Some notes from my LW meetup lecture on book of Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Not sure if legible for someone who wasn’t there. May serve as a motivation to read the book.
Human brain has two hemispheres, relatively loosely connected, each of them is relatively independent (look up experiments when one hemisphere was disabled by e.g. injecting amytal into neck artery). Both can listen and see, but only the dominant hemisphere can talk. The corresponding part of the non-dominant hemisphere, when stimulated by electric current, creates super-realistic auditory—and sometimes even visual—hallucinations, similar to schizophrenia.
What is the evolutionary purpose of having a schizophrenia center in the brain? (This is just a speculation, skip this paragraph if it annoys you.) Julian Jaynes supposes that something similar to today’s schizophrenia was actually an evolutionary precedessor of consciousness. Hallucinating voices of their fellow apes allowed our ancestors to create tribes of larger sizes than other primates. Belief in afterlife emerged as a side effect of hallucinating voices of dead tribe members. Obeying dead tribe leaders became a basis of religion. The hallucinations of specific people later evolved into hallucinations of culturally shared gods.
When the society becomes so complex that mere knowledge of rules and pattern-matching is not sufficient to solve existing problems, people have to develop theory of mind instead (first the theory of other minds; later, applying it to themselves, the consciousness), which made them lose the ability to see gods. Jaynes believes the switch from interacting with gods to consciousness happened during the “fall of Atlantis”, which was a series of vulcanic eruptions in the Mediterranean sea, dramatically changing life in all local civilizations except for Egypt. In the absence of gods, “religions/superstition as we know it today” emerged. People started praying to absent gods, and making rituals to appease them; they also invented various forms of divination. Even then, a high level of stress can invoke the hallucinations again. The threshold of stress required seems to be genetic. People who retained the ability to speak with gods were called prophets. They were often uneducated people.
Some evidence: In ancient Egypt seeing hallucinations of other people was perfectly normal; the hallucinations were called “ka”. In Iliad, people interacted with gods all the time; pretty much all thinking was outsourced to gods. (The later Odyssey already depicts humans with modern psychology: they make decisions, invent tricks, lie.) The Oracle of Delphi used illiterate teenage girls from peasant families to channel the god Apollon.
The Old Testament (a collections of books written and edited in different eras) also reflects the process. At the beginning, humans regularly interacted with gods; the latest of them was Moses. Then the interaction with gods was limited to prophets; often uneducated people, sometimes prophesizing against their wills. Sometimes they were killed either because their prophecies failed, or for political reasons when they prophesized for the wrong god. Gradually they were eradicated.
Relevant Biblical quotes:
“The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tekoa — the vision he saw concerning Israel … He said: The Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem … This is what the Lord says: … This is what the Lord says: … This is what the Lord says: …” (Amos) He speaks while hearing the hallucinations.
“Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’” (Amos 7:14-15) Prophet explains to a professional priest why such a nobody as him is speaking for the mighty God.
“But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”” (Exodus 3:11) Moses tries to avoid the role of prophet, because he doesn’t feel high-status.
“Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.” (Jeremiah 1:6) “You persuaded me, Lord, and I was persuaded; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” (Jeremiah 20:7-9) Jeremiah also tries to avoid this role, but to no end. Hallucinations come involuntarily, and they require to be acted upon; resistance is futile.
Related interesting phenomenon is hypnosis. That’s something that Vulcan rationalists try to avoid, because it works differently in different cultural settings and for different people, so it seems to avoid scientific approach. Jaynes’s explanation is that the non-dominant hemisphere hears the hypnotist’s voice and decides to obey (usually because the person believes that this is how hypnosis really works, hence the cultural dependence), overruling the dominant hemisphere. How is hypnosis different from voluntary compliance? People who try faking it by conscious compliance provide worse results. For example, if you convince someone in hypnosis that they are a chicken, they can spend fifteen minutes happily clucking, while a person who fakes being hypnotized will become visibly bored.
Here is something that wasn’t mentioned in the book, but I think it fits the pattern: In Zen Buddhism, priests used paradoxical puzzles called “koans” to make students “enlightened”, and to verify that they really are “enlightened”. If Jaynes’s theory is true, it could have been a historical tool to turn off the bicameral (hallucinatory, pattern-matching) thinking, and turn on the consciousness. In other words, if you are a modern human interested in Buddhism, studying koans is probably just a waste of time: the abilities they promise you already have; and no, they aren’t supernatural. (Also many koans are based on puns in languages you don’t know, so you actually can’t solve them.)
