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Speaker 1: Comic Con dot com slash NYCC hyphen presents Welcome to

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Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey,

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Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is

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Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Into Day. This is

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Speaker 1: going to be part two of our two part series

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Speaker 1: on Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind and the origin

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Speaker 1: of consciousness in the Breakdown of the bi cameral Mind.

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Speaker 1: So as this is part two of a two part episode.

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Speaker 1: If you haven't heard part one yet, you should go

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Speaker 1: back and listen to that one first. Sometimes we say,

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Speaker 1: you know, if you feel like jumping right in and

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Speaker 1: go for it, This is one where I feel like

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Speaker 1: you're really going to have a hard time following us

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Speaker 1: if you haven't heard part one yet, because that's gonna

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Speaker 1: be where we explain what Julian james main hypothesis is

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Speaker 1: and how he arrived at it, and then in the

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Speaker 1: second episode we're gonna be talking about evidence for it

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Speaker 1: from the ancient world and from the modern world. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: this episode is going to be full of like falling

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Speaker 1: kingdoms and whispering statues and other great stuff, but you

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Speaker 1: need that first episode to understand it. Now, as with

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Speaker 1: the first episode, we want to make clear that we're

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Speaker 1: not necessarily endorsing this hypothesis. This is a very controversial hypothesis.

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Speaker 1: It's not something that is at all considered proven or

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Speaker 1: even necessarily very well attested by evidence. It's something that

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Speaker 1: is controversial but very fascinating and I think worth exploring

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Speaker 1: as a hypothetical. Yeah, it is a it is a

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Speaker 1: radical hypothesis, and if nothing else, it is just a

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Speaker 1: fascinating thought. Experiment. So as we discuss it again, you're

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Speaker 1: going to hear us Uh discussing it as if it

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Speaker 1: was fact, as if this is actually how ancient people thought.

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Speaker 1: But that is just a part of our exploration of

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Speaker 1: the hypothesis. Now to briefly recap the core of Julian

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Speaker 1: James theory, and we should say Julian James, when did

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Speaker 1: he live? Nine? Yeah? So seven. Julian James was an

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Speaker 1: American psychologist. He's primarily known for this book that was

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Speaker 1: published in nineteen seventy six called The Origin of Consciousness

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Speaker 1: in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And the thrust

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Speaker 1: of that book is, until about three thousand years ago,

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Speaker 1: human beings were not conscious. They did not possess consciousness

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Speaker 1: in the way we do today. And around that time,

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Speaker 1: roughly three thousand years ago, modern human consciousness be and

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Speaker 1: as a cultural invention, probably in Mesopotamia that's spread around

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Speaker 1: the world over time. And before that time, for thousands

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Speaker 1: of years, almost all humans were not conscious in the

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Speaker 1: way we are, but instead we're unconscious beings commanded in

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Speaker 1: all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices that they called gods

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Speaker 1: or another way of putting it and uh, and James

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Speaker 1: himself put it this way, everybody was schizophrenic sort of. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I mean, so schizophrenia, as James imagines, it is one

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Speaker 1: form or a modified version of a regression to this

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Speaker 1: bicameral mind state that used to be the norm for

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Speaker 1: how humans and ancient civilizations lived. And so this norm

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Speaker 1: would be that most of the time you would be

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Speaker 1: going around unconsciously behaving out of habit you know, you

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Speaker 1: have a stimulus response behaviors, and you would have habitual

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Speaker 1: behaviors that you would enact, and this would serve to

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Speaker 1: do most things that would be you know, recurrent repetitive

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Speaker 1: behaviors over the day. Whenever something new happened, whenever you

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Speaker 1: needed to make a decision and there was a stress

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Speaker 1: point induced by that decision, you would be told what

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Speaker 1: to do by a hallucinated auditory voice that you would

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Speaker 1: perceive as a god, and that you would enact that. Now,

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Speaker 1: this is, as you said, a radical hypothesis. Yeah, because

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Speaker 1: again the idea here is that everybody heard these voices,

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Speaker 1: that this was the universal human experience, this was the norm, right,

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Speaker 1: And so obviously I mean that that sounds kind of

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Speaker 1: crazy to us now, like, what really could could that

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Speaker 1: be true? So, if there is any truth to Jane's theory,

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Speaker 1: and as we said before, we're not necessarily endorsing it

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Speaker 1: is true, just entertaining it as an interesting hypothesis, we

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Speaker 1: should be able to find some evidence of that theory.

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Speaker 1: And so we can look at psychiatry, and we can

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Speaker 1: look at neuroscience, and we can look at evidence from

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Speaker 1: the ancient world. And today we're gonna start by looking

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Speaker 1: at evidence from the ancient world, from history, from archaeology,

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Speaker 1: from ancient literature. If there was a bicam moral mind state,

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Speaker 1: this divided mind state, where one half of the brain

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Speaker 1: spoke to the other as the voice of a god

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Speaker 1: and commanded the unconscious other half, we should be able

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Speaker 1: to see that in the behaviors of ancient people's and

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Speaker 1: the traces left of those behaviors. Right, So a lot

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Speaker 1: of this episode is going to be UH, Joe and

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Speaker 1: I discussing some of the examples that James brings up

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Speaker 1: in the book. We can't possibly touch on all of

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Speaker 1: the examples because much of the book, and much of

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Speaker 1: the real joy of the book is UH is him

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Speaker 1: bringing up these various examples from from historical accounts, from archaeology,

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Speaker 1: from literature, and using that to support the idea of

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Speaker 1: the by bicameral mind. Yeah. And one of the pleasures

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Speaker 1: of the book is even if Jane's hypothesis does turn

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Speaker 1: out to be entirely incorrect, you know, if there never

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Speaker 1: was any bicameral mind, if consciousness is not a recent invention,

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Speaker 1: if he's wrong about all that, it's still a fascinating

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Speaker 1: book just because of the way he pulls in so

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Speaker 1: many different disciplines and ranges throughout history, incorporating evidence in

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Speaker 1: such an amazing and fascinating way. All right, well, let's

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Speaker 1: jump into it a bit here and start discussing some

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Speaker 1: of the evidence that James brought up in the book. Okay, Well,

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Speaker 1: one of the things that we probably should be able

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Speaker 1: to think about is if ancient people's perceived auditory hallucinations

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Speaker 1: that they regarded as gods, and these gods told them

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Speaker 1: what to do, there should be some evidence of this

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Speaker 1: in what traces they left of their relationship to the

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Speaker 1: gods they believed in, right, Yeah, And one of those examples,

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Speaker 1: James argues, is the positioning of the houses of the gods.

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Speaker 1: So this is the basic idea. Well, today, you travel

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Speaker 1: to a big city. Let's say you go to Washington,

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Speaker 1: d C. Okay, this is our example, not James. So

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Speaker 1: I'm in Washington, all right, and you seek out the grandest,

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Speaker 1: most centralized home, the one that just really stands out

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Speaker 1: from the rest, is the most protected. It has them,

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Speaker 1: you know that, the most central status of any other

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Speaker 1: um habitat. Okay, so I'm imagining it is the home

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Speaker 1: of an extremely tall, thin person that stands looking out

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Speaker 1: over the water. Yeah, that's that's one one interpretation. No way,

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Speaker 1: that thing isn't a home, is it. No, well, it's

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Speaker 1: not a home, But I mean that is an example

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Speaker 1: of a of a building of prominence with a with

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Speaker 1: a statue in it, which kind of gets into some

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Speaker 1: additional arguments that we're going to make here. But no,

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Speaker 1: no, no no, you'd expect to find the home of a king, right, Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: you would. That's the thing, right, you would want to

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Speaker 1: you would expect a right, this is the center of

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Speaker 1: the town. The whole town is built around this. It

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Speaker 1: occupies a spatial center as well as just the center

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Speaker 1: of meaning and purpose. Or maybe sorry that that was

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Speaker 1: probably my sexism talking to a king or a queen.

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Speaker 1: In any case, you would expect the ruling person to

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Speaker 1: live there. But what have you entered into this grand

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Speaker 1: building at the center of the city and you found

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Speaker 1: that it was home only to a quote hallucinated presence,

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Speaker 1: perhaps the statue of that presence in the case of

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Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln, if you will, but still you for our

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Speaker 1: purposes here an unreal entity, a god, a goddess. Um.

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Speaker 1: You can also look to to cities in which a

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Speaker 1: church still occupies the central ground, and James argues that

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Speaker 1: this is an perhaps an echo of the bicameral past.

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Speaker 1: So why would that why would that be evidence of

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Speaker 1: a bicameral past, to find churches or temples at the

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Speaker 1: center of a city as opposed to the house of

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Speaker 1: a king. Well, the idea here is that the voice

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Speaker 1: occupied the center of our thoughts, and so to it

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Speaker 1: occupied the center of the town or the city, and

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Speaker 1: that the house of the God or the house of

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Speaker 1: the gods was quite literally the house of the gods. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: this is true. So if I remember hearing when I

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Speaker 1: was a kid people saying, you know, be be respectful

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Speaker 1: when you're in church because it's God's house. But the

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Speaker 1: churches I was going to didn't literally believe that the

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Speaker 1: God they worshiped lived in the church. That was just

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Speaker 1: where humans congregated to worship. That's not so much the

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Speaker 1: case in ancient religions. It really does seem like in

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Speaker 1: many ancient religions, the place of worship or the the

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Speaker 1: you know, the sacred building was literally where the God inhabited. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: where the God inhabited, and then his things sort of

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Speaker 1: go on the place where God may visit, the place

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Speaker 1: where God may be contacted. So he draws on examples

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Speaker 1: from the God houses at Jericho, uh the ziggarat of

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Speaker 1: r which we discussed in our Tower of Babel episode,

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Speaker 1: as well as the city of Hatasus, the Bronze Age

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Speaker 1: capital of the Hittite Empire, and in the Ladder this

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Speaker 1: was actually a mountain shrine with images of the overwatching

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Speaker 1: gods rather than a city center, but he said it's

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Speaker 1: kind of an exception that that also lines up with

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Speaker 1: the argument. He also looks to the Old mec and

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Speaker 1: Mayan empires as Bicameral Mesoamerican empires due to the presence

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Speaker 1: of quote huge, otherwise useless, centrally located buildings in chief

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Speaker 1: among these the pyramid of TiO Tiwakan in modern Mexico.

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Speaker 1: And I love how he mentioned, you know, otherwise useless buildings,

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Speaker 1: because is this touches on on our discussions in the

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Speaker 1: Tower of Battle episode regarding the ziggurats. A lot of

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Speaker 1: our our study of the past has been us trying

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Speaker 1: to figure out what was this for what purpose? And

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Speaker 1: a lot of times we try and figure out a

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Speaker 1: practical purpose. You know, what purpose did this structure have? Absolutely?

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Speaker 1: I mean these building projects consumed vast resources. I mean

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Speaker 1: to build the most prominent and highest and well defended

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Speaker 1: building in the middle of of an inhabited space. That

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Speaker 1: just seems like, why would you waste that on being

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Speaker 1: there for a being that is not that does not

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Speaker 1: physically need a house. Yeah, unless you are a people

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Speaker 1: for whom the voice of God is real. Again, this

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Speaker 1: is just the wonder of this theory is that it

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Speaker 1: turns so much of ancient history on its head. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And and then also you know, more recent history, as

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Speaker 1: this is all an echo of the past. Now, in

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Speaker 1: the previous episode, we pointed out that you know, the

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Speaker 1: by the voice of the bicameral mind, it is it's

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Speaker 1: coming in to help you deal with novel experiences that

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Speaker 1: pop up, and how it might be helpful but it

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Speaker 1: might also be destructive. Well, in the same way that

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Speaker 1: a conscious person can make good decisions or can make

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Speaker 1: bad decisions, the god guiding the behaviors of the unconscious

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Speaker 1: bicameral person, if this person ever existed, could be giving

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Speaker 1: good advice or bad advice. I mean, it's based on

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Speaker 1: the integrated powers of the brain. In both cases, it's

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Speaker 1: just that is it consciously happening or is it being

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Speaker 1: delivered to you as a command that must be obeyed? Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And and along these lines, he attributes the construction of

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Speaker 1: ancient meso American cities that are located in inhospitable areas,

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Speaker 1: such as you on top of a mountain or uh,

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Speaker 1: in the middle of a swamp on the you know,

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Speaker 1: on the side of a cliff. He says that, uh,

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Speaker 1: these are areas that again we're inhospitable, and they may

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Speaker 1: have been abandoned at some point later on. Uh. And

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Speaker 1: this is because they were linked to the commands of

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Speaker 1: quote hallucinations, which in certain periods could be not only

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Speaker 1: irrational but downright punishing. Now that's possible, but it's also

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Speaker 1: possible that we in the modern world are just not

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Speaker 1: seeing correctly what the benefits of these spaces were. That's right,

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Speaker 1: I mean, we're always working with imperfect data. Um. He

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Speaker 1: does not reference this, but I couldn't help but think

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Speaker 1: of Montezuma Castle in modern Arizona. These were cliff side

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Speaker 1: dwellings of the Senegua culture that were abandoned around four

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Speaker 1: s after centuries of occupation. Now now, various explanations for

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Speaker 1: the abandonment of Montezuma Castle include a drought, resource depletion,

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Speaker 1: tribal conflict, and interestingly enough, just religious inclination to move. Now,

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Speaker 1: you can get into a discussion of of how that

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Speaker 1: would possibly line up with james timeline for the bicameral mind.

