't know that other people think differently than they think up until about the age of five. They don't realize there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking and ways of feeling about things that other people have. Exactly. That's what's called theory of mind, right? And on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to great lengths to basically say that Julian Jayne's using the term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily. And if you just used theory of mind, it would have made a lot more sense. And Scott Alexander, I think I said Anderson, Scott Alexander makes some really good case for it. And that's kind of what he's pointing out is, you know, like it's possible that because you learn, it's not, you're not born with it. You learn it through experience. It just kind of evolves in you as you grow as a person and experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more, almost like a microcosm of what happened in civilization a few thousand years ago. Yeah. You gain theory of mind. So the fact that you can learn and that you do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the idea that maybe consciousness as we understand it was learned, it did evolve. It was an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated language. It's a fascinating thing to see happen in a child's life to see these little light bulbs come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it is, you know, very much a learned thing. Man, I bet. Very fascinating. All right. I say we take a break and we'll talk a little bit about just some other fascinating stuff when we get back right after this. Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fans, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars related episodes. Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of tontons and wampas on the ice planet hot or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub-CD hachakar, reached the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker, I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. I was going to summarize what we were going to talk about but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden before the break. I think it's nice, it's loosey-goosey. I think that's what it should be. Can I talk about one of my favorite parts of this hypothesis? Is we were kind of jumping around now but jumping back to where we talked about writing things down all of a sudden. It was around here in human history that there was a collapse of societies in the Mediterranean around the Middle East. It was called the Late Bronze Age Collapse and it didn't take that long and it met like these very advanced sort of societies in a matter of decades. A number of them, a lot of their culture was lost. It's sort of, they called it in fact the Greek Dark Ages and it lasted for hundreds of years and jiving with this was when humans started to lose and it kind of all makes sense that they were losing with the written word, with metaphor and language coming along. They were losing this voice as a god. They felt like they were losing their gods because all of a sudden the gods were silent to them. They weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were gaining consciousness and here's where it gets super interesting. Jains has a hypothesis that says it's about here where the organized religions that we know today were born out of a kind of nostalgia basically for these gods that left them. I think that idea is really interesting. It is and I mean the timetable really jibes and it is really interesting that that Late Bronze Age collapse happened when it did. But the idea is not just nostalgia but also desperation because these people had guidance. They didn't have to think and this poor set of generations over a few hundred years are maybe some of the most pitiful humans that ever lived because they went from just knowing what to do because the gods told them what to do to having no idea what to do because their gods had abandoned them. And as a result of that they started forming religions. They started beseeching the gods to give them a sign. This is when oracles started to become a thing, prophets started to become a thing, superstitions like omens grew like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes into your house and bites you, you will soon die and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that right? So this didn't exist before because the gods were in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone and I just think it must be must have been really pitiful and dark to live through that time. Yeah I mean they were lost I guess as a people. Yeah and that was figuratively they were lost but literally too because that late Bronze Age collapse they think was brought on at least in part by climate change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the Sea Peoples that seem to have overrun different cultures and so like culture after culture would fall those people would become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that to the breaking point. That culture would fall. It was just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once. So they really felt like the gods had abandoned them like they'd angered them or something like that. They were genuinely lost. So what James did to help support his hypothesis which makes sense was to go back and look at literature and of the time and see if it sort of supported this. I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in 1976 was that it was Homer's Iliad because he's kind of like here's proof right here. I mean if you look at the Iliad they were basically automatons. They just listened to the gods and did what the gods said and they substituted like the words that we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to indicate consciousness just weren't there. Right so they were more like physical descriptors like my belly was quivering or my heart was fluttering or something like that. Not I think the example that's used as fear-filled Agamemnon's mind. Well there wasn't a mind so they would describe fear in other physical terms right. It's like a stomach ache. Yeah and that it wasn't until later on when new translations were coming along that people who were now conscious turned the stuff into metaphor and James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before. They meant it as literally and they didn't have descriptors for minds and when they say the gods were guiding them along they meant literally and he was saying that the Iliad in particular started to be written about 1100 BCE and then around 700 BCE it was like in its form that we see it today but along the way it was kind of added to and it was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness. Right. He sees it as basically a document that traces that transition. Yeah very interesting. There was some other stuff too right literature wise. Yeah so that wasn't the only one. He also found in some of the religious texts like evidence that people felt like God had abandoned them. There's something a Mesopotamian poem called the Lidlul Bel Nemeci and it says my God has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed and again most other scholars would say there's something happened. This guy was blue. He was in a funk who knows but it's all metaphorical and James is saying no this guy had God talking to him now he doesn't anymore. So should we talk a little bit about actual science here with the brain? Yeah I think so. Because this is something we've covered before in the past when we talked about alien hand syndrome. Oh is that where it came from? From a gazillion years ago. There was evidence that when the there were certain epilepsy patients where it was so severe that they would sever the corpus callosum undergo a corpus callostomy and the corpus callosum is basically the thing that makes the two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And with alien hand syndrome I think they found that it could be brought on by the surgery where all of a sudden the left arm was doing something and without being told to do it by the right brain. And they have uh James I think or people since James and was it James or was it just people trying to sort of prove his theory? I think that people saw this these experiments as support for James's theory. Okay so they looked at these surgeries these corpus callosumies and they're called split brain patients basically where they you know after the surgery it's not like they felt all out of whack they felt like a regular you know whole human being. But they learned that there