This is just my speculation: This theory could explain why it is useful to debate your thoughts with other people (e.g. in therapy; most obviously Rogerian therapy), or to accompany your decisions with rituals, as opposed to just thinking rationally about them. It is how the dominant hemisphere explains its intentions to the non-dominant hemisphere, which in turn can later provide the necessary willpower. This could also provide a hint to why highly intelligent people suffer so often from akrasia.
When the society becomes so complex that mere knowledge of rules and pattern-matching is not sufficient to solve existing problems, people have to develop theory of mind instead
This implies that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies (Amazon Indians, Bushmen, Aboriginals, Andamanese, etc.) did not do this and still are “bicameral”. Is there evidence that this is so?
koans … could have been a historical tool to turn off the bicameral (hallucinatory, pattern-matching) thinking, and turn on the consciousness
Koans originate around IX century AD in China—the implication is that the Chinese mind before that was mostly bicameral. Again, any evidence of this? In Japan koans were important much later, e.g. Hakuin lived in the XVIII century.
I have no idea if someone made a research about how many members of the contemporary hunter-gatherer societies hear “voices” and see “spirits”. But it seems to be a standard trope.
The part about koans is just my idea; it’s not from the book. Actually, I later realized it could easily be the other way round. High stress induces bicameral thinking, and giving someone an unsolvable puzzle and saying his future incarnations depend on it could be quite stressful. The non-dominant hemisphere is supposed to be the one that matches patterns, so it could just as well be an exercise to activate it. And the “enlightement” could mean activating the inner voice. (In other words, it could be a culturally different way to achieve what charismatic Christians are achieving by “speaking in tongues”.) Well, if you can easily argue either way...
Yeah, that shows that even a modern mind can be temporarily switched into the bicameral mode under a proper combination of circumstances and beliefs (i.e. a ritual).
Ancient Greeks used rituals to initiate illiterate girls into speaking prophecies. Some African tribes use rituals to create zombies (unconscious slaves). Modern Christians use rituals to initiate believers into speaking gibberish, or falling on the floor. Hypnotists use rituals to make volunteers on the stage believe that they are chicken.
These are all different cultutal variations of the same thing: high social pressure can activate the bicameral mode in a modern mind. There are differences in how easily a mind will succumb to such pressure; and the difference probably has a biological component. In schizophrenia, the bicameral mode can activate spontaneously.
It seems to me you’re putting too many equal signs between things like schizophrenia, religious (in particular, mystical) experiences, altered states of consciousness including the drug-mediated ones, and the bicameral mode of thinking.
Not all unusual mind states can be fit into the bicameral mold.
To make me understand your model and objections, please tell me which statements specifically you agree or disagree with; or rather how much likely or unlikely you consider them. (So that I don’t argue for a statement we both happen to agree with.)
the brain has two hemispheres;
the hemispheres communicate with each other;
each of these hemispheres separately is capable of intelligent behavior;
each of these hemispheres separately is capable of listening and seeing;
the non-dominant hemisphere can send visual or auditory hallucinations to the dominant one;
sometimes hallucination can force people to feel certain way or do certain things;
hallucinations are among the typical symptoms of schizophrenia;
high stress increases the probability of hallucinations.
My point is that if we happen to agree on these points, then I think that proposing this mechanism as an explanation for seeing or hearing unusual things or feeling compelled to do things in situations of high social pressure is a reasonable explanation.
(Kind of like learning that humans have legs, and then concluding that legs are probably responsible for walking and running and jumping. The accusation of “putting too many equal signs” between walking, running, and jumping doesn’t feel fair. And the statement that “not all long-distance movement can be fit into the leg movement” is technically true—one could also walk on hands, or crawl—but it still makes sense to consider legs as a prime suspect.)
My point is that if we happen to agree on these points, then I think that proposing this mechanism as an explanation for seeing or hearing unusual things or feeling compelled to do things in situations of high social pressure is a reasonable explanation.
We agree on these points (in their literal interpretation), but I don’t think that proposing this mechanism is a reasonable explanation. For one thing, the causal chain is really weak. For another, you’re ignoring all alternate hypotheses.