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Speaker 1: But he does uh point out that by the time

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Speaker 1: the Incans encountered Europeans in the fifteenth century. Uh, there

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Speaker 1: was perhaps a combination of things bicameral and things protosubjective, subjective. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and that is one feature of his theory that for

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Speaker 1: a long period of time it wasn't just like everyone

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Speaker 1: was bicameral and then everyone was conscious. You had a

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Speaker 1: long period of the slow death of bicameral society turning

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Speaker 1: into being taken over by conscious people. You know, this

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Speaker 1: makes me think of shows like Game of Thrones and

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Speaker 1: other fantasy worlds where magic slowly bleeds out of the world,

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Speaker 1: because that's essentially the argument here is that over time,

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Speaker 1: fewer and fewer people are hearing the voice voices of

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Speaker 1: the gods, Fewer people are hearing the voices of the

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Speaker 1: spirits of the departed loved ones, etcetera. And yet they're

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Speaker 1: surrounded by the cultural memory of people who did hear

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Speaker 1: the voices of the gods, or people who still hear

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Speaker 1: the voices of the gods today even though they can't.

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Speaker 1: So you have this society in which there are conscious

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Speaker 1: people who are are constantly being reminded that they could

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Speaker 1: be in contact with the gods, but they're not, and this,

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Speaker 1: I imagine is very distressing and frustrating to these people.

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Speaker 1: And you know, this is also interesting in that you

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Speaker 1: eventually have this clash between the Inca Empire and the

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Speaker 1: Spanish Empire. And he says that this was as close,

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Speaker 1: too close to anything in our history as to a

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Speaker 1: meeting of these two different minds, of the bicameral mind

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Speaker 1: and the conscious mind, like two different cultures, uh, encountering

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Speaker 1: each other. Um. And and yet he points to a

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Speaker 1: number of different arguments for and against the Inca Empire

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Speaker 1: at being a bicameral empire. Well, it could have been

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Speaker 1: an empire in transition, as many of these others were

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Speaker 1: for so long. Yeah, I think Basically, he says that

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Speaker 1: he believes that if there was a transition from a

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Speaker 1: bicameral society to a conscious society, that it began in

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Speaker 1: Mesopotamia about you know, roughly one thousand BC. Uh, you know,

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Speaker 1: a few hundred years on each side. It was a

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Speaker 1: slow transition and spread around the world from there. Yes.

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Speaker 1: So with the Inca in particularly, he um he points

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Speaker 1: out that on one hand, uh, the administrative demands and politics,

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Speaker 1: we're probably beyond something that a purely bicameral culture could handle.

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Speaker 1: Yet they had a god king who was the Inca

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Speaker 1: among them, and there were you know, other aspects of

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Speaker 1: bi cameral culture as well. Uh. And then these may

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Speaker 1: have been again to your point, mere traditional echoes of

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Speaker 1: the past. But he points out that, uh that you

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Speaker 1: you had these gold and jeweled spools that members of

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Speaker 1: the top of Inca hierarchy they wore in their ears,

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Speaker 1: and sometimes with images of the sun on them that

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Speaker 1: these may have indicated that those same ears we're hearing

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Speaker 1: the voice of the sun, since the Sun was a god. Yeah. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So he spends a lot of time with various examples

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Speaker 1: discussing the importance of eye symbolism, ear symbolism, as uh

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Speaker 1: as showing that that the individual or the statue is

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Speaker 1: somehow involved in speech or hearing. Now, one of the

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Speaker 1: things I wanted to revisit from our last episode is

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Speaker 1: just the idea that James is not necessarily saying that,

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Speaker 1: for example, the bicameral mind is not as good as

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Speaker 1: the conscious mind. I know, we our conscious bias, uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, would naturally kind of feel that way, But

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Speaker 1: it's not necessarily that conscious minds are better or more

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Speaker 1: valuable or even smarter. I mean, that's not just that's

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Speaker 1: just not necessarily the case. It's that they have different

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Speaker 1: adaptive strengths, and so having different strengths a a sudden

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Speaker 1: clash of a conscious culture against a bicameral culture could

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Speaker 1: be very disastrous for one or the other. Yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: this is this is basically the the the key example

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Speaker 1: of an outside context problem in our world and Uh,

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Speaker 1: and James has a just a beautiful little description of

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Speaker 1: how this would have gone down. Assuming that this is

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Speaker 1: a meeting of a bicameral or partially bicameral culture in

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Speaker 1: the Inca and a conscious culture and that of the Spaniards,

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Speaker 1: he says, quote, it is possible that it was one

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Speaker 1: of the few confrontations between subjective and bicameral minds, that

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Speaker 1: for things as unfamiliar as Inca at a Wappa was

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Speaker 1: confronted with these rough, milk skinned men with hair drooling

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Speaker 1: from their chins instead of from their scalps, so that

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Speaker 1: their heads looked upside down, clothed in metal, with avertive

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Speaker 1: eyes writing strange lama like creatures with silver hoofs having

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Speaker 1: arrived like gods in gigantic quampas uh teared like mockagan

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Speaker 1: temples over the sea, which to the Inca was unsailable

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Speaker 1: that for all this there were no bicameral voices coming

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Speaker 1: from the sun or from the golden statues of Cuzco

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Speaker 1: in their dazzling towers. Not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive

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Speaker 1: or to nar narrat a rise out the deception of others,

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Speaker 1: the Inca and his lords were captured like helpless automatons.

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Speaker 1: It's a horrible thing to imagine, as I mean, reading

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Speaker 1: anything about the European conquest Americans is always like a

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Speaker 1: horrible thing to Yeah, you don't have told have to

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Speaker 1: imagine a separate state of mind for it to be

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Speaker 1: a rather horrific, uh encounter. But yeah, that is of

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Speaker 1: the features of his hypothesis. Is so one of the

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Speaker 1: things that consciousness gives us is a capability for treachery. Yes,

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Speaker 1: that really, the bicameral person is not very much capable

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Speaker 1: of treachery. I mean, they can't prolong a deceptive behavior,

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Speaker 1: right because they can't run this internal narrative of how

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Speaker 1: they should behave if they were to believe one thing

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Speaker 1: versus how they you know, really what goal they'll be

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Speaker 1: working towards secretly, It just doesn't seem like that works

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Speaker 1: out very well. But these conscious people are capable of

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Speaker 1: extreme deception and treachery and the ability to just be

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Speaker 1: jerks all right. Now. Another area that that he brings

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Speaker 1: up is that of essentially the loved dead. He points

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Speaker 1: to the burial of the dead as if they were

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Speaker 1: still alive as being a key evidence for by the

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Speaker 1: bicameral mind. So we've covered a number of different momification

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Speaker 1: practices on the show over the year. So I think

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Speaker 1: everyone here knows the drill the corpse as an astronaut

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Speaker 1: on a cosmic journey to the other side. You know,

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Speaker 1: there's some sort of an elaborate tomb. Maybe you fill

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Speaker 1: that tomb with items that that individual loved in life

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Speaker 1: and therefore might continue to need on a trip. And

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Speaker 1: then beyond that, you may even supply them, as we

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Speaker 1: see in the case of Egyptian tombs, with food stuffs,

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Speaker 1: with with perishable goods to uh to aid them in

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Speaker 1: the journey. And the idea here is that if this

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Speaker 1: goes beyond the mere idea that oh, well, they like

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Speaker 1: to cheeseburger, so let's put a cheeseburger in there as

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Speaker 1: a you know, a token is some sort of uh,

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Speaker 1: just at tribute to them. It's the idea that that no,

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Speaker 1: I still hear their voice, they are still speaking to me,

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Speaker 1: even though the body has stopped moving, I will put

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Speaker 1: a cheeseburger in there for them to eat, exactly. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So we think of tokens to the dead today primarily

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Speaker 1: as uh it's something representing the way the living feel Yeah,

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Speaker 1: but no, the belief here was that the dead person

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Speaker 1: still need at that. Yeah. And he says that this

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Speaker 1: spills over to the treatment of ordinary dead as well

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Speaker 1: as royal dead and many of these ancient cultures. But

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Speaker 1: the concept of bearing the dead and massive tombs preserving

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Speaker 1: their bodies, providing them with physical luxuries and even food, uh,

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Speaker 1: this is key. And and and and in cases where there

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Speaker 1: was no food, such as the graves at Larsa and

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Speaker 1: Mesopotamia from around the uh. He says there these areas

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Speaker 1: were foodless because the tombs were beneath human habitation, so

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Speaker 1: that the dead essentially still lived among the living, so

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Speaker 1: that they would wander up into the house and you

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Speaker 1: would literally hallucinate them doing so and telling you what

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Speaker 1: to do. Yeah. Now, James admits that grief could have

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Speaker 1: been the core motivation and most of these rights. And certainly,

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Speaker 1: I think that's the way we think about it when

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Speaker 1: we're trying to put ourselves in the shoes of ancient people, right.

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Speaker 1: I Mean, another very plausible and perhaps the more probable

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Speaker 1: answer is just that people wished their loved ones were

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Speaker 1: still alive and wanted to behave as if they could now. Yeah, now,

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Speaker 1: he argues that grief alone wouldn't be able to account

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Speaker 1: for all of these practices. I mean, I think it

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Speaker 1: depends on your example and uh and you know what

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Speaker 1: your experience with bereavement is. I think that a lot

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Speaker 1: of this can a test that. Yeah, that that the

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Speaker 1: loss of a loved one, or even the loss of

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Speaker 1: just a you know, I loved celebrity in many cases

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Speaker 1: can can have a big impact, a huge impact on

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Speaker 1: your life. So uh, yeah, I don't know to what

386
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Speaker 1: extent I completely agree with that assessment, but I still

387
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Speaker 1: think it's a it's an interesting case to be Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean, in a bicameral culture, you could imagine that

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Speaker 1: when Prince died, everybody would still be hearing him sing

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Speaker 1: into their ear. Yeah, because what is prince but a

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Speaker 1: you know, royal of the modern age. All Right, we're

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Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,

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Speaker 1: we will keep looking at evidence from the ancient world

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Speaker 1: that may indicate a bicameral past. Okay, we're back. You know, Joe,

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Speaker 1: you mentioned uh uh Statue of Lincoln to the top

396
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Speaker 1: of this step said, I know, oh you know what

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Speaker 1: I think I think I was talking about. What's it

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Speaker 1: called the Obelisk the Washington I thought you meant when

399
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Speaker 1: you were talking about a statue of a tall, slender figure,

400
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Speaker 1: I thought you meant Lincoln slender dude. There's a miscommunication

401
00:22:14,520 --> 00:22:19,159
Speaker 1: that so easily comes with our conscious inability to communicate. Well,

402
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Speaker 1: you've been you've seen Lincoln his statue in Washington. Yeah,

403
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Speaker 1: he's just sitting in that chair. But he probably has

404
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Speaker 1: not spoken to you. And I mean I don't mean

405
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Speaker 1: that in a in a metaphorical sense or anything. I

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Speaker 1: mean that statue has not literally spoke. You have not

407
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Speaker 1: heard the voice of that statue. No, But if I

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Speaker 1: were a bicameral person, apparently I might, like I could

409
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Speaker 1: go to pay reverence to that statue. But I wouldn't

410
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Speaker 1: just be paying reverence. I'd be getting advice on what

411
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Speaker 1: to do exactly. So that's the next point that the

412
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Speaker 1: James made, is that we have these idols of the

413
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Speaker 1: speaking stone that that that play into all these different cultures.

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Speaker 1: So we've already mentioned that, all right, your your father's

415
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Speaker 1: voice is still in your head, like literally in your head,

416
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Speaker 1: you're still hearing it after they have died. Because of

417
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Speaker 1: this confusion to take place about about the nature of death.

418
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Speaker 1: So your your parents did die, yet you still hear

419
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Speaker 1: their admonitions, right, and then the king dies, you still

420
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Speaker 1: hear the voice of the king. So one of the

421
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Speaker 1: first humans just raised up the corpses and skulls of

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Speaker 1: their dead loved ones and their dead leaders. Uh. After that,

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Speaker 1: we would turn more and more to two various artificial

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Speaker 1: likenesses of those individuals in varying degrees of detail. So

425
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Speaker 1: we we can find crude humanoid figurings dating back to

426
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Speaker 1: a roughly UM fifty six hundred BC in what's modern

427
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Speaker 1: day Turkey and uh and relatively, these are relics that

428
00:23:46,920 --> 00:23:52,560
Speaker 1: were already ancient when the pyramids were built. Now, Frasier

429
00:23:53,080 --> 00:23:57,040
Speaker 1: would have classified such carvings as just fertility figures, but

430
00:23:57,160 --> 00:23:59,399
Speaker 1: James points out that that was the horse He was right,

431
00:23:59,400 --> 00:24:02,640
Speaker 1: and he was trying to cram everything into those process. Yeah.

