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The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)
409

Another way the dissolving of mind-space shows itself is in the disorientation in respect to time so common in the schizophrenic. We can only be conscious of time as we can arrange it into a spatial succession, and the diminishing of mind-space in schizophrenia makes this difficult or impossible. For example, patients may complain that “time has stopped,” or that everything seems to be “slowed down” or “suspended,” or more simply that they have “trouble with time.” As one former patient remembered it after he was well: \r\n\r\n>For a long time no days seemed to me like a day and no night seemed like a night. But this in particular has no shape in my memory. I used to tell time by my meals, but as I believed we were served sets of meals in each real day — about half a dozen sets of breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner in each twelve hours — this was not much help. \r\n\r\nOn the face of it, this may seem inconsistent with the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a partial relapse to the bicameral mind. For bicameral man certainly knew the hours of the day and the seasons of the year. But this knowing was, I suggest, a very different knowing from the narratization in a spatially successive time which we who are conscious are constantly doing. Bicameral man had behavioral knowing, responding to the cues for rising and sleeping, for planting and harvesting, cues so important that they were worshiped, as at Stonehenge, and were probably hallucinogenic in themselves. For someone coming from a culture where attention to such cues has been superseded by a different sense of time, the loss of that spatial successiveness leaves the patient in a relatively timeless world. It is interesting in this connection that when it is suggested to normal hypnotic subjects that time does not exist, a schizophrenic form reaction results.


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The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events. In contrast to all other types of divination, it is entirely passive. It is simply an extension of something common to all mammalian nervous systems, namely, that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a tendency to expect B the next time that A occurs. Since omens are really a particular example of this when expressed in language, we can say that the origin of omens is simply in animal nature rather than in civilized culture per se. Omens or sequences of events that might be expected to recur were probably present in a trivial way throughout bicameral times. But they had little importance. Nor was there any necessity to study such sequences, since the hallucinated voices of gods made all the decisions in novel situations. There are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatever. While the first traces of omens occur among the Semitic Akkadians, it is really only after the loss of the bicameral mind toward the end of the second millennium B.C. that such omen texts proliferate everywhere and swell out to touch almost every aspect of life imaginable. By the first millennium B.C., huge collections of them are made. In the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand tablets come into the category of omen literature. Each entry in these tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by a then-clause or apodosis. And there were many classes of omens, terrestrial omens dealing with everyday life: If a town is set on a hill, it will not be good for the dweller within that town. If black ants are seen on the foundations which have been laid, that house will get built; the owner of that house will live to grow old. If a horse enters a man's house, and bites either an ass or a man, the owner of the house will die and his household will be scattered. If a fox runs into the public square, that town will be devastated. If a man unwittingly treads on a lizard and kills it, he will prevail over his adversary. And so on endlessly, bearing on all those aspects of life that in a previous age would have been under the guidance of gods. They can be construed as a kind of first approach to narratization, doing by verbal formulae what consciousness does in a more complex way.


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The Causes of Consciousness AN OLD SUMERIAN PROVERB has been translated as “Act promptly, make your god happy.”1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing, we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.” This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched by major social disturbance. But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes. Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world. Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness.


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If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallunications are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucinations is extremely high; most of us need to be oever our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of a breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for gentical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.\n\n During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary becuase of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination.\n\n It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers*. Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not*. It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as there are often called, do not occur*.'\n\n *W.L. Sawrey and J.D. Weisz, 'An experimental method of producing gastic ulcers,' Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1956, 49:269-270.\n **J.V. Brady, R.W. Porter, D.G. Conrad, and J.W. Mason, 'Avoidance behavior and the development of gastro-duodenal ulcers,' Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1958, I:69-72.\n **J.M. Weiss, 'Psychological Factors in Stress and Disease,' Scientific American, 1972, 226:106.\n\n\n


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Visual hallucinations in schizophrenia occur less commonly, but sometimes with extreme clarity and vividness. One of my schizophrenic subjects, a vivacious twenty-year-old writer of folk songs, had been sitting in a car for a long time, anxiously waiting for a friend. A blue car coming along the road suddenly, oddly, slowed, turned rusty brown, then grew huge gray wings and slowly flapped over a hedge and disappeared. Her greater alarm, however, came when others in the street behaved as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Why? Unless all of them were somehow in league to hide their reactions from her. And why why should that be? It is often the narratization of such false events by consciousness, fitting the world in around them in a rational way, that brings on other tragic symptoms.