For example let’s do this:
Prolonged starvation can cause visual or auditory hallucinations;
sometimes hallucination can force people to feel certain way or do certain things;
hallucinations are among the typical symptoms of schizophrenia;
high stress increases the probability of hallucinations.
...Profit? X-)
The accusation of “putting too many equal signs” between walking, running, and jumping doesn’t feel fair.
Have you considered the implications? For example, would you agree that members of stone-age tribes are literally schizophrenics by DSM criteria and would be diagnosed as such by competent psychiatrists? Effective anti-psychotic drugs exists—would you agree that medicating such people would force their minds into a “contemporary” mode and out of the “bicameral” mode? Is meditation nothing but teaching yourself schizophrenia? Were all mystics throughout the ages just mentally ill people?
For example, would you agree that members of stone-age tribes are literally schizophrenics by DSM criteria and would be diagnosed as such by competent psychiatrists?
This reminds me of debates about IQ, whether stone-age tribes would be diagnosed as mentally retarded.
Seems like on one hand, if we could use a time machine and somehow convince the stone-age people to do our IQ tests, they would probably score low. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be the same kind of people as a random selection of people who have the same value of IQ today. I guess the conclusion is that there are many factors that can lower the IQ, some one of them would be problematic in the ancient environment, and some of them not.
Analogically, the idea that the members of stone-age tribes would be diagnosed as mentally ill using today’s criteria seems quite unsurprising to me. And analogically, there could be various variants of schizophrenia, some of them widely present among the stone-age tribes, and some of them absent. I have no idea whether the anti-psychotic drugs would target those historic variants.
Is meditation nothing but teaching yourself schizophrenia?
It seems like the goal of the most serious meditators is to have hallucinations of your previous reincarnations, which is supposed to give you the hard evidence that your faith is the true one. (Conveniently ignoring the alternative explanation that your faith may actually have shaped the content of the hallucinations.)
But most people in our culture seem to meditate merely as a way of relaxation. That means, not giving it enough time and effort to make the hallucinations appear. (Literature seems to suggests that it is usually necessary to spend weeks meditating several hours daily to achieve the “enlightenment”.)
Were all mystics throughout the ages just mentally ill people?
Well, unless you believe in the supernatural, I am curious what other explanation there is...
(Connotational disclaimer: “Mentally ill” is not the same thing as “dysfunctional at everything”. Just because a person has weird hallucinations once in a while, they can still be a great person, even a great scientist.)
I’m talking about people living now. Amazon Indian tribes, Andamanese, maybe remote communities of Bushmen, Aboriginals, etc.
the idea that the members of stone-age tribes would be diagnosed as mentally ill using today’s criteria seems quite unsurprising to me.
The question was much more specific: diagnosed with schizophrenia by DSM standards. And should we medicate them? The life of schizophrenics noticeably improves when they take their drugs.
It seems like the goal of the most serious meditators is to have hallucinations of your previous reincarnations
I don’t know about that. Meditation is not limited to the Hinduist or Buddhist religious context. And, by the way, enlightenment is usually thought to require many years of meditation, not weeks.
Amazon Indian tribes, Andamanese, maybe remote communities of Bushmen, Aboriginals, etc.
I remember reading somewhere that Incas received commands from statues when the Spanish conquerred them. Not sure how reliable this information is, but I would count “hearing voices from statues” among the symptoms of schizophrenia, if that’s true.
diagnosed with schizophrenia by DSM standards. And should we medicate them? The life of schizophrenics noticeably improves when they take their drugs.
The map (even a high-status one such as DSM) is not the territory. Asking “are they schizophrenic according to DSM” and “are they the kind of schizophrenic who is unable to function normally in their daily life” are two different questions. If someone hears voices which are completely benign, I’d say “live and let live”. It’s only the voices that make people cause harm to themselves and the others that should be treated by medication.
In the bicameral era, I can imagine that most people heard the relatively benign voices, and only a few ones heard the harmful voices. In other words, the actual problem of schizophrenia could be not hearing voices per se, but having those voices become dangerous. (Or hearing the voices so often that it makes normal functioning difficult; but how much that is would probably differ in the ancient times and now, especially when it’s a social stigma now.)
The life of schizophrenics noticeably improves when they take their drugs.
Removing the dangerous voices improves life.