432
00:24:02,960 --> 00:24:05,040
Speaker 1: But but James points out that you you can find

433
00:24:05,080 --> 00:24:07,239
Speaker 1: them in very fertile parts of the world, such as

434
00:24:07,240 --> 00:24:10,480
Speaker 1: with the Old Metal civilization, and he points to some

435
00:24:10,520 --> 00:24:15,040
Speaker 1: of the various um attributes of these likenesses open mouths,

436
00:24:15,080 --> 00:24:19,439
Speaker 1: exaggerated ears, as if the statue is going to listen

437
00:24:19,480 --> 00:24:23,200
Speaker 1: to you and speak to you, and in the case

438
00:24:23,280 --> 00:24:26,840
Speaker 1: of the old mix, the creation of such idle skyrocketed

439
00:24:26,880 --> 00:24:30,280
Speaker 1: about seven hundred see. But James's questions whether this was

440
00:24:30,359 --> 00:24:33,679
Speaker 1: due to the cease of the voices. So did the

441
00:24:33,760 --> 00:24:37,320
Speaker 1: voices stop so that you you were crafting more and

442
00:24:37,359 --> 00:24:39,560
Speaker 1: more of these details to try and bring them back,

443
00:24:40,119 --> 00:24:43,000
Speaker 1: or was it due to a multiplication of them, so

444
00:24:43,080 --> 00:24:45,960
Speaker 1: you know, you're having to deal with the chaos of

445
00:24:46,000 --> 00:24:50,520
Speaker 1: all these voices now. He argues that many artifacts might

446
00:24:50,560 --> 00:24:55,320
Speaker 1: have been quote semi hallucinatory uh mnemonic aids for the

447
00:24:55,480 --> 00:24:59,960
Speaker 1: non conscious people. So they're all it's also about remembering things,

448
00:25:00,040 --> 00:25:03,600
Speaker 1: ings and um, you know, adding order to life. But

449
00:25:03,720 --> 00:25:06,639
Speaker 1: he argues that quote some of these small objects, we

450
00:25:06,720 --> 00:25:09,640
Speaker 1: may be confident we're capable of assisting with the production

451
00:25:09,680 --> 00:25:13,920
Speaker 1: of bicameral voices, and he points to Mesopotamian ie idols

452
00:25:13,920 --> 00:25:16,679
Speaker 1: from around three thousand BS. He and the eyes of

453
00:25:16,760 --> 00:25:20,480
Speaker 1: these and numerous others were figures were important to focus

454
00:25:21,359 --> 00:25:26,760
Speaker 1: because of our involved dependency on eye contact for communication. Yeah,

455
00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:29,119
Speaker 1: and then it's only left for the statute to speak

456
00:25:29,119 --> 00:25:33,160
Speaker 1: to us and speak they did. Uh. Not only according

457
00:25:33,200 --> 00:25:36,520
Speaker 1: to bicameral mind theory here, but also just according to

458
00:25:36,600 --> 00:25:41,159
Speaker 1: various accounts. Um uniform literature he writes provides examples of

459
00:25:41,160 --> 00:25:44,200
Speaker 1: speaking statues. If you turn in your Old Testament to

460
00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:48,800
Speaker 1: Ezekiel one, there's an example of a Babylonian king who

461
00:25:48,920 --> 00:25:52,680
Speaker 1: said to speak to idols, which were known as a terrup. Yeah,

462
00:25:52,760 --> 00:25:54,960
Speaker 1: they're there are all kinds of accounts of this throughout

463
00:25:54,960 --> 00:25:58,119
Speaker 1: the ancient world of us. I mean, this is another

464
00:25:58,200 --> 00:26:00,520
Speaker 1: case of like we were talking about in the live episode,

465
00:26:00,520 --> 00:26:02,800
Speaker 1: with ancient literature. You know, you read it and you

466
00:26:02,840 --> 00:26:06,159
Speaker 1: feel you send something alien about the characters, and you're like,

467
00:26:06,280 --> 00:26:08,800
Speaker 1: is that something I'm just not getting that's getting lost

468
00:26:08,800 --> 00:26:12,240
Speaker 1: in translation or were they truly alien to my mentality?

469
00:26:12,640 --> 00:26:14,920
Speaker 1: A similar thing is going on with when it describes

470
00:26:14,960 --> 00:26:19,200
Speaker 1: the practices of hearing God speak. You could think like, okay,

471
00:26:19,240 --> 00:26:23,280
Speaker 1: well I don't usually hear God speak. Um, so maybe

472
00:26:23,280 --> 00:26:25,680
Speaker 1: there's just something this, you know, this like a literary

473
00:26:25,720 --> 00:26:28,320
Speaker 1: device or something that's getting lost in translation. Or you

474
00:26:28,359 --> 00:26:30,720
Speaker 1: could just say, no, I'll just take this literally. I'll

475
00:26:30,760 --> 00:26:33,240
Speaker 1: take it at face value. Something was speaking to them

476
00:26:33,520 --> 00:26:36,520
Speaker 1: and it was the other hemisphere of their brain. Yeah,

477
00:26:36,600 --> 00:26:38,920
Speaker 1: So we get into this point where these statutes, these

478
00:26:39,000 --> 00:26:43,600
Speaker 1: artifacts become kind of focus points for the voice, like

479
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:47,120
Speaker 1: in a way too, in a way summon the voice

480
00:26:47,480 --> 00:26:51,800
Speaker 1: even when it's not, you know, directly called up by

481
00:26:51,920 --> 00:26:57,240
Speaker 1: stressful circumstance. H. He has numerous tidbits to support this.

482
00:26:57,920 --> 00:27:00,399
Speaker 1: Some of the really fun ones I found was he

483
00:27:00,440 --> 00:27:03,440
Speaker 1: adds that to quote, the conquered Aztecs told the Spanish

484
00:27:03,440 --> 00:27:06,760
Speaker 1: invaders how their history began when a statue from a

485
00:27:06,840 --> 00:27:10,920
Speaker 1: ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders.

486
00:27:11,800 --> 00:27:14,439
Speaker 1: So I just love the mental image of you know,

487
00:27:14,760 --> 00:27:18,320
Speaker 1: these tribal individuals coming across the statue built by someone else,

488
00:27:18,880 --> 00:27:21,600
Speaker 1: and it it summons the voices just to look at it.

489
00:27:21,680 --> 00:27:25,439
Speaker 1: You can also imagine, though, how if this model is correct,

490
00:27:25,640 --> 00:27:30,960
Speaker 1: conscious people would react very negatively to encountering b cameral

491
00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:34,160
Speaker 1: people and and the voices of their gods. Right, Oh yeah,

492
00:27:34,200 --> 00:27:36,159
Speaker 1: I mean that's another example he makes is that you

493
00:27:36,160 --> 00:27:40,840
Speaker 1: have the Spaniards, who again are conscious individuals steeped in Catholicism,

494
00:27:41,320 --> 00:27:44,960
Speaker 1: and they come in and uh, they encounter the native

495
00:27:45,000 --> 00:27:47,399
Speaker 1: peoples and they actually reported that the people of of

496
00:27:47,480 --> 00:27:51,679
Speaker 1: Peru were a quote commanded by the devil. In that quote,

497
00:27:51,680 --> 00:27:54,960
Speaker 1: the devil himself actually spoke to the incas out of

498
00:27:54,960 --> 00:27:58,639
Speaker 1: the mouths of their statues. So that could just be

499
00:27:59,160 --> 00:28:03,439
Speaker 1: you know, historic goal cultural slander, or it could be

500
00:28:03,560 --> 00:28:06,920
Speaker 1: them trying to make sense of practices they saw. Yeah,

501
00:28:06,960 --> 00:28:09,680
Speaker 1: you know, before really getting into the bicameral mind theory,

502
00:28:09,720 --> 00:28:12,200
Speaker 1: I would have easily just said, well, that's just obviously

503
00:28:12,280 --> 00:28:15,720
Speaker 1: just a bunch of xenophobic foreigners from another continent coming

504
00:28:15,720 --> 00:28:17,800
Speaker 1: in and saying, oh, they have statues. They probably stand

505
00:28:17,800 --> 00:28:20,359
Speaker 1: around listening to their voices and they obey the statues.

506
00:28:21,000 --> 00:28:23,440
Speaker 1: I mean, either way, they are putting their their dominant

507
00:28:23,520 --> 00:28:26,320
Speaker 1: racist spin on it. But it could be that they

508
00:28:26,359 --> 00:28:29,760
Speaker 1: were actually observing a practice. Yes. Now again we always

509
00:28:29,800 --> 00:28:32,879
Speaker 1: get into the same situation though, where they was this

510
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:37,480
Speaker 1: a practice that was based on on an existing bicameral

511
00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:41,160
Speaker 1: experience or is it an echo of a bicameral past. Yeah,

512
00:28:41,400 --> 00:28:43,920
Speaker 1: it could be either one. If there's anything to this theory.

513
00:28:44,400 --> 00:28:47,640
Speaker 1: Another thing that I think is one of the most

514
00:28:47,680 --> 00:28:51,440
Speaker 1: important takeaways of this whole theory is that if James

515
00:28:51,520 --> 00:28:55,360
Speaker 1: is correct, it's not that people used to be more

516
00:28:55,440 --> 00:28:59,600
Speaker 1: religious and now they're less religious. That's not the progression.

517
00:29:00,080 --> 00:29:04,640
Speaker 1: It's that ancient bicameral religion and modern conscious religion are

518
00:29:04,680 --> 00:29:10,040
Speaker 1: completely different types of things. Conscious religion requires an emphasis

519
00:29:10,080 --> 00:29:15,360
Speaker 1: on things like faith and belief and organized systems of dogma.

520
00:29:15,440 --> 00:29:17,840
Speaker 1: You know, they say, here's what we believe, and here's

521
00:29:17,880 --> 00:29:21,000
Speaker 1: why you should believe it, and so it's like regulated

522
00:29:21,000 --> 00:29:25,560
Speaker 1: by ecclesiastical authorities. It's addressed to an object that is

523
00:29:25,600 --> 00:29:30,600
Speaker 1: not immediately apparent. Not so for bicameral religion. Right, So

524
00:29:30,760 --> 00:29:33,720
Speaker 1: bicameral religion would have had no need for the concept

525
00:29:33,760 --> 00:29:36,280
Speaker 1: of faith, because what's the point in telling people to

526
00:29:36,320 --> 00:29:39,040
Speaker 1: believe in the gods that literally talked to them and

527
00:29:39,080 --> 00:29:43,120
Speaker 1: appear before them all the time? That's right, I mean,

528
00:29:43,160 --> 00:29:47,000
Speaker 1: the gods are speaking to you household, God's household spirits

529
00:29:47,000 --> 00:29:49,960
Speaker 1: are speaking to you. Uh so you really there's not

530
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:52,480
Speaker 1: really any room to doubt there if doubt was even

531
00:29:52,480 --> 00:29:54,320
Speaker 1: a thing that your mind can do. Yeah, I mean,

532
00:29:54,360 --> 00:29:57,680
Speaker 1: our modern concept of religion you could look at as

533
00:29:57,760 --> 00:30:01,400
Speaker 1: something that came to exist at through the disappearance of

534
00:30:01,440 --> 00:30:05,240
Speaker 1: the direct experience of the gods. Likewise, I mean, could

535
00:30:05,360 --> 00:30:08,840
Speaker 1: could heresy even exist in such a world like everybody is?

536
00:30:08,880 --> 00:30:12,280
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly you're you're still gonna have, you know,

537
00:30:12,360 --> 00:30:15,840
Speaker 1: a structure to society but everyone is hearing voices of

538
00:30:15,840 --> 00:30:20,200
Speaker 1: the God. Everyone has has their their their radio set

539
00:30:20,320 --> 00:30:22,680
Speaker 1: to the other world. Yeah, I mean this is a

540
00:30:22,720 --> 00:30:25,680
Speaker 1: world where the voices are speaking to everyone. Okay, I

541
00:30:25,720 --> 00:30:29,640
Speaker 1: think we should look at one more thing about features

542
00:30:29,680 --> 00:30:32,360
Speaker 1: we see of the organization of ancient societies before we

543
00:30:32,360 --> 00:30:35,160
Speaker 1: start to look at some ancient literature. So how about

544
00:30:35,200 --> 00:30:38,760
Speaker 1: the theocratic organization of ancient society? What what does that

545
00:30:38,840 --> 00:30:42,160
Speaker 1: tell us about whether or not a bicameral mind ever existed.

546
00:30:42,200 --> 00:30:45,480
Speaker 1: According to Julian James, well, in this we're getting into

547
00:30:46,320 --> 00:30:49,160
Speaker 1: a topic that we've discussed before, the idea of divine kings.

548
00:30:49,800 --> 00:30:52,600
Speaker 1: What does it mean that the king is either the

549
00:30:52,760 --> 00:30:55,280
Speaker 1: you know, the right hand man of God, works for God,

550
00:30:55,800 --> 00:30:58,680
Speaker 1: or in some cases is God. That's an important distinction,

551
00:30:58,720 --> 00:31:01,080
Speaker 1: and James makes that this stinction. You know, there are

552
00:31:01,080 --> 00:31:03,600
Speaker 1: two main types of kings for him, the steward king

553
00:31:03,640 --> 00:31:06,040
Speaker 1: and the God king. Right, that's right, the steward king.

554
00:31:06,080 --> 00:31:08,200
Speaker 1: This is where the king is a stand in for

555
00:31:08,240 --> 00:31:11,280
Speaker 1: God and then the God king. The king is God

556
00:31:11,920 --> 00:31:14,520
Speaker 1: and James believe that both tides developed out of the

557
00:31:14,560 --> 00:31:18,920
Speaker 1: more primitive bicameral situation where a new king ruled by

558
00:31:19,360 --> 00:31:23,480
Speaker 1: obeying the hallucinated voice of a dead king, which sort

559
00:31:23,480 --> 00:31:27,280
Speaker 1: of that gives you like the you know, the succession order, right. Yeah,

560
00:31:27,320 --> 00:31:31,240
Speaker 1: in fact, you're never really obeying you're never really obeying

561
00:31:31,240 --> 00:31:34,160
Speaker 1: the new king. You're always obeying the old king through

562
00:31:34,480 --> 00:31:37,360
Speaker 1: a sort of intermediary. And in this he I mean,

563
00:31:37,360 --> 00:31:40,360
Speaker 1: he even argues that the ziggurat centered civilizations of ancient

564
00:31:40,400 --> 00:31:43,600
Speaker 1: Mesopotamia that in these cases it's not you can't even

565
00:31:43,600 --> 00:31:45,520
Speaker 1: really look at it, like the human beings were the

566
00:31:45,520 --> 00:31:48,280
Speaker 1: ones that were ruling, Like the ruling powers were the

567
00:31:48,320 --> 00:31:51,400
Speaker 1: hallucinated voices of the various gods. Right, So it was

568
00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:54,400
Speaker 1: not the left brain or the dominant side of the

569
00:31:54,400 --> 00:31:56,880
Speaker 1: brain of the actual king, but it was the other

570
00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:02,040
Speaker 1: hemisphere of their brain ruling, the dominant side ruling the people. Right.

