Schizophrenics hear voices in their heads - but did we all use to?

          “One who has no god, as he walks along the street

                   Headache envelops him like a garment.”

These intriguing lines come from a cuneiform text believed to have been written around 1250 B.C. From the same period, a stone altar built for the Assyrian ruler Tukulti-Ninurta 1 shows the king kneeling in front of a throne which should contain a god, but which is empty: earlier carvings always had a deity in place. 

In his snappily-titled book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, first published in 1977, Julian Jaynes, a psychology lecturer at Princeton, used these artefacts, along with a mass of other evidence, to put forward a startlingly original theory: until late in the second millennium B.C., human beings didn’t possess consciousness in the way we now do: he wasn’t aware of his internal thought processes. Up until then, Jaynes suggests, the left-hand side of our brain heard a series of commands and urgings from the right-hand side of the brain, and, because we didn’t realize they came from inside us, we attributed these “voices in our head” to gods.

Of course, the same phenomenon still occurs all the time. We all know from experience (often frustrating) that trying to figure out the right thing to do in any situation by thinking it through rationally often doesn’t work – just as trying to remember a name or a tune won’t come to us through willed mental effort. Forgetting about the problem for a bit by doing something else often results in “the answer” popping into our head unbidden. Nowadays, we accept that the problem has somehow been munged by our subconscious, which has subsequently coughed up a solution. But if you didn’t know you possessed a subconscious, where might you imagine the answer came from?

In support of his theory, Jaynes further suggests that the Old Testament and the Iliad and the Odyssey contain absolutely no references to introspection, but offer endless examples of auditory hallucinations. Wetalk to ourselves: back then, people assumed they were being addressed by someone else – usually God or a god.

The “one who has no god”, Jaynes suggests, suffers tension headaches because he is living through the transition between bicameral and unified consciousness – his gods no longer talk to him, so he is having to make his own decisions, and the effort is taking a psychic toll. Similarly, the Assyrian king’s god has stopped telling him what to do:  the altar is empty.

“Thus,” Jaynes writes, “as the slow withdrawing tide of divine voices and presences strands more and more of each population on the sands of subjective uncertainties, the variety of technique by which man attempts to make contact with his lost oceans of authority becomes extended. Prophets, poets, oracles, diviners, statue cults, mediums, astrologers, inspired saints, demon possession, tarot cards, Ouija boards, popes and peyote all are the residue of bicamerality that was progressively narrowed down as uncertainties piled upon uncertainties.”

It is during this period that the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser 1 (1155 – 1077 B.C.) instigated what scholars have dubbed “a policy of frightfulness” – mass enslavement and mass slaughter: contemporary bas-reliefs appear to show the whole population of villages “stuck alive on stakes running up through the groin and out the shoulders”. As Byron put it, “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.” After a period of impoverished retrenchment, the Assyrians would return in the 10th Century B.C., displaying even greater ferocity. 

                                                                               Assyrians flaying captives alive

Was this frenzy of cruelty – which, we hope, reached its zenith in the 20th Century - the result of the breakdown of the bicameral mind? In his fascinating book, A Criminal History of Mankind, Colin Wilson, drawing heavily on Jaynes’s work,  theorises that it might have been the origin of large-scale criminality.

As you’d expect, mainstream academia has generally shied away from getting involved in such wild speculation (possibly because Jaynes’s book is both scholarly and accessible to the lay reader). But Jaynes (who died in 1997) was no Erich Von Daniken, and distinguished practitioners from a whole range of disciples (including psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and psychology) contributed to Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, published in 2007.

For once, I agree with Richard Dawkins, who had this to say about Jaynes’s book: "It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."  

Me too. Whether he’s right or not, Julian Jaynes devised one of the most audacious, exciting and thought-provoking theories as to why we are as we are that I’ve even come across.