Removing rare and benign voices… I am not sure about that one. Actually, I could imagine this being the other way round, for example sometimes hearing the voices could manifest as increased “willpower” (e.g. it’s easier to exercise every morning, if an irresistable voice of God keeps reminding you). Maybe akrasia correlates positively with atheism.
Meditation is not limited to the Hinduist or Buddhist religious context.
Then I’d cynically guess that people in those other contexts, if they meditate hard enough, usually receive hallucinations that confirm their contexts (e.g. instead of their previous reincarnation, they will see Jesus Christ or Holy Spirit or Allah coming and speaking to them).
Jaynes’s explanation is that the non-dominant hemisphere hears the hypnotist’s voice and decides to obey (usually because the person believes that this is how hypnosis really works, hence the cultural dependence), overruling the dominant hemisphere.
This theory seems the prediction that you shouldn’t get a similar hypnotic effect if the sound get’s processed by the left and by the right ear.
How strongly do you believe that?
Some evidence: In ancient Egypt seeing hallucinations of other people was perfectly normal; the hallucinations were called “ka”.
Plenty of people I know have internal family systems type hallucinations that speak to them. Given different cultural norms they likely also coud be called “ka” or do you have an argument for why what the Egyptian hallucinate was something different or why you think that their society had more people having those hallucinations?
Furthermore internal family systems voices often have a clear direction from which they are coming. When some come from the right and others of the same person come from the left, why should we believe that they come from the “non-dominate hemisphere” (which probably is either left or right).
If Jaynes’s theory is true, it could have been a historical tool to turn off the bicameral (hallucinatory, pattern-matching) thinking, and turn on the consciousness. In other words, if you are a modern human interested in Buddhism, studying koans is probably just a waste of time: the abilities they promise you already have
I don’t think you get to the purpose of koans. Koans often point to phenonomogical primitives that the student doesn’t has access to and provide a tool to learn the new primitives.
This theory seems the prediction that you shouldn’t get a similar hypnotic effect if the sound get’s processed by the left and by the right ear. How strongly do you believe that?
I don’t know how the sound is processed in brain. For example in vision, each hemisphere gets half of input from each eye. So “which eye” doesn’t matter, but “left or right from where you are looking at” does.
When some (voices) come from the right and others of the same person come from the left, why should we believe that they come from the “non-dominate hemisphere” (which probably is either left or right).
This would suggest that inputs from both ears are processed by both hemispheres. If not, then I admit this is a serious argument against Jaynes’s theory.
The halves are neither mirror images nor contain completely exclusive functions. However there are significant similarities. Each half receive sensory information though, curiously, from the opposite side of the body. Thus the right eye goes to the left brain and vice versa. The exception is the nose: the right nostril goes to the right brain.
I thought this was very widely known—which I say not in order to make you feel bad (there’s no shame in not knowing things) but to suggest why Viliam didn’t find it necessary to provide references when he said that each hemisphere gets input from both eyes’ view of one half of the visual field.
Or take a look at this diagram from a book about the visual field. Or this online book.
Thanks.
but to suggest why Viliam didn’t find it necessary to provide references when he said that each hemisphere gets input from both eyes’ view of one half of the visual field.
I don’t ask for reference to claim that it was wrong for Viliam that he didn’t provide references. I rather ask because the belief I had in my mind conflict. Likely because sources like the ChangingMinds website making a wrong claim (if I take your link to be trustworthy).
But if it’s the visual field that’s link that doesn’t raise my basic confidence in the claim that hypnosis focuses on a single hemisphere. Timeline therapy would be a good example. Some people orient their timeline in a way that if you ask them to visualize an event that happend in the past it will be on the left side and if you ask them to imagine an event of the future it will be on the right side.
Different people have a different spatial layout for this but it generally doesn’t happen that someone visualize both his past and future in the same direction.
Generally entities accessed by hypnosis do have a location and there are effects of moving that location around but they are not all located to one side, and if I would meet a person for whom everything is on one side I would hypnotize that the person has a pathology.
I’m personally wary of drawing strong conclusions about underlying neuroscience when thinking about hypnosis, particularly because I’m exposed to hypnotists talking about neuroscience who might have access to empiric experience of what hypnosis does but who don’t have real neurosicence knowledge.