571
00:32:02,840 --> 00:32:06,120
Speaker 1: And he also gets into how, you know, we've talked about, Okay,

572
00:32:06,160 --> 00:32:09,600
Speaker 1: you're reacting to statues, humanoid figures, but on top of

573
00:32:09,640 --> 00:32:12,280
Speaker 1: this we also end up with all with additional uh,

574
00:32:12,760 --> 00:32:17,920
Speaker 1: religious imageries, symbology. That's that's this used even written language. Uh.

575
00:32:18,000 --> 00:32:20,960
Speaker 1: He points out that quote reading in the third millennium

576
00:32:21,000 --> 00:32:24,080
Speaker 1: b c. May therefore have been a matter of hearing

577
00:32:24,120 --> 00:32:27,720
Speaker 1: the cuneiform, that is hallucinating the speech from looking at

578
00:32:27,720 --> 00:32:31,520
Speaker 1: its picture symbols rather than visual reading of syllables in

579
00:32:31,600 --> 00:32:35,920
Speaker 1: our sense. Woh, that's that's fascinating. So you think about

580
00:32:35,920 --> 00:32:38,600
Speaker 1: how reading takes place for us today, it is largely

581
00:32:38,640 --> 00:32:41,120
Speaker 1: an unconscious thing if you're an adult that's been reading,

582
00:32:41,440 --> 00:32:43,840
Speaker 1: not if you're a kid who's learning to read, or

583
00:32:43,880 --> 00:32:45,479
Speaker 1: if you know, at any point in your life. If

584
00:32:45,480 --> 00:32:48,000
Speaker 1: you're learning to read, you do have to think about

585
00:32:48,120 --> 00:32:51,400
Speaker 1: the constituent parts of words and sentences, like you have

586
00:32:51,480 --> 00:32:53,640
Speaker 1: to sound them out and put them together in your mind,

587
00:32:53,720 --> 00:32:58,480
Speaker 1: using your conscious mind. Eventually reading becomes unconscious. I mean,

588
00:32:58,520 --> 00:33:03,200
Speaker 1: I wonder if in this, in this bicameral framework, you

589
00:33:03,200 --> 00:33:06,920
Speaker 1: would learn to read in an entirely unconscious way, the

590
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:10,160
Speaker 1: same way that maybe you get better at shooting basketballs

591
00:33:10,280 --> 00:33:15,040
Speaker 1: or something in an unconscious way. Yeah. Yeah, that's so. Now.

592
00:33:15,280 --> 00:33:17,640
Speaker 1: Now another thing that another point that he makes about

593
00:33:17,720 --> 00:33:22,120
Speaker 1: language is that in reference to ancient Egyptians, uh, much

594
00:33:22,160 --> 00:33:24,440
Speaker 1: like the language of the ancient Sumerians. He says that

595
00:33:24,880 --> 00:33:28,520
Speaker 1: these languages were concrete from first to last, and that

596
00:33:28,640 --> 00:33:33,520
Speaker 1: interpretations involving abstract thought, uh, these are that these are modern,

597
00:33:33,760 --> 00:33:39,320
Speaker 1: modern intrusions, and that basically the gods commanded rather than created. Yeah,

598
00:33:39,320 --> 00:33:41,240
Speaker 1: and we'll see that more we look in literature in

599
00:33:41,280 --> 00:33:43,840
Speaker 1: the next section. Now, I think I made reference already

600
00:33:43,880 --> 00:33:47,320
Speaker 1: to household gods and household spirits. You encounter these in

601
00:33:47,360 --> 00:33:49,600
Speaker 1: a lot of different cultures. If it's not household gods,

602
00:33:49,600 --> 00:33:51,880
Speaker 1: then maybe it's a you know, just a memorial of

603
00:33:52,400 --> 00:33:54,520
Speaker 1: various members of the family, right, And a lot of

604
00:33:54,560 --> 00:33:57,040
Speaker 1: those traditions still carry on to this day. But the

605
00:33:57,080 --> 00:33:59,880
Speaker 1: idea here is that not everyone can hear the voice

606
00:34:00,040 --> 00:34:02,200
Speaker 1: the ruling god, right, that would seem to be kind

607
00:34:02,200 --> 00:34:04,440
Speaker 1: of chaotic if the even if it's just a simple

608
00:34:04,480 --> 00:34:08,239
Speaker 1: model of the previous dead king speaking to the current king.

609
00:34:08,880 --> 00:34:10,480
Speaker 1: I mean, it wouldn't make sense for everyone to hear

610
00:34:10,480 --> 00:34:12,920
Speaker 1: that king's voice and have their authority. But everyone in

611
00:34:12,920 --> 00:34:16,200
Speaker 1: this scenario, in the bicameral scenario, is hearing voices. So

612
00:34:16,280 --> 00:34:19,240
Speaker 1: who are those voices? Well, there's a hierarchy of God's

613
00:34:19,320 --> 00:34:22,120
Speaker 1: isn't exactly like because we there are different types of

614
00:34:22,120 --> 00:34:27,320
Speaker 1: stressful situations. Imagine a scenario where one is cooking, preparing

615
00:34:27,360 --> 00:34:30,359
Speaker 1: a meal in one's hut, and um, let's say you've

616
00:34:30,360 --> 00:34:33,719
Speaker 1: only got one piece of meat and then you accidentally

617
00:34:33,800 --> 00:34:36,240
Speaker 1: drop it onto the ground. There's a moment of panic,

618
00:34:36,440 --> 00:34:39,680
Speaker 1: what do I do? Well, the household cooking god chimes

619
00:34:39,719 --> 00:34:42,320
Speaker 1: in and says, take it and wash it in the

620
00:34:42,440 --> 00:34:44,799
Speaker 1: river or something to that effect, you know, and the

621
00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:50,040
Speaker 1: and it's salts. Second. Yeah, so this would be the

622
00:34:50,040 --> 00:34:52,480
Speaker 1: case of a of a lesser deity coming in and

623
00:34:52,520 --> 00:34:55,239
Speaker 1: calling the shot. Yeah. You know. One of the things

624
00:34:55,239 --> 00:34:57,719
Speaker 1: about ancient religion he mentions in the book that is

625
00:34:57,840 --> 00:35:00,320
Speaker 1: very interesting is his discussion of the evil ocean, of

626
00:35:00,400 --> 00:35:03,200
Speaker 1: the concepts of the car and the ba in uh

627
00:35:03,239 --> 00:35:08,080
Speaker 1: in Egyptian theology, where it's hard to I guess we

628
00:35:08,120 --> 00:35:10,399
Speaker 1: can't summarize it here, but if you get a chance

629
00:35:10,440 --> 00:35:12,840
Speaker 1: to read the book yourself, look out for that section.

630
00:35:12,920 --> 00:35:17,759
Speaker 1: It's really interesting. It's it's about the way we're you know,

631
00:35:17,840 --> 00:35:22,520
Speaker 1: words for theological concepts sort of transition into other into

632
00:35:22,560 --> 00:35:26,480
Speaker 1: having other meanings. Now, part of the whole timeline, of course,

633
00:35:26,520 --> 00:35:29,000
Speaker 1: is that as we've already stressed, that the gods cease

634
00:35:29,160 --> 00:35:31,640
Speaker 1: speaking to everyone after a while and then cease all

635
00:35:31,640 --> 00:35:34,520
Speaker 1: together for the most part. We'll get into the details

636
00:35:34,520 --> 00:35:37,399
Speaker 1: of that as we we go. But but then when

637
00:35:37,440 --> 00:35:42,200
Speaker 1: that happens, there's uh, there's order collapses. Uh, cultures end

638
00:35:42,239 --> 00:35:45,240
Speaker 1: up retreating into the jungles, and for many people everything

639
00:35:45,280 --> 00:35:48,960
Speaker 1: has to be built up again. Basically, the idea here

640
00:35:49,000 --> 00:35:52,200
Speaker 1: is that the bicameral mind, this, this whole system of

641
00:35:52,239 --> 00:35:56,719
Speaker 1: hearing voices, this hold society together. This is it's it's

642
00:35:56,719 --> 00:35:59,719
Speaker 1: an instrument of social control. Yeah, and so it's it's

643
00:35:59,760 --> 00:36:03,720
Speaker 1: like playing jinga with gravity, and then gravity goes away,

644
00:36:03,760 --> 00:36:05,680
Speaker 1: and then how do you hold the blocks together? Well,

645
00:36:05,719 --> 00:36:07,880
Speaker 1: then suddenly have to come with new novel ways to

646
00:36:07,960 --> 00:36:10,600
Speaker 1: do it, such as gluing them all together. I guess.

647
00:36:10,640 --> 00:36:13,360
Speaker 1: Is so the political organization equivalent of that would be

648
00:36:13,400 --> 00:36:16,320
Speaker 1: what it would be brutal dictatorship. Yeah, things like brutal

649
00:36:16,320 --> 00:36:19,759
Speaker 1: dictatorship have to step in. Uh. Suddenly, you know, you

650
00:36:19,800 --> 00:36:23,800
Speaker 1: have all these wars and just total bloodshed occurring because

651
00:36:23,840 --> 00:36:27,960
Speaker 1: the voices that organized society have have stopped speaking, or

652
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:33,880
Speaker 1: have certainly stopped speaking with enough regularity to hold everything together. So,

653
00:36:33,920 --> 00:36:36,920
Speaker 1: in closing on this, he argues quote that man in

654
00:36:36,920 --> 00:36:41,200
Speaker 1: his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own,

655
00:36:41,520 --> 00:36:43,880
Speaker 1: that in fact, men and women were not conscious as

656
00:36:43,920 --> 00:36:47,320
Speaker 1: we are. We're not responsible for their actions and therefore

657
00:36:47,400 --> 00:36:49,960
Speaker 1: cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that

658
00:36:50,080 --> 00:36:53,480
Speaker 1: was done over these vast millennia of time. That instead,

659
00:36:53,600 --> 00:36:56,640
Speaker 1: each person had a part of his nervous system, which

660
00:36:56,760 --> 00:36:59,680
Speaker 1: was divine, by which he was ordered about like any

661
00:36:59,719 --> 00:37:03,680
Speaker 1: slow ave a voice or voices, which indeed were what

662
00:37:03,760 --> 00:37:08,120
Speaker 1: we call volition and empowered what they commanded, and were

663
00:37:08,160 --> 00:37:11,360
Speaker 1: related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully

664
00:37:11,440 --> 00:37:14,920
Speaker 1: established hierarchy. And this mindset would have again developed over

665
00:37:14,960 --> 00:37:18,880
Speaker 1: the over the ninth century BC to the second millennium BC,

666
00:37:19,280 --> 00:37:23,719
Speaker 1: a gradual procession progression. Right, So that's the hypothesized era

667
00:37:23,840 --> 00:37:26,640
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind, which around the first millennium BC

668
00:37:27,040 --> 00:37:30,080
Speaker 1: starts to decompose and fall apart. All right, we're gonna

669
00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:31,600
Speaker 1: take a quick break, and when we come back, we

670
00:37:31,640 --> 00:37:35,360
Speaker 1: will look at signs of the bicameral mind in ancient literature.