were these little things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take an action based on this information that it didn't have access to. And the example they gave was if they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen and they would get up and walk to the kitchen but they would say hey why did you get up and walk to the kitchen? The language the left hemisphere the language dominant hemisphere is the only part that can respond to that. But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up and the really fascinating part is that they wouldn't say well I don't know I'm not sure why I just did that I just did it. They would make something up on the spot and say you know I felt like getting up and going to make a bowl of cereal. Right. And it's almost like we had this natural instinct to BS somebody when faced with a question that we can't answer about why we did something. Yeah because the left hemisphere wants to explain things it wants to tell the story using metaphors usually. And this is this became the left brain interpreter theory and it kind of supports Jane's idea that the consciousness is a flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and it just can't find it. And the idea is that the left hemisphere creates the explanation the stories for our behavior even if it doesn't know why we did something but that's just what it does. And there's a saying in consciousness research among people who subscribe to the left brain interpreter theory is that consciousness isn't in the oval office like it thinks it is it's more in the press office like it's the one that's public facing and explaining what you're doing but it might not have all the information so sometimes it's just BSing. That's very interesting stuff. Yeah. And sort of tying in with the kid thing. Who is this how do you pronounce the name of that one researcher? Kushjen? Ashton Kutcher. K-U-I-J-S-T-E-N. Oh yeah. I'm just going to say Kushjen. I think that's pretty dead on. That's the person who runs the Julian Jaynes Society. Today because Jaynes died in 1997. I don't think we ever pointed that out. Yeah. But this person basically says hey if you look at people who hear voices and that's not necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia because that is one percent of the population apparently is the highest 10 percent of the population can you know does hear things basically. So these it's the idea of the command voice basically is to do something and if you're hearing a voice that says you know move to the window and look out on the street that's one thing. If you hear a voice that says take the knife from the drawer and you know put it in someone's head then that's another thing altogether. And we were talking about kids earlier you know the idea of the imaginary friend kind of jibes with this lack of consciousness. 65 percent of kids have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friends. My daughter had for years what she called her ghost friends which is a lot creepier way to put it. But I think that's all just sort of to say that like that nine percent of people who are hearing voices who are not suffering from schizophrenia is that's proof of that initial bicameral mind at work. Right. Yeah. And I mean Julie and Jaynes believe that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state as evidenced by that development of theory of mind or as evidenced by imaginary friends and that they're kind of recreating what society or the human species went through thousands of years ago as they age and develop. Very interesting. So you might be out there especially if you're a concreteist like Chuck thinking like you might be rocking in your seat right now face flushed about to faint out of rage. Oh wait is my camera on? Because this is by definition unscientific. It's not provable in the form that Jaynes put it forth. It's more of a concept, an idea. And apparently he was well aware of that. He didn't tout it as anything more than that. But Cuscian the director of the Julian Jaynes Society likes to point out that it was he was basically laying the groundwork for an entirely new way of looking at things that other people could come along and take it up and figure out how he was wrong, how he was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense in its that form. And people have been doing that. Again this is like a crackpot theory that has never gone away because the more people pay attention to it and the more we start to understand about the brain the more sense it kind of makes. And it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it over the like 50 years that it's been around. I think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not rocking in my chair. David Bowie loved it. He said that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind. I think that was it. The book. Is that a song? No. He said it was one of the top 100 books to read. Oh all right. I believe that. Totally. It's a very Bowie thing. For sure. And other people too. And then one other thing, another way to put all this to kind of sum it up that I saw it put is that we developed at some point back in the in history a left brain bias. That's it. You know which kind of ties into your original view of the whole thing which was you know they weren't conscious that they were conscious. Right. I like that. You got anything else? I might but I might just not be aware of it. Man. As I said this is the best episode we've ever done. Since Chuck Giggles, which everybody loves, I think then it's time for listener mail. This is about the freedom of the press episode. And this was a Josh request. Hey guys, how freedom of the press works struck a particular chord with me. I used to work as a science teacher but was finding more and more students were being duped by pseudoscience on the internet and weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I did a masters in library and information science and now a school librarian on a mission to vanquish disinformation. Awesome. While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of approaching news critically as with any online source of information your recent podcast on how freedom of the press works really inspired me to put forward more information and content about media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden it's very easy to take freedom to press for granted. Last year in sympathy with my American colleagues I put up a display of banned books tracked by the ALA and each book had a tag listing the years and ranking a book was challenged and I encouraged the students to guess what for. It led to a lot of really good, that's I love this experiment with students, led to a lot of really good discussions. Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books had been banned or challenged, were horrified to see their own favorite books on display and were also shocked by the justification as are we always. Now that COVID restrictions are being lifted I'm very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books the Dawet Isaac Library in the Malmö archives. That's a new mouth. So that students can see the extent of limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world. Thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series kind regards. Medvengliga helsnegar. That is must just be a salutation in Swedish. That comes from Ms. Alice Antunsen. She heard hers. Thank you Alice that is amazing. I'm so glad we got to that listener mail because I've been proud of that person for a very long time ever since that email came in. Totally. How about Sweden, keeping the American dream alive? I love it. And Chuck also before we sign off there's something I've been meaning to address that you said earlier. You said you have a dumb brain. No you don't. Did I say that? Yeah you did. Okay. So if you want to get in touch with us like Alice did and show the world what a hero you are we would love to hear that kind of thing. You can email us to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fans so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun thought provoking Star Wars related episodes. Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far far away such as the biology of tauntons and wampas on the ice planet hot or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeart radio app, podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. No gloss no filter just stories spoken without fear. Listen to my weekly podcast the puja bhajjo on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty stay for the fire. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.