I can’t quickly find a source for each hemisphere receiving only a part of the visual field, but the optical nerves coming from each eye cross before reaching the brain, so it’s not “one eye, one hemisphere”. (That doesn’t mean “the left one goes right and vice versa”, but “they join, and then they split again”.)
I can’t quickly find a source for each hemisphere receiving only a part of the visual field, but the optical nerves coming from each eye cross before reaching the brain
The nerves cross in the ChangingMind descriptions. That’s how the left eye surplies the right hemisphere and vice versa. I don’t see how they join in the sense of sharing information while the cross.
If I remember correctly from school, there are many different criteria, but for right-handed people usually most of them provide the same answer. Example criteria: which hand is more dextrous, which foot is more dextrous, which eye perceives better, where is the speech center...
(With left-handed people it’s complicated; for some of them the functionality of brain is a mirror image of right-handed people, others are some mix of both.)
Basically you are saying if we have a right handed individual with a dextrous right hand that means his left hemisphere is dominant. Thus for them hypnosis is about activiting the left brain hemisphere?
If the left hemisphere is dominant, then hypnosis is about making the right hemisphere comply with the hypnotist’s commands; then the right hemisphere will make the left one obey the hypnotic commands.
Some notes from my LW meetup lecture on book of Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Not sure if legible for someone who wasn’t there. May serve as a motivation to read the book.
Human brain has two hemispheres, relatively loosely connected, each of them is relatively independent (look up experiments when one hemisphere was disabled by e.g. injecting amytal into neck artery). Both can listen and see, but only the dominant hemisphere can talk. The corresponding part of the non-dominant hemisphere, when stimulated by electric current, creates super-realistic auditory—and sometimes even visual—hallucinations, similar to schizophrenia.
What is the evolutionary purpose of having a schizophrenia center in the brain? (This is just a speculation, skip this paragraph if it annoys you.) Julian Jaynes supposes that something similar to today’s schizophrenia was actually an evolutionary precedessor of consciousness. Hallucinating voices of their fellow apes allowed our ancestors to create tribes of larger sizes than other primates. Belief in afterlife emerged as a side effect of hallucinating voices of dead tribe members. Obeying dead tribe leaders became a basis of religion. The hallucinations of specific people later evolved into hallucinations of culturally shared gods.
When the society becomes so complex that mere knowledge of rules and pattern-matching is not sufficient to solve existing problems, people have to develop theory of mind instead (first the theory of other minds; later, applying it to themselves, the consciousness), which made them lose the ability to see gods. Jaynes believes the switch from interacting with gods to consciousness happened during the “fall of Atlantis”, which was a series of vulcanic eruptions in the Mediterranean sea, dramatically changing life in all local civilizations except for Egypt. In the absence of gods, “religions/superstition as we know it today” emerged. People started praying to absent gods, and making rituals to appease them; they also invented various forms of divination. Even then, a high level of stress can invoke the hallucinations again. The threshold of stress required seems to be genetic. People who retained the ability to speak with gods were called prophets. They were often uneducated people.
Some evidence: In ancient Egypt seeing hallucinations of other people was perfectly normal; the hallucinations were called “ka”. In Iliad, people interacted with gods all the time; pretty much all thinking was outsourced to gods. (The later Odyssey already depicts humans with modern psychology: they make decisions, invent tricks, lie.) The Oracle of Delphi used illiterate teenage girls from peasant families to channel the god Apollon.
The Old Testament (a collections of books written and edited in different eras) also reflects the process. At the beginning, humans regularly interacted with gods; the latest of them was Moses. Then the interaction with gods was limited to prophets; often uneducated people, sometimes prophesizing against their wills. Sometimes they were killed either because their prophecies failed, or for political reasons when they prophesized for the wrong god. Gradually they were eradicated.
Relevant Biblical quotes:
“The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tekoa — the vision he saw concerning Israel … He said: The Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem … This is what the Lord says: … This is what the Lord says: … This is what the Lord says: …” (Amos) He speaks while hearing the hallucinations.
“Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’” (Amos 7:14-15) Prophet explains to a professional priest why such a nobody as him is speaking for the mighty God.
“But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”” (Exodus 3:11) Moses tries to avoid the role of prophet, because he doesn’t feel high-status.
“Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.” (Jeremiah 1:6) “You persuaded me, Lord, and I was persuaded; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” (Jeremiah 20:7-9) Jeremiah also tries to avoid this role, but to no end. Hallucinations come involuntarily, and they require to be acted upon; resistance is futile.