671
00:37:35,840 --> 00:37:39,799
Speaker 1: Than all right, we're back, all right, So obviously it

672
00:37:39,800 --> 00:37:43,120
Speaker 1: would make sense that we'd see examples or the examples

673
00:37:43,120 --> 00:37:46,759
Speaker 1: could be made in literature, because after all, the bicameral

674
00:37:46,840 --> 00:37:50,200
Speaker 1: mind is uh is according to the theory, according to

675
00:37:50,200 --> 00:37:52,960
Speaker 1: the hypothes here and offshoot of the acquisition of language, right,

676
00:37:53,040 --> 00:37:56,719
Speaker 1: Jane says language makes it exist, So could you could

677
00:37:56,719 --> 00:38:00,200
Speaker 1: you look at ancient uses of language to find evidens

678
00:38:00,239 --> 00:38:03,239
Speaker 1: of it? Now, another thing that complicates this is that

679
00:38:03,400 --> 00:38:06,760
Speaker 1: James thinks that one of the causes of the decomposition

680
00:38:06,800 --> 00:38:09,360
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind into the conscious mind is the

681
00:38:09,440 --> 00:38:13,680
Speaker 1: widespread introduction of written language. So this also writing ends

682
00:38:13,760 --> 00:38:17,280
Speaker 1: up undermining the bicameral mind. But can we see signs

683
00:38:17,320 --> 00:38:21,200
Speaker 1: of the bi cameral mind in ancient literature? I think

684
00:38:21,280 --> 00:38:24,080
Speaker 1: he's got some interesting stuff to talk about here. Yet again,

685
00:38:24,280 --> 00:38:26,480
Speaker 1: I want to be clear that I'm not endorsing his

686
00:38:26,600 --> 00:38:29,600
Speaker 1: theory as correct, but I do think some of his claims,

687
00:38:29,680 --> 00:38:32,839
Speaker 1: especially about what we see in Greek literature, are fascinating

688
00:38:33,120 --> 00:38:35,759
Speaker 1: and a little terrifying. I have to admit, when I

689
00:38:35,800 --> 00:38:38,040
Speaker 1: was reading you know, it kind of kind of gave

690
00:38:38,080 --> 00:38:40,920
Speaker 1: me the willies at various points to try to imagine

691
00:38:41,320 --> 00:38:45,600
Speaker 1: ancient people ruled by bicameral mind. But when you started

692
00:38:45,600 --> 00:38:47,960
Speaker 1: talking about the Iliad in particular, it kind of gave

693
00:38:48,000 --> 00:38:50,319
Speaker 1: me chill bumps. Oh totally. So the Iliot is one

694
00:38:50,320 --> 00:38:54,000
Speaker 1: of Jane's chief examples of bicameral literature. So, of course

695
00:38:54,000 --> 00:38:56,120
Speaker 1: the Iliad if you're if you never read it, it's

696
00:38:56,120 --> 00:38:58,440
Speaker 1: an epic war poem that tells the story of an

697
00:38:58,440 --> 00:39:02,400
Speaker 1: alliance of Greek kings and warriors, primarily the warrior Achilles,

698
00:39:02,800 --> 00:39:05,279
Speaker 1: laying siege to the city of Troy. This is the

699
00:39:05,320 --> 00:39:09,080
Speaker 1: historical event now known as the Trojan War. And Jane's

700
00:39:09,160 --> 00:39:11,759
Speaker 1: claims that the Iliad was developed by a group of

701
00:39:11,920 --> 00:39:14,600
Speaker 1: oral storytellers or bards known as the ao E d

702
00:39:15,280 --> 00:39:18,320
Speaker 1: and that's in contrast to sort of the traditional received

703
00:39:18,320 --> 00:39:21,280
Speaker 1: knowledge that they were composed by an individual named Homer.

704
00:39:21,400 --> 00:39:24,000
Speaker 1: I think it's probably more widely believed now that these

705
00:39:24,040 --> 00:39:28,200
Speaker 1: are the works of many people of time. But anyway,

706
00:39:28,760 --> 00:39:32,800
Speaker 1: that that war took place about twelve thirty b C.

707
00:39:33,320 --> 00:39:35,320
Speaker 1: Or sorry, it was first composed around the time the

708
00:39:35,360 --> 00:39:38,200
Speaker 1: war took place around twelve thirty BC, and it was

709
00:39:38,280 --> 00:39:42,359
Speaker 1: first transcribed into written form around nine hundred or eight

710
00:39:42,440 --> 00:39:45,360
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty b C. And scholars may believe some

711
00:39:45,440 --> 00:39:47,759
Speaker 1: different dates now, but that's what Janes is working with.

712
00:39:48,840 --> 00:39:51,560
Speaker 1: So when we look at the thoughts and behaviors of

713
00:39:51,680 --> 00:39:54,560
Speaker 1: characters in the Iliad, it should tell us something about

714
00:39:54,600 --> 00:39:57,000
Speaker 1: the mental life of people who composed and wrote the

715
00:39:57,040 --> 00:39:59,800
Speaker 1: story about three thousand years ago. And when we examine

716
00:39:59,840 --> 00:40:03,000
Speaker 1: the what do we find? Well, James makes a really

717
00:40:03,040 --> 00:40:05,960
Speaker 1: striking claim about the Iliad. It is a work of

718
00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:10,520
Speaker 1: literature in which the characters are almost entirely devoid of

719
00:40:10,640 --> 00:40:16,680
Speaker 1: anything recognizable as consciousness. You do not really see introspection

720
00:40:16,719 --> 00:40:19,600
Speaker 1: in the Iliad. There are a few passages which serve

721
00:40:19,640 --> 00:40:23,520
Speaker 1: as exceptions to this. Generally, James thinks that they look

722
00:40:23,560 --> 00:40:26,520
Speaker 1: like late additions to the text or signed or they

723
00:40:26,520 --> 00:40:30,479
Speaker 1: could possibly be signs of early protoconscious thoughts seeping through.

724
00:40:30,520 --> 00:40:35,160
Speaker 1: But primarily, the characters of the Iliad do not introspect,

725
00:40:35,280 --> 00:40:38,120
Speaker 1: They do not narrotize, they do not seem to have

726
00:40:38,200 --> 00:40:41,680
Speaker 1: conscious consideration. Instead, when they're faced with the need for

727
00:40:41,760 --> 00:40:45,480
Speaker 1: novel behavior, what happens. They're told what to do by

728
00:40:45,520 --> 00:40:48,799
Speaker 1: a god. A god makes them do it. Now, it's

729
00:40:48,840 --> 00:40:51,200
Speaker 1: it's generally when we look back on pieces of literature

730
00:40:51,239 --> 00:40:52,640
Speaker 1: like this, we think, well, this is just this was

731
00:40:52,680 --> 00:40:55,200
Speaker 1: a primitive form of literature, This was a this is

732
00:40:55,239 --> 00:40:58,359
Speaker 1: a more archaic um in a form of storytelling. Yeah,

733
00:40:58,400 --> 00:41:01,439
Speaker 1: you see it as a literary device very well, could be.

734
00:41:01,800 --> 00:41:03,879
Speaker 1: It makes me think, you know, all these various bad

735
00:41:03,920 --> 00:41:08,280
Speaker 1: films that you and I enjoy. Uh, sometimes they're enjoyably

736
00:41:08,360 --> 00:41:13,560
Speaker 1: bad because the craftsmanship isn't there at various levels. Um,

737
00:41:13,840 --> 00:41:17,719
Speaker 1: if bicameral, If the bicameral mind hypothesis is true, could

738
00:41:17,719 --> 00:41:21,160
Speaker 1: it be possible that that sometimes we love bad movies

739
00:41:21,200 --> 00:41:24,359
Speaker 1: because they seem to have been created by a bicameral mind.

740
00:41:25,840 --> 00:41:28,280
Speaker 1: I was with you every step of the way there, Robert.

741
00:41:28,640 --> 00:41:32,160
Speaker 1: I can believe that there are movies that feel quite bicameral. Yeah,

742
00:41:32,280 --> 00:41:35,279
Speaker 1: they feel as if they were like dictated by a

743
00:41:35,320 --> 00:41:39,200
Speaker 1: divine presence rather than consciously thought through. All right, but

744
00:41:39,200 --> 00:41:40,880
Speaker 1: but but back to the discussion here. So, yeah, we

745
00:41:40,920 --> 00:41:44,120
Speaker 1: have this this war going on. There's no introspection, there's

746
00:41:44,160 --> 00:41:47,920
Speaker 1: nothing that resembles consciousness, and at all the pivotal plot

747
00:41:47,920 --> 00:41:50,560
Speaker 1: points are punctuated by a God stepping in and saying

748
00:41:50,600 --> 00:41:52,480
Speaker 1: do this or do that. So there might be like

749
00:41:52,520 --> 00:41:54,560
Speaker 1: a scene where Achilles is going to reach out and

750
00:41:54,640 --> 00:41:57,720
Speaker 1: kill his king Agamemnon, but instead it says a God

751
00:41:57,840 --> 00:42:03,000
Speaker 1: grabs him and tell and makes him not do it. Yeah. Interesting.

752
00:42:03,480 --> 00:42:05,640
Speaker 1: I would like to see more of that in our films, though,

753
00:42:05,680 --> 00:42:07,920
Speaker 1: where they just have God's pop up than direct the

754
00:42:07,920 --> 00:42:10,920
Speaker 1: course of action, you know. Even in the words of

755
00:42:10,960 --> 00:42:14,279
Speaker 1: the Greek, Jane says, uh, we can see something of

756
00:42:14,640 --> 00:42:18,479
Speaker 1: bicamerality here, because there are Greek words that later come

757
00:42:18,560 --> 00:42:21,920
Speaker 1: to be used to refer to consciousness, and they appear

758
00:42:22,080 --> 00:42:25,480
Speaker 1: throughout the Iliad, but through contextual clues we can tell

759
00:42:25,520 --> 00:42:28,560
Speaker 1: that they mean something entirely different in the Iliad than

760
00:42:28,600 --> 00:42:31,480
Speaker 1: what they mean when they later come to mean consciousness.

761
00:42:31,920 --> 00:42:36,200
Speaker 1: For example, the word see he it's spelt psyche, you know,

762
00:42:36,280 --> 00:42:40,000
Speaker 1: in the English pronunciation see he. In later centuries, this

763
00:42:40,120 --> 00:42:43,560
Speaker 1: clearly comes to mean consciousness or mind or soul. That's

764
00:42:43,560 --> 00:42:46,120
Speaker 1: how it is used in Greek, but in the Iliad

765
00:42:46,640 --> 00:42:49,920
Speaker 1: phase it appears to refer to something more like physical

766
00:42:50,120 --> 00:42:53,960
Speaker 1: life substances. Jane says it means something more like blood

767
00:42:54,120 --> 00:42:57,480
Speaker 1: or breath, like if a soldier gets killed on the battlefield,

768
00:42:57,840 --> 00:43:01,880
Speaker 1: his see he bleeds out onto the round or the

769
00:43:01,920 --> 00:43:05,719
Speaker 1: word thumos. In later writings, Jane says this means something

770
00:43:05,760 --> 00:43:09,160
Speaker 1: more like emotional mind or soul. In the Iliad, once again,

771
00:43:09,200 --> 00:43:12,000
Speaker 1: it seems to have this base level animal meaning. It's

772
00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:16,000
Speaker 1: something more like animation or motion. So when a soldier

773
00:43:16,120 --> 00:43:21,080
Speaker 1: stops moving the thumos goes out of his limbs, but

774
00:43:21,280 --> 00:43:23,800
Speaker 1: it also seems to mean this weird kind of organ

775
00:43:23,920 --> 00:43:26,600
Speaker 1: in the body that can be filled with the impetus

776
00:43:26,640 --> 00:43:32,960
Speaker 1: for motion or activity. Next is noose. In later Greek

777
00:43:33,040 --> 00:43:36,360
Speaker 1: it certainly comes to mean consciousness, it's like a conscious mind.

778
00:43:36,800 --> 00:43:39,640
Speaker 1: But in the Iliad it appears to mean something much plainer.

779
00:43:39,680 --> 00:43:43,080
Speaker 1: It means like sight or field division. So when you

780
00:43:43,120 --> 00:43:47,440
Speaker 1: see something, the thing is in your noose. Now, this

781
00:43:47,560 --> 00:43:50,120
Speaker 1: next point, this is the exact place where he really

782
00:43:50,120 --> 00:43:52,960
Speaker 1: gave me the creeps, and I got actual chill bumps.

783
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:56,000
Speaker 1: He points out that the Iliad, as well as Greek

784
00:43:56,080 --> 00:43:59,200
Speaker 1: art at the time, quote shows man as an assembly

785
00:43:59,320 --> 00:44:03,520
Speaker 1: of strange the articulated limbs, the joints under drawn, and

786
00:44:03,560 --> 00:44:07,400
Speaker 1: the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically

787
00:44:07,480 --> 00:44:10,040
Speaker 1: what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks

788
00:44:10,080 --> 00:44:14,280
Speaker 1: of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs

789
00:44:14,800 --> 00:44:18,879
Speaker 1: as being fleet, sinewy in speedy motion, etcetera, with no

790
00:44:19,080 --> 00:44:22,480
Speaker 1: mention of the body as a whole. Yeah, so it's

791
00:44:22,520 --> 00:44:28,400
Speaker 1: just this idea of just these automatons waging war, uh,

792
00:44:28,800 --> 00:44:32,960
Speaker 1: you know, killing each other, uh, with without this concrete

793
00:44:33,000 --> 00:44:36,439
Speaker 1: sense of self guiding. It so alien to comprehend. Oh,

794
00:44:36,440 --> 00:44:39,520
Speaker 1: it really is. And so if you buy into Jane's theory,

795
00:44:40,239 --> 00:44:42,080
Speaker 1: or if you just want to entertain it as we

796
00:44:42,120 --> 00:44:45,640
Speaker 1: are doing, these characters simply do not seem to introspect.

797
00:44:45,800 --> 00:44:49,520
Speaker 1: They argue, they rage, they desire, they act out on desires,

798
00:44:49,760 --> 00:44:51,960
Speaker 1: but they don't seem to have access to a mind

799
00:44:52,040 --> 00:44:56,040
Speaker 1: space where they can perform introspective metaphor based activities like

800
00:44:56,120 --> 00:44:59,680
Speaker 1: we described in the previous episode. They don't have access

801
00:44:59,719 --> 00:45:03,239
Speaker 1: either to the conscious aspect of decision making. Instead, when

802
00:45:03,280 --> 00:45:05,279
Speaker 1: they got to make a novel decision, the iliot is

803
00:45:05,360 --> 00:45:07,799
Speaker 1: very clear about what happens. The God tells him what

804
00:45:07,880 --> 00:45:11,920
Speaker 1: to do, and they do it. Hm. Maybe this is

805
00:45:11,960 --> 00:45:14,520
Speaker 1: one of the reasons we like like a very classic

806
00:45:14,600 --> 00:45:16,920
Speaker 1: action hero, you know, because it's like they don't think,

807
00:45:16,960 --> 00:45:19,279
Speaker 1: they just do. They are a man of action. They

808
00:45:19,280 --> 00:45:24,239
Speaker 1: are a bicameral hero. I mean, you sometimes do get

809
00:45:24,239 --> 00:45:27,959
Speaker 1: that sense, right that there is a kind of there's

810
00:45:27,960 --> 00:45:32,120
Speaker 1: a kind of unthinking charisma to the action hero in

811
00:45:32,200 --> 00:45:35,640
Speaker 1: most action movies. I guess that is what you'd call

812
00:45:35,760 --> 00:45:40,040
Speaker 1: that that man of action cliche. I mean, I guess

813
00:45:40,040 --> 00:45:42,680
Speaker 1: it technically usually is a man in these movies. And

814
00:45:42,719 --> 00:45:45,839
Speaker 1: he's got this kind of macho swagger that does not

815
00:45:46,000 --> 00:45:50,480
Speaker 1: seem to involve thinking, it doesn't seem to involve self reflection.