Related interesting phenomenon is hypnosis. That’s something that Vulcan rationalists try to avoid, because it works differently in different cultural settings and for different people, so it seems to avoid scientific approach. Jaynes’s explanation is that the non-dominant hemisphere hears the hypnotist’s voice and decides to obey (usually because the person believes that this is how hypnosis really works, hence the cultural dependence), overruling the dominant hemisphere. How is hypnosis different from voluntary compliance? People who try faking it by conscious compliance provide worse results. For example, if you convince someone in hypnosis that they are a chicken, they can spend fifteen minutes happily clucking, while a person who fakes being hypnotized will become visibly bored.
Here is something that wasn’t mentioned in the book, but I think it fits the pattern: In Zen Buddhism, priests used paradoxical puzzles called “koans” to make students “enlightened”, and to verify that they really are “enlightened”. If Jaynes’s theory is true, it could have been a historical tool to turn off the bicameral (hallucinatory, pattern-matching) thinking, and turn on the consciousness. In other words, if you are a modern human interested in Buddhism, studying koans is probably just a waste of time: the abilities they promise you already have; and no, they aren’t supernatural. (Also many koans are based on puns in languages you don’t know, so you actually can’t solve them.)
This is just my speculation: This theory could explain why it is useful to debate your thoughts with other people (e.g. in therapy; most obviously Rogerian therapy), or to accompany your decisions with rituals, as opposed to just thinking rationally about them. It is how the dominant hemisphere explains its intentions to the non-dominant hemisphere, which in turn can later provide the necessary willpower. This could also provide a hint to why highly intelligent people suffer so often from akrasia.
This implies that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies (Amazon Indians, Bushmen, Aboriginals, Andamanese, etc.) did not do this and still are “bicameral”. Is there evidence that this is so?
Koans originate around IX century AD in China—the implication is that the Chinese mind before that was mostly bicameral. Again, any evidence of this? In Japan koans were important much later, e.g. Hakuin lived in the XVIII century.
I have no idea if someone made a research about how many members of the contemporary hunter-gatherer societies hear “voices” and see “spirits”. But it seems to be a standard trope.
The part about koans is just my idea; it’s not from the book. Actually, I later realized it could easily be the other way round. High stress induces bicameral thinking, and giving someone an unsolvable puzzle and saying his future incarnations depend on it could be quite stressful. The non-dominant hemisphere is supposed to be the one that matches patterns, so it could just as well be an exercise to activate it. And the “enlightement” could mean activating the inner voice. (In other words, it could be a culturally different way to achieve what charismatic Christians are achieving by “speaking in tongues”.) Well, if you can easily argue either way...
The thing is, it’s not limited to primitive tribes. Try a Pentecostal church in a XXI century first-world country :-)
Yeah, that shows that even a modern mind can be temporarily switched into the bicameral mode under a proper combination of circumstances and beliefs (i.e. a ritual).
Ancient Greeks used rituals to initiate illiterate girls into speaking prophecies. Some African tribes use rituals to create zombies (unconscious slaves). Modern Christians use rituals to initiate believers into speaking gibberish, or falling on the floor. Hypnotists use rituals to make volunteers on the stage believe that they are chicken.
These are all different cultutal variations of the same thing: high social pressure can activate the bicameral mode in a modern mind. There are differences in how easily a mind will succumb to such pressure; and the difference probably has a biological component. In schizophrenia, the bicameral mode can activate spontaneously.
It seems to me you’re putting too many equal signs between things like schizophrenia, religious (in particular, mystical) experiences, altered states of consciousness including the drug-mediated ones, and the bicameral mode of thinking.
Not all unusual mind states can be fit into the bicameral mold.
To make me understand your model and objections, please tell me which statements specifically you agree or disagree with; or rather how much likely or unlikely you consider them. (So that I don’t argue for a statement we both happen to agree with.)
the brain has two hemispheres;
the hemispheres communicate with each other;
each of these hemispheres separately is capable of intelligent behavior;
each of these hemispheres separately is capable of listening and seeing;
the non-dominant hemisphere can send visual or auditory hallucinations to the dominant one;
sometimes hallucination can force people to feel certain way or do certain things;
hallucinations are among the typical symptoms of schizophrenia;
high stress increases the probability of hallucinations.