816
00:45:50,880 --> 00:45:54,640
Speaker 1: They've just got this, uh this like violent intuition, can't

817
00:45:54,640 --> 00:45:57,359
Speaker 1: be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, and absolutely will

818
00:45:57,400 --> 00:46:00,960
Speaker 1: not stop. I mean this, that's the terminator in a nutshell.

819
00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:03,480
Speaker 1: The by the terminator is is a is a machine.

820
00:46:03,520 --> 00:46:07,479
Speaker 1: Everybody was the terminator in the Iliad. That's the scary part.

821
00:46:07,760 --> 00:46:10,640
Speaker 1: Oh man, So what I what I'm thirsting for now?

822
00:46:11,480 --> 00:46:14,239
Speaker 1: It's almost like this theory is too interesting and I'm

823
00:46:14,280 --> 00:46:17,640
Speaker 1: too tempted to want it to be true. So what

824
00:46:17,760 --> 00:46:21,160
Speaker 1: I want now is for a great classic scholar to say, like, no, no, no,

825
00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:23,759
Speaker 1: he's got it all wrong. Here's why, here's how. You

826
00:46:23,800 --> 00:46:26,800
Speaker 1: can definitely find lots of signs of consciousness in the Iliad.

827
00:46:26,920 --> 00:46:28,880
Speaker 1: And they're not later editions. They are part of the

828
00:46:28,880 --> 00:46:33,200
Speaker 1: original text. I want that, or I don't want that.

829
00:46:33,320 --> 00:46:35,640
Speaker 1: I feel like I need that. Yeah, Otherwise I feel

830
00:46:35,640 --> 00:46:38,480
Speaker 1: like I'm just buying into the idea that Stanley Kubrick

831
00:46:38,480 --> 00:46:41,719
Speaker 1: faith them in landing or something. Right. Yeah, it is

832
00:46:41,760 --> 00:46:45,040
Speaker 1: just such a radical hypothesis. Okay, well, let's leave the

833
00:46:45,080 --> 00:46:47,880
Speaker 1: Iliad and look at some other literature from the ancient world.

834
00:46:48,360 --> 00:46:52,000
Speaker 1: How about Jewish literature. This is interesting. I'd not run

835
00:46:52,040 --> 00:46:54,600
Speaker 1: across this before either. This is ah So this deals

836
00:46:54,640 --> 00:46:58,520
Speaker 1: with Yeah, the Elohim, one of the names of God

837
00:46:58,840 --> 00:47:02,680
Speaker 1: used in the the Hebrew Bible, very often just translated

838
00:47:02,800 --> 00:47:06,200
Speaker 1: as God, a singular right, but he argues that it

839
00:47:06,280 --> 00:47:09,200
Speaker 1: translated as merely God is to miss the plural nature

840
00:47:09,239 --> 00:47:12,719
Speaker 1: of the word in Hebrew. Uh, which is something I've

841
00:47:12,760 --> 00:47:15,960
Speaker 1: independently read, like Melohem is essentially a plural word, but

842
00:47:16,040 --> 00:47:19,799
Speaker 1: it's rendered in the modern sense and as a singular word. Yeah.

843
00:47:19,840 --> 00:47:21,759
Speaker 1: It says that it comes from the root of to

844
00:47:21,920 --> 00:47:26,480
Speaker 1: be powerful. But better translations of of ela him might

845
00:47:26,560 --> 00:47:31,520
Speaker 1: be the great ones, the prominent ones, the Majesty's, the judges,

846
00:47:31,560 --> 00:47:35,879
Speaker 1: the mighty ones, etcetera. And so these, he argues, are

847
00:47:35,920 --> 00:47:38,760
Speaker 1: the vote could be the voice visions of the bicameral mind.

848
00:47:39,800 --> 00:47:42,239
Speaker 1: And he also argues that one can really see the

849
00:47:42,280 --> 00:47:45,400
Speaker 1: decline of the bicameral vision in the Bible. Now, this

850
00:47:45,480 --> 00:47:47,839
Speaker 1: is I really love this because he's basically talking about

851
00:47:47,840 --> 00:47:49,480
Speaker 1: all right, if you pick up the Old Testament and

852
00:47:49,520 --> 00:47:53,080
Speaker 1: you read it front to back, you can see this transition.

853
00:47:53,600 --> 00:47:56,640
Speaker 1: So in the he says quote. In the true bicameral period,

854
00:47:56,880 --> 00:47:59,879
Speaker 1: there was usually a visual component to the holluciated holy

855
00:48:00,000 --> 00:48:03,680
Speaker 1: sinated voice, either it's self hallucinated or as the statue

856
00:48:03,719 --> 00:48:07,440
Speaker 1: in front of in front of which one listened. So

857
00:48:07,840 --> 00:48:10,360
Speaker 1: even as a modern reader of the Bible will find this,

858
00:48:10,440 --> 00:48:13,400
Speaker 1: you go from a physical God who physically does stuff

859
00:48:13,440 --> 00:48:15,720
Speaker 1: like kick people out of the garden or shut the

860
00:48:15,800 --> 00:48:19,720
Speaker 1: door on the arc, to a God that merely speaks

861
00:48:19,719 --> 00:48:23,400
Speaker 1: to everyone, and a purely auditory God that we account

862
00:48:23,880 --> 00:48:26,960
Speaker 1: that we encounter with Moses, you know, with additional visual

863
00:48:27,280 --> 00:48:29,959
Speaker 1: flares here and there, and crucially after that, a God

864
00:48:30,040 --> 00:48:33,960
Speaker 1: of law and religion rather than of direct experience. So

865
00:48:34,040 --> 00:48:37,919
Speaker 1: you go from this robustly imagined God who physically does

866
00:48:37,920 --> 00:48:41,040
Speaker 1: stuff to a God who is a voice, to a

867
00:48:41,080 --> 00:48:44,880
Speaker 1: God who is not experienced directly and rather as experience

868
00:48:45,000 --> 00:48:49,680
Speaker 1: through his tradition of teachings and law and so um

869
00:48:49,719 --> 00:48:52,520
Speaker 1: so yeah. James argues that the Hebrew Bible is essentially

870
00:48:52,520 --> 00:48:56,560
Speaker 1: a long narrative of the transition from myth to bicameral

871
00:48:56,640 --> 00:49:00,319
Speaker 1: humankind too conscious humankind, and you can see the whole thing. There,

872
00:49:00,560 --> 00:49:03,480
Speaker 1: you've got the older prophets like Amos, who Janes identifies

873
00:49:03,520 --> 00:49:08,400
Speaker 1: as clearly b cameral, to Ecclesiastes, who uh. James thinks

874
00:49:08,440 --> 00:49:11,120
Speaker 1: the author shows all the markers of consciousness, and he

875
00:49:11,480 --> 00:49:14,759
Speaker 1: claims you can also see this painful transition from bicameral

876
00:49:14,880 --> 00:49:18,400
Speaker 1: society to conscious society in many aspects of the canon.

877
00:49:18,800 --> 00:49:22,840
Speaker 1: A couple of examples, he says people are constantly begging

878
00:49:22,880 --> 00:49:26,320
Speaker 1: for contact with a God or God's that no longer

879
00:49:26,440 --> 00:49:29,520
Speaker 1: speak to them in the literature that he believes comes

880
00:49:29,520 --> 00:49:32,680
Speaker 1: from the conscious period of this history. So one quote

881
00:49:32,680 --> 00:49:34,799
Speaker 1: he gives from Psalm forty two, and this is with

882
00:49:34,880 --> 00:49:38,000
Speaker 1: the name of God rendered directly to the plural rather

883
00:49:38,040 --> 00:49:41,279
Speaker 1: than the singular as it would usually be rendered as

884
00:49:41,320 --> 00:49:44,480
Speaker 1: the stag pants after the water Brooks, So pants my

885
00:49:44,560 --> 00:49:48,520
Speaker 1: mind after you, Oh Gods, my mind thirsts for God's,

886
00:49:48,640 --> 00:49:51,640
Speaker 1: for living gods. When shall I come face to face

887
00:49:51,719 --> 00:49:55,160
Speaker 1: with God's. Yeah, it's almost like a like a gradual

888
00:49:55,239 --> 00:49:57,439
Speaker 1: breakup story, like oh, he used he used to see

889
00:49:57,440 --> 00:50:00,200
Speaker 1: God all the time we hung out, and now, yeah,

890
00:50:00,200 --> 00:50:01,879
Speaker 1: we talk on the phone sometime, but it's not quite

891
00:50:01,920 --> 00:50:03,960
Speaker 1: the same. And now it's like he won't even call.

892
00:50:04,120 --> 00:50:07,600
Speaker 1: We just keep exchanging texts, and suddenly you know, that's

893
00:50:07,600 --> 00:50:09,239
Speaker 1: all I have to go on. It's just the the

894
00:50:09,400 --> 00:50:12,360
Speaker 1: not even new text but the old texts. But then again,

895
00:50:12,640 --> 00:50:16,319
Speaker 1: there are there are definitely, in Jane's vision, partisans of

896
00:50:16,360 --> 00:50:19,440
Speaker 1: the conscious version of the religion that don't want anything

897
00:50:19,480 --> 00:50:23,080
Speaker 1: to do with the direct experience version of the religion.

898
00:50:23,680 --> 00:50:25,800
Speaker 1: Like he says that there are many signs throughout the

899
00:50:25,840 --> 00:50:28,319
Speaker 1: books of the Hebrew Bible that the Bicameral people may

900
00:50:28,320 --> 00:50:32,719
Speaker 1: have been actively persecuted by conscious people for religious reasons.

901
00:50:33,400 --> 00:50:35,759
Speaker 1: I'll just read one quote, he says. Quote. A further

902
00:50:35,840 --> 00:50:39,200
Speaker 1: vestige from the Bicameral era is the word obe, often

903
00:50:39,200 --> 00:50:43,440
Speaker 1: translated as a familiar spirit. A man also or a

904
00:50:43,480 --> 00:50:46,600
Speaker 1: woman that have an obe shall surely be put to death,

905
00:50:46,760 --> 00:50:52,040
Speaker 1: says Leviticus. And similarly, Saul drives out from Israel all

906
00:50:52,120 --> 00:50:55,759
Speaker 1: those that had an obe. In First Samuel, even though

907
00:50:55,760 --> 00:50:59,239
Speaker 1: an obe is something that one consults with, according to

908
00:50:59,320 --> 00:51:03,480
Speaker 1: Deuteronomy eighteen eleven, it probably had no physical embodiment. It

909
00:51:03,600 --> 00:51:07,239
Speaker 1: is always bracketed with wizards and witches, and thus probably

910
00:51:07,280 --> 00:51:10,920
Speaker 1: refers to some Bicameral voice that was not recognized by

911
00:51:10,920 --> 00:51:15,080
Speaker 1: the Old Testament writers as religious Yeah, I mean, you

912
00:51:15,080 --> 00:51:18,000
Speaker 1: get into this scenario where you know, obviously the individuals

913
00:51:18,000 --> 00:51:20,160
Speaker 1: who don't hear the voices, they've built up all this

914
00:51:20,160 --> 00:51:23,080
Speaker 1: this law and order based on the old texts and

915
00:51:23,120 --> 00:51:27,080
Speaker 1: the old stories. It it becomes dangerous if other individuals

916
00:51:27,120 --> 00:51:30,440
Speaker 1: are attempting to to add new material to it. No,

917
00:51:30,640 --> 00:51:33,719
Speaker 1: I'm hearing God's right now, and they're telling me something different. Yeah,

918
00:51:33,760 --> 00:51:35,960
Speaker 1: I mean, it reminds me of the fact that the

919
00:51:36,200 --> 00:51:38,520
Speaker 1: church that I attend they have this saying God is

920
00:51:38,560 --> 00:51:42,520
Speaker 1: still speaking, which, as it's intended, the idea is God

921
00:51:42,640 --> 00:51:45,560
Speaker 1: is still real and a part of everyone's lives, and

922
00:51:45,600 --> 00:51:47,560
Speaker 1: you know, this is not just a story. But on

923
00:51:47,600 --> 00:51:50,480
Speaker 1: the other hand, there's it's kind of scary to think, well,

924
00:51:50,640 --> 00:51:53,160
Speaker 1: God is still speaking, what's he going to say? You know,

925
00:51:54,200 --> 00:51:58,359
Speaker 1: um comes it could provide license for some very uh,

926
00:51:58,480 --> 00:52:03,560
Speaker 1: for some very disturbing content or some great stuff. Yeah, indeed. Yeah,

927
00:52:03,560 --> 00:52:05,719
Speaker 1: it's just sort of like it provides you with a

928
00:52:05,800 --> 00:52:10,560
Speaker 1: blanket authorization for action that is not so there if

929
00:52:10,560 --> 00:52:13,160
Speaker 1: you have a written and codified law. So again, all

930
00:52:13,200 --> 00:52:15,839
Speaker 1: of this just ends up playing into the conflict of

931
00:52:15,880 --> 00:52:19,919
Speaker 1: the downfall of the bicameral mind as the voices blink out,

932
00:52:20,400 --> 00:52:23,720
Speaker 1: and this a new system of of order and social

933
00:52:23,800 --> 00:52:27,000
Speaker 1: stability has to take hold. So let's try to summarize

934
00:52:27,080 --> 00:52:30,960
Speaker 1: real quick what James is saying is the basic contours

935
00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:35,320
Speaker 1: of the transition through the bicameral period to the conscious period.

936
00:52:35,800 --> 00:52:37,560
Speaker 1: Let's see Robert tell me what you think of this.

937
00:52:37,680 --> 00:52:40,200
Speaker 1: As I've tried to summarize his view, I think James

938
00:52:40,320 --> 00:52:44,600
Speaker 1: argues that bicameral society emerged with language and the increasing

939
00:52:44,800 --> 00:52:48,920
Speaker 1: size of tribal groups. So when one could encode mental

940
00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:52,680
Speaker 1: content into grammatical sentences, it was possible to code action

941
00:52:52,760 --> 00:52:56,320
Speaker 1: motivation efficiently through language. So you'd have a big group

942
00:52:56,560 --> 00:53:00,759
Speaker 1: where your authority figure can't be around instantly tell you

943
00:53:00,800 --> 00:53:03,319
Speaker 1: what to do because the group's too big. So a

944
00:53:03,480 --> 00:53:07,279
Speaker 1: command heard from one's parents or one's tribal chieftain is

945
00:53:07,360 --> 00:53:12,440
Speaker 1: hallucinated to recur over and over again, providing continuous motivation

946
00:53:12,520 --> 00:53:16,440
Speaker 1: for action. And this is the non dominant hemisphere commanding

947
00:53:16,480 --> 00:53:20,120
Speaker 1: the dominant hemisphere. This is the first version of bi camerality.

948
00:53:20,320 --> 00:53:23,520
Speaker 1: So when you've got words and sentences that can be hallucinated,

949
00:53:24,280 --> 00:53:29,160
Speaker 1: then over time, these admonitory voices Eventually they become not

950
00:53:29,280 --> 00:53:32,959
Speaker 1: just repetitive but synthetic. So they're not just telling you

951
00:53:33,040 --> 00:53:35,480
Speaker 1: what these authority figures have told you in the past,

952
00:53:35,880 --> 00:53:39,680
Speaker 1: but they're telling you what these authority figures would command

953
00:53:40,239 --> 00:53:42,840
Speaker 1: if they were present now. And of course we know

954
00:53:42,920 --> 00:53:46,600
Speaker 1: the mind has the power to synthesize information and imagine

955
00:53:46,640 --> 00:53:49,680
Speaker 1: what somebody else would command. We do that consciously now,

956
00:53:49,719 --> 00:53:52,360
Speaker 1: but here it's saying, what if the right hemisphere, and

957
00:53:52,640 --> 00:53:56,680
Speaker 1: in most people, or the non dominant hemisphere generally did

958
00:53:56,719 --> 00:54:02,960
Speaker 1: that automatically, nonconsciously. Uh So, over time, parents and chieftains

959
00:54:03,040 --> 00:54:06,920
Speaker 1: die and their voices are still heard instead of internal

960
00:54:06,960 --> 00:54:12,120
Speaker 1: copies of authority figures to become imbued with disembodied authority,

961
00:54:12,160 --> 00:54:17,600
Speaker 1: the voice itself provides inherent authorization, magical authority, as from

962
00:54:17,600 --> 00:54:21,600
Speaker 1: a god. Then for a long time, bicameral society grows

963
00:54:21,640 --> 00:54:25,440
Speaker 1: and develops, and bicameral people build technologies and kingdoms and

964
00:54:25,520 --> 00:54:28,800
Speaker 1: begin to write works of ancient literature. But what happens

965
00:54:28,840 --> 00:54:32,719
Speaker 1: to make it all disappear? Essentially, his answer is a

966
00:54:32,760 --> 00:54:38,839
Speaker 1: combination of catastrophe and literature. Would you agree with that, Robert, Yeah,

967
00:54:38,840 --> 00:54:42,759
Speaker 1: that seems to be the basic idea of catastrophe and literature. Yeah,

968
00:54:43,040 --> 00:54:45,600
Speaker 1: the story of the story of our lives. Yeah, that

969
00:54:45,600 --> 00:54:48,239
Speaker 1: that that is the roof collapsing on the bicameral mind.

970
00:54:48,320 --> 00:54:52,000
Speaker 1: So the catastrophe he singles out is the widespread failure

971
00:54:52,040 --> 00:54:55,680
Speaker 1: of civilization throughout the Eastern Mediterranean close to the end

972
00:54:55,719 --> 00:54:59,399
Speaker 1: of the second millennium BC. This is a period that's

973
00:54:59,400 --> 00:55:01,560
Speaker 1: coming off of what's now referred to as the Late

974
00:55:01,680 --> 00:55:05,880
Speaker 1: Bronze Age collapse, where ancient empires fell apart and dispersed

975
00:55:05,920 --> 00:55:08,040
Speaker 1: and people were displaced, and there was a lot of

976
00:55:08,040 --> 00:55:12,840
Speaker 1: war and raiding and uh and collapse of infrastructure, trade

977
00:55:12,920 --> 00:55:16,040
Speaker 1: was interrupted, education stifled, and it led to what some

978
00:55:16,160 --> 00:55:19,279
Speaker 1: would consider a dark age of the ancient world. And

979
00:55:19,320 --> 00:55:22,279
Speaker 1: he also argues that a certain a small amount of

980
00:55:22,320 --> 00:55:25,000
Speaker 1: natural selection may have come into play as well, because

981
00:55:25,040 --> 00:55:27,840
Speaker 1: as all this is going on and the enormous, enormous

982
00:55:27,840 --> 00:55:30,360
Speaker 1: bloodshed that's playing out here at the end of the

983
00:55:30,360 --> 00:55:33,520
Speaker 1: second century BC, those who had the best chance to

984
00:55:33,560 --> 00:55:36,960
Speaker 1: survive were those who could resist the commandments of the

985
00:55:37,000 --> 00:55:40,319
Speaker 1: gods and the literal you know, the voice of compulsion, right,

986
00:55:40,360 --> 00:55:44,640
Speaker 1: who were more adaptable and could narrotize out solutions to problems,

987
00:55:44,760 --> 00:55:49,160
Speaker 1: and who had the ability to practice prolonged deception and treachery. Yes,

988
00:55:49,239 --> 00:55:51,960
Speaker 1: that's another huge idea here. So yeah, So he's got

989
00:55:52,000 --> 00:55:55,080
Speaker 1: a summary of of the several factors he thinks led

990
00:55:55,160 --> 00:55:58,680
Speaker 1: to in this period around the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia,

991
00:55:58,800 --> 00:56:01,400
Speaker 1: the collapse of the bikeamera all mine, and in the

992
00:56:01,440 --> 00:56:04,920
Speaker 1: beginnings of widespread consciousness in culture. So what are what

993
00:56:04,960 --> 00:56:08,680
Speaker 1: are these main things he offers? He's talking about, first

994
00:56:08,680 --> 00:56:12,279
Speaker 1: of all, one, the weakening of the auditory by the

995
00:56:12,320 --> 00:56:14,560
Speaker 1: advent of writing. Okay, A good example would be the

996
00:56:14,600 --> 00:56:18,279
Speaker 1: invention of written law, right, clearly distinguishing acceptable from non

997
00:56:18,280 --> 00:56:20,960
Speaker 1: acceptable behavior in a way that does not require the

998
00:56:21,040 --> 00:56:24,040
Speaker 1: intervention of an internal God. Yeah, we got these tablets here.

999
00:56:24,200 --> 00:56:25,480
Speaker 1: He didn't have to speak to you all the time.

1000
00:56:25,560 --> 00:56:27,680
Speaker 1: Just refer to the tablets. Yeah, this is how I

1001
00:56:27,719 --> 00:56:30,920
Speaker 1: feel about any kind of power point presentation. Just give

1002
00:56:30,960 --> 00:56:33,000
Speaker 1: me the power point. I don't need the voice of

1003
00:56:33,040 --> 00:56:36,800
Speaker 1: God telling me the things. Just give me a list. Yeah, okay, Okay,

1004
00:56:36,800 --> 00:56:39,640
Speaker 1: what's the next thing? Number two? The inherent fragility of

1005
00:56:39,800 --> 00:56:42,799
Speaker 1: hallucinatory control. Okay, Yeah, we can see that there's some

1006
00:56:42,840 --> 00:56:46,919
Speaker 1: instability in the system there. Number three, the unworkable nous

1007
00:56:47,000 --> 00:56:50,640
Speaker 1: of God's in the chaos of historical upheaval. Okay, so

1008
00:56:50,680 --> 00:56:54,120
Speaker 1: the gods prevented problems that they caused problems when when

1009
00:56:54,120 --> 00:56:57,120
Speaker 1: society and hierarchy was falling apart. Yeah, and again the

1010
00:56:57,200 --> 00:56:59,840
Speaker 1: voice of the gods was just there was not actually

1011
00:56:59,880 --> 00:57:03,680
Speaker 1: the voice of a divine being with superior knowledge. It

1012
00:57:03,760 --> 00:57:07,360
Speaker 1: was still originating from within the individual, right. Okay. The

1013
00:57:07,360 --> 00:57:10,280
Speaker 1: fourth one, the fourth one is depositing of internal cause

1014
00:57:10,520 --> 00:57:13,560
Speaker 1: and the observation of difference in others. Okay, so you

1015
00:57:13,600 --> 00:57:16,640
Speaker 1: see other people are behaving differently, and you begin to

1016
00:57:16,760 --> 00:57:20,480
Speaker 1: wonder if maybe they're just behaving on their own and

1017
00:57:20,520 --> 00:57:24,320
Speaker 1: not being commanded by God's maybe undermining your own authorization

1018
00:57:24,400 --> 00:57:27,440
Speaker 1: of god belief. Yeah, I can see where it would be. Um,

1019
00:57:27,480 --> 00:57:30,240
Speaker 1: I mean it would, it would It would be contagious

1020
00:57:30,280 --> 00:57:34,120
Speaker 1: in that in that respect. Uh. Number five, the acquisition

1021
00:57:34,240 --> 00:57:39,000
Speaker 1: of a narratization from epics, the introduction of stories. Number six,

1022
00:57:39,040 --> 00:57:41,880
Speaker 1: the survival value of deceit, which we already touched on,

1023
00:57:42,480 --> 00:57:45,200
Speaker 1: and number seven a modicum of natural selection, which we

1024
00:57:45,240 --> 00:57:48,200
Speaker 1: also discussed here. But to be clear, I think James

1025
00:57:48,280 --> 00:57:52,160
Speaker 1: is primarily thinking about these transitions in mindset, not as

1026
00:57:52,320 --> 00:57:55,360
Speaker 1: changes in the physical brain brought about by you know,

1027
00:57:55,480 --> 00:57:58,520
Speaker 1: mutation and natural selection, though there might be a little

1028
00:57:58,520 --> 00:58:02,200
Speaker 1: bit of selection towards levels of predisposition for it. But

1029
00:58:02,240 --> 00:58:05,280
Speaker 1: he's primarily thinking about this as cultural change, right, that

1030
00:58:05,480 --> 00:58:10,560
Speaker 1: there there are cultures of bicamerality and cultures of consciousness. Yes,

1031
00:58:11,840 --> 00:58:13,400
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna take one more break and when

1032
00:58:13,440 --> 00:58:16,720
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to jump into modern traces

1033
00:58:16,760 --> 00:58:21,520
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind. All right, we're back. So we've

1034
00:58:21,560 --> 00:58:24,600
Speaker 1: examined the evidence that James claims to offer for the

1035
00:58:24,640 --> 00:58:27,480
Speaker 1: existence of a bicameral mind and history and his conception

1036
00:58:27,560 --> 00:58:31,320
Speaker 1: of how the bicameral mind arose and then collapsed into

1037
00:58:31,400 --> 00:58:36,120
Speaker 1: society's based on conscious mentality. So, if there truly was

1038
00:58:36,200 --> 00:58:38,959
Speaker 1: a bicamerality in the past, if our brains are still

1039
00:58:39,040 --> 00:58:42,440
Speaker 1: so wired as to be perhaps capable of bicameral culture

1040
00:58:42,440 --> 00:58:46,160
Speaker 1: in the present, if we just practiced it, what would

1041
00:58:46,200 --> 00:58:48,280
Speaker 1: the evidence of that be. Well, you would think that

1042
00:58:48,280 --> 00:58:51,440
Speaker 1: there'd be some practices in human behavior that would give

1043
00:58:51,440 --> 00:58:53,680
Speaker 1: you evidence that we used to be bi cameral, and

1044
00:58:53,720 --> 00:58:57,360
Speaker 1: that we could still be bicameral if we tried. That's right,

1045
00:58:57,440 --> 00:59:00,000
Speaker 1: And he first of all, he makes uh he makes

1046
00:59:00,040 --> 00:59:04,080
Speaker 1: some examples out of religion. So at this point I

1047
00:59:04,080 --> 00:59:06,400
Speaker 1: think everyone can pretty well imagine the sorts of religious

1048
00:59:06,400 --> 00:59:09,360
Speaker 1: examples that James is going to make. After all, we've

1049
00:59:09,360 --> 00:59:13,200
Speaker 1: been discussing the trans like nature of biocameral existence uh

1050
00:59:13,200 --> 00:59:17,160
Speaker 1: in the commanding words of corpses and statues, you know, all,

1051
00:59:17,720 --> 00:59:20,440
Speaker 1: you know, very magical and scenarios that we can imagine

1052
00:59:20,480 --> 00:59:24,120
Speaker 1: lining up with both religious stories and religious right. So

1053
00:59:24,240 --> 00:59:27,960
Speaker 1: expectantly he points to spirit possession. There's a topic we

1054
00:59:28,040 --> 00:59:30,600
Speaker 1: come back to on a few different episodes of Stuff

1055
00:59:30,600 --> 00:59:33,120
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, and it ranges from demonic possession

1056
00:59:33,160 --> 00:59:37,400
Speaker 1: across various cultures to you know, tribal African beats that

1057
00:59:37,680 --> 00:59:41,360
Speaker 1: threatened Carl Young's sanity, and more positive forms of spirit

1058
00:59:41,520 --> 00:59:44,880
Speaker 1: possessions such as oracles, which which Jane spends a lot

1059
00:59:44,920 --> 00:59:47,600
Speaker 1: of time with. UM. We have a recent episode of

1060
00:59:47,600 --> 00:59:49,800
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind that covers the the Thaie

1061
00:59:49,840 --> 00:59:54,720
Speaker 1: Tattoo festival, in which uh, the animal tattoo ends up

1062
00:59:54,760 --> 00:59:58,000
Speaker 1: overtaking the individual individual. So we have examples of this

1063
00:59:58,000 --> 01:00:01,800
Speaker 1: this throughout different cultures. H Speaking of tongues, UH and

1064
01:00:01,920 --> 01:00:05,480
Speaker 1: similar religious experiences may also play into this, and of

1065
01:00:05,560 --> 01:00:08,160
Speaker 1: course we have examples of this in ancient writings as well.