My point is that if we happen to agree on these points, then I think that proposing this mechanism as an explanation for seeing or hearing unusual things or feeling compelled to do things in situations of high social pressure is a reasonable explanation.
(Kind of like learning that humans have legs, and then concluding that legs are probably responsible for walking and running and jumping. The accusation of “putting too many equal signs” between walking, running, and jumping doesn’t feel fair. And the statement that “not all long-distance movement can be fit into the leg movement” is technically true—one could also walk on hands, or crawl—but it still makes sense to consider legs as a prime suspect.)
We agree on these points (in their literal interpretation), but I don’t think that proposing this mechanism is a reasonable explanation. For one thing, the causal chain is really weak. For another, you’re ignoring all alternate hypotheses.
For example let’s do this:
Prolonged starvation can cause visual or auditory hallucinations;
sometimes hallucination can force people to feel certain way or do certain things;
hallucinations are among the typical symptoms of schizophrenia;
high stress increases the probability of hallucinations.
...Profit? X-)
Have you considered the implications? For example, would you agree that members of stone-age tribes are literally schizophrenics by DSM criteria and would be diagnosed as such by competent psychiatrists? Effective anti-psychotic drugs exists—would you agree that medicating such people would force their minds into a “contemporary” mode and out of the “bicameral” mode? Is meditation nothing but teaching yourself schizophrenia? Were all mystics throughout the ages just mentally ill people?
This reminds me of debates about IQ, whether stone-age tribes would be diagnosed as mentally retarded.
Seems like on one hand, if we could use a time machine and somehow convince the stone-age people to do our IQ tests, they would probably score low. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be the same kind of people as a random selection of people who have the same value of IQ today. I guess the conclusion is that there are many factors that can lower the IQ, some one of them would be problematic in the ancient environment, and some of them not.
Analogically, the idea that the members of stone-age tribes would be diagnosed as mentally ill using today’s criteria seems quite unsurprising to me. And analogically, there could be various variants of schizophrenia, some of them widely present among the stone-age tribes, and some of them absent. I have no idea whether the anti-psychotic drugs would target those historic variants.
It seems like the goal of the most serious meditators is to have hallucinations of your previous reincarnations, which is supposed to give you the hard evidence that your faith is the true one. (Conveniently ignoring the alternative explanation that your faith may actually have shaped the content of the hallucinations.)
But most people in our culture seem to meditate merely as a way of relaxation. That means, not giving it enough time and effort to make the hallucinations appear. (Literature seems to suggests that it is usually necessary to spend weeks meditating several hours daily to achieve the “enlightenment”.)
Well, unless you believe in the supernatural, I am curious what other explanation there is...
(Connotational disclaimer: “Mentally ill” is not the same thing as “dysfunctional at everything”. Just because a person has weird hallucinations once in a while, they can still be a great person, even a great scientist.)
I’m talking about people living now. Amazon Indian tribes, Andamanese, maybe remote communities of Bushmen, Aboriginals, etc.
The question was much more specific: diagnosed with schizophrenia by DSM standards. And should we medicate them? The life of schizophrenics noticeably improves when they take their drugs.
I don’t know about that. Meditation is not limited to the Hinduist or Buddhist religious context. And, by the way, enlightenment is usually thought to require many years of meditation, not weeks.
They are normal :-P
I remember reading somewhere that Incas received commands from statues when the Spanish conquerred them. Not sure how reliable this information is, but I would count “hearing voices from statues” among the symptoms of schizophrenia, if that’s true.
The map (even a high-status one such as DSM) is not the territory. Asking “are they schizophrenic according to DSM” and “are they the kind of schizophrenic who is unable to function normally in their daily life” are two different questions. If someone hears voices which are completely benign, I’d say “live and let live”. It’s only the voices that make people cause harm to themselves and the others that should be treated by medication.
In the bicameral era, I can imagine that most people heard the relatively benign voices, and only a few ones heard the harmful voices. In other words, the actual problem of schizophrenia could be not hearing voices per se, but having those voices become dangerous. (Or hearing the voices so often that it makes normal functioning difficult; but how much that is would probably differ in the ancient times and now, especially when it’s a social stigma now.)
Removing the dangerous voices improves life.
Removing rare and benign voices… I am not sure about that one. Actually, I could imagine this being the other way round, for example sometimes hearing the voices could manifest as increased “willpower” (e.g. it’s easier to exercise every morning, if an irresistable voice of God keeps reminding you). Maybe akrasia correlates positively with atheism.
Then I’d cynically guess that people in those other contexts, if they meditate hard enough, usually receive hallucinations that confirm their contexts (e.g. instead of their previous reincarnation, they will see Jesus Christ or Holy Spirit or Allah coming and speaking to them).
This theory seems the prediction that you shouldn’t get a similar hypnotic effect if the sound get’s processed by the left and by the right ear. How strongly do you believe that?
Plenty of people I know have internal family systems type hallucinations that speak to them. Given different cultural norms they likely also coud be called “ka” or do you have an argument for why what the Egyptian hallucinate was something different or why you think that their society had more people having those hallucinations?
Furthermore internal family systems voices often have a clear direction from which they are coming. When some come from the right and others of the same person come from the left, why should we believe that they come from the “non-dominate hemisphere” (which probably is either left or right).
I don’t think you get to the purpose of koans. Koans often point to phenonomogical primitives that the student doesn’t has access to and provide a tool to learn the new primitives.
I don’t know how the sound is processed in brain. For example in vision, each hemisphere gets half of input from each eye. So “which eye” doesn’t matter, but “left or right from where you are looking at” does.
This would suggest that inputs from both ears are processed by both hemispheres. If not, then I admit this is a serious argument against Jaynes’s theory.
Where did you get that idea? A quick googling gives me http://changingminds.org/explanations/brain/parts_brain/left_right_brain.htm:
Skeptics question : http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32988/does-the-right-eye-feed-information-to-the-left-brain-hemisphere-while-the-left
If you look e.g. at the start of the Wikipedia article on the visual cortex you will find:
Or take a look at this diagram from a book about the visual field. Or this online book.
I thought this was very widely known—which I say not in order to make you feel bad (there’s no shame in not knowing things) but to suggest why Viliam didn’t find it necessary to provide references when he said that each hemisphere gets input from both eyes’ view of one half of the visual field.
Thanks.
I don’t ask for reference to claim that it was wrong for Viliam that he didn’t provide references. I rather ask because the belief I had in my mind conflict. Likely because sources like the ChangingMinds website making a wrong claim (if I take your link to be trustworthy).
But if it’s the visual field that’s link that doesn’t raise my basic confidence in the claim that hypnosis focuses on a single hemisphere. Timeline therapy would be a good example. Some people orient their timeline in a way that if you ask them to visualize an event that happend in the past it will be on the left side and if you ask them to imagine an event of the future it will be on the right side.
Different people have a different spatial layout for this but it generally doesn’t happen that someone visualize both his past and future in the same direction. Generally entities accessed by hypnosis do have a location and there are effects of moving that location around but they are not all located to one side, and if I would meet a person for whom everything is on one side I would hypnotize that the person has a pathology.
I’m personally wary of drawing strong conclusions about underlying neuroscience when thinking about hypnosis, particularly because I’m exposed to hypnotists talking about neuroscience who might have access to empiric experience of what hypnosis does but who don’t have real neurosicence knowledge.
I can’t quickly find a source for each hemisphere receiving only a part of the visual field, but the optical nerves coming from each eye cross before reaching the brain, so it’s not “one eye, one hemisphere”. (That doesn’t mean “the left one goes right and vice versa”, but “they join, and then they split again”.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_nerve
The nerves cross in the ChangingMind descriptions. That’s how the left eye surplies the right hemisphere and vice versa. I don’t see how they join in the sense of sharing information while the cross.
How is
dominant hemisphereoperationalized?If I remember correctly from school, there are many different criteria, but for right-handed people usually most of them provide the same answer. Example criteria: which hand is more dextrous, which foot is more dextrous, which eye perceives better, where is the speech center...
(With left-handed people it’s complicated; for some of them the functionality of brain is a mirror image of right-handed people, others are some mix of both.)
Basically you are saying if we have a right handed individual with a dextrous right hand that means his left hemisphere is dominant. Thus for them hypnosis is about activiting the left brain hemisphere?
Is that a correct description of your claim?
If the left hemisphere is dominant, then hypnosis is about making the right hemisphere comply with the hypnotist’s commands; then the right hemisphere will make the left one obey the hypnotic commands.