1066
01:00:08,640 --> 01:00:11,680
Speaker 1: So as early as a fourth century BC, Socrates wrote

1067
01:00:11,680 --> 01:00:15,040
Speaker 1: of God possessed men, so and clearly like, that's not

1068
01:00:15,160 --> 01:00:19,640
Speaker 1: the kind of thing you would necessarily speak about if

1069
01:00:19,480 --> 01:00:25,480
Speaker 1: if you were immerged within a bicameral UH world anymore. Right, Um, yeah,

1070
01:00:25,680 --> 01:00:28,840
Speaker 1: these might be more vestiges of the bicameral culture, right.

1071
01:00:29,960 --> 01:00:33,640
Speaker 1: And James points to a number of different examples, mainly

1072
01:00:33,680 --> 01:00:37,520
Speaker 1: those dealing with Greek oracles UH, with the idea being

1073
01:00:37,560 --> 01:00:40,160
Speaker 1: that the oracle the individual here would have would have

1074
01:00:40,320 --> 01:00:43,600
Speaker 1: ramped themselves up, but they basically ramped up right hemisphere

1075
01:00:43,640 --> 01:00:47,200
Speaker 1: activity in relation to the left as a result, as

1076
01:00:47,240 --> 01:00:50,960
Speaker 1: a response to complex ritual stimuli, you know, the use

1077
01:00:50,960 --> 01:00:53,120
Speaker 1: of all these various and we've talked about statues and

1078
01:00:53,240 --> 01:00:56,720
Speaker 1: language and and all of all of these aspects playing

1079
01:00:56,760 --> 01:01:01,440
Speaker 1: into passed by cameral experiences. And therefore the idea here

1080
01:01:01,520 --> 01:01:05,000
Speaker 1: is that even as we're shifting out of the bicameral age,

1081
01:01:05,520 --> 01:01:08,520
Speaker 1: even as the bicameral ages behind us, you have conscious

1082
01:01:08,560 --> 01:01:11,480
Speaker 1: individuals who are able to sort of resurrect the bicameral

1083
01:01:11,520 --> 01:01:16,680
Speaker 1: experience enter into trance like states, etcetera. By engaging in

1084
01:01:16,720 --> 01:01:19,560
Speaker 1: these rituals. Yeah, and these would be rituals where they

1085
01:01:19,640 --> 01:01:23,880
Speaker 1: channel the output of what Jans identifies as in most

1086
01:01:23,920 --> 01:01:28,040
Speaker 1: people the right hemisphere speech associated sections of course, right

1087
01:01:28,200 --> 01:01:30,800
Speaker 1: a speech usually coming from the left hemisphere. So it

1088
01:01:30,840 --> 01:01:33,600
Speaker 1: would be like the voices of the gods that spoke

1089
01:01:33,640 --> 01:01:36,080
Speaker 1: in the bicameral minds of the ancients, but speaking out

1090
01:01:36,120 --> 01:01:39,400
Speaker 1: through the mouths of these oracles and prophets. And you

1091
01:01:39,440 --> 01:01:43,840
Speaker 1: know what, uh, those oracles and prophets, they didn't necessarily

1092
01:01:44,120 --> 01:01:47,400
Speaker 1: speak in a even in a commanding tone. In many

1093
01:01:47,440 --> 01:01:51,080
Speaker 1: cases they may have they may have sung yes. And

1094
01:01:51,160 --> 01:01:53,880
Speaker 1: so this is a really interesting section James gets into

1095
01:01:53,920 --> 01:01:56,400
Speaker 1: in the in the third book of his book where

1096
01:01:56,400 --> 01:02:00,400
Speaker 1: he talks about the evidence of passed by camera reality

1097
01:02:00,520 --> 01:02:05,520
Speaker 1: in poetry and music. So remember that james neurological hypothesis, uh,

1098
01:02:05,840 --> 01:02:08,040
Speaker 1: is that the bi cameral mind consisted of the non

1099
01:02:08,120 --> 01:02:10,680
Speaker 1: dominant hemisphere, which is the right brain in most people,

1100
01:02:10,760 --> 01:02:14,800
Speaker 1: speaking directly as an auditory hallucination to the dominant hemisphere,

1101
01:02:14,800 --> 01:02:17,160
Speaker 1: which is the left brain in most people. Keep that

1102
01:02:17,240 --> 01:02:20,240
Speaker 1: in mind here, that's right now. His his his thesis

1103
01:02:20,280 --> 01:02:23,920
Speaker 1: here is quote, the first poets were God's poetry began

1104
01:02:24,040 --> 01:02:27,760
Speaker 1: with the bicameral mind, the God's side of our ancient mentality,

1105
01:02:28,080 --> 01:02:30,920
Speaker 1: at least in a certain period of history, usually or

1106
01:02:30,920 --> 01:02:34,840
Speaker 1: perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men

1107
01:02:34,960 --> 01:02:38,400
Speaker 1: at one time throughout the day, we're hearing poetry of

1108
01:02:38,440 --> 01:02:41,919
Speaker 1: a sort composed and spoken within their own minds. That's

1109
01:02:42,080 --> 01:02:45,280
Speaker 1: terrifying and beautiful. Yeah, that that kind of sums up

1110
01:02:45,280 --> 01:02:48,800
Speaker 1: a lot of the bicameral hypothesis in general. So evidence

1111
01:02:48,800 --> 01:02:51,520
Speaker 1: is scanned for this, but he argues that quote individuals

1112
01:02:51,520 --> 01:02:55,840
Speaker 1: who remained bicameral into the conscious age, that these individuals

1113
01:02:55,920 --> 01:02:59,200
Speaker 1: continue to express the voice of God or God's in poetry.

1114
01:02:59,800 --> 01:03:03,560
Speaker 1: Uh the so you know, the Indian Vada dictated by

1115
01:03:03,600 --> 01:03:07,400
Speaker 1: the gods, the oracle at Delphi, early Arabic poets, etcetera.

1116
01:03:08,560 --> 01:03:12,320
Speaker 1: And this concerns music too, because early poetry was musical

1117
01:03:12,440 --> 01:03:15,880
Speaker 1: in nature. Jane's says absolutely. I mean, you could still

1118
01:03:15,920 --> 01:03:18,920
Speaker 1: say that poetry is musical and nature, especially insofar as

1119
01:03:18,960 --> 01:03:21,640
Speaker 1: it invokes any kind of scanning or rhythm. That's right.

1120
01:03:21,720 --> 01:03:24,280
Speaker 1: And speech is a function again primarily of the left

1121
01:03:24,760 --> 01:03:28,120
Speaker 1: cerebral hemisphere, but song is primarily a function of the

1122
01:03:28,240 --> 01:03:32,560
Speaker 1: right hemisphere. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the

1123
01:03:32,560 --> 01:03:38,080
Speaker 1: bicameral mind. That's an interesting hypothesis in itself. Now there's

1124
01:03:38,120 --> 01:03:41,840
Speaker 1: a he presents a fair amount of of evidence for this,

1125
01:03:42,440 --> 01:03:44,600
Speaker 1: which I'm gonna I'm gonna roll through here. Joe, jump

1126
01:03:44,680 --> 01:03:48,040
Speaker 1: in as we go. Hit me man, all right. So,

1127
01:03:48,400 --> 01:03:51,040
Speaker 1: first of all, many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral

1128
01:03:51,080 --> 01:03:54,640
Speaker 1: hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak,

1129
01:03:55,040 --> 01:03:59,360
Speaker 1: they can still sing. We also have the Wada test

1130
01:03:59,520 --> 01:04:02,360
Speaker 1: to determine in a person's cerebral dominance. This is when

1131
01:04:02,400 --> 01:04:06,680
Speaker 1: sodium amatal is injected into the karatid artery on one side,

1132
01:04:06,720 --> 01:04:10,280
Speaker 1: putting the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation, and the other

1133
01:04:10,320 --> 01:04:13,320
Speaker 1: side remains awake. So in this case case, if the

1134
01:04:13,440 --> 01:04:16,640
Speaker 1: left hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't speak, but they

1135
01:04:16,640 --> 01:04:19,720
Speaker 1: can sing. If the right hemisphere sedated, the patient can't sing,

1136
01:04:19,880 --> 01:04:23,120
Speaker 1: but they can speak. So like, the centers for speech

1137
01:04:23,240 --> 01:04:28,160
Speaker 1: and singing are lateralized and the situation is more pronounced.

1138
01:04:28,200 --> 01:04:32,120
Speaker 1: In cases where there's actual physical damage to one hemisphere

1139
01:04:32,160 --> 01:04:35,080
Speaker 1: or the other, or you know, it's it's completely removed. Also,

1140
01:04:35,120 --> 01:04:38,560
Speaker 1: electrical stimulation of the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to

1141
01:04:38,560 --> 01:04:42,720
Speaker 1: the posterior temporal lobe often produces hallucinations of singing and music.

1142
01:04:44,040 --> 01:04:46,720
Speaker 1: Oh and he also he presents an experiment that you

1143
01:04:46,760 --> 01:04:49,600
Speaker 1: can try. He says, says that you can prove the

1144
01:04:49,680 --> 01:04:53,920
Speaker 1: Latin though the laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different

1145
01:04:54,000 --> 01:04:57,960
Speaker 1: musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will

1146
01:04:58,000 --> 01:05:00,800
Speaker 1: perceive and remember the music on of the left ear

1147
01:05:00,840 --> 01:05:03,960
Speaker 1: phone better. This is because the left ear has greater

1148
01:05:04,040 --> 01:05:08,240
Speaker 1: neuro representation on the right hemisphere. Now it points out

1149
01:05:08,320 --> 01:05:12,120
Speaker 1: that Plato spoke of poetry as possession. Yeah, I said,

1150
01:05:12,160 --> 01:05:16,640
Speaker 1: poets then around four b C. Were comparable in mentality

1151
01:05:16,680 --> 01:05:18,640
Speaker 1: to the oracles of the same period and went through

1152
01:05:18,720 --> 01:05:24,240
Speaker 1: similar uh psychological transformation when they performed. And then there's

1153
01:05:24,280 --> 01:05:26,720
Speaker 1: this idea. We've all heard talk of the muses, right right,

1154
01:05:26,920 --> 01:05:29,840
Speaker 1: I mean, so ancient epics might start saying like sing

1155
01:05:30,000 --> 01:05:34,360
Speaker 1: muse blah blah blah. So the authors telling their personal

1156
01:05:36,000 --> 01:05:40,160
Speaker 1: composition God to start going. Yeah, Now, when we talk

1157
01:05:40,160 --> 01:05:42,440
Speaker 1: about the muses, where you know, we're just talking about

1158
01:05:42,440 --> 01:05:45,720
Speaker 1: inspiration or you know, or attention even or just you know,

1159
01:05:45,760 --> 01:05:48,360
Speaker 1: the will to get a project done. It's a literary device.

1160
01:05:48,400 --> 01:05:51,080
Speaker 1: We think of. Yeah, but but back back then, the

1161
01:05:51,200 --> 01:05:55,480
Speaker 1: argument is that the bicameral human would literally need to

1162
01:05:55,520 --> 01:05:58,120
Speaker 1: hear the voice of the Muse. Yeah, the muse was

1163
01:05:58,240 --> 01:06:01,520
Speaker 1: literally real, so it wasn't just something to imagine, It

1164
01:06:01,560 --> 01:06:06,360
Speaker 1: was something they experienced, though it all was in the brain. Now,

1165
01:06:06,400 --> 01:06:08,680
Speaker 1: he points out that by the sixth century BC, the

1166
01:06:08,760 --> 01:06:12,080
Speaker 1: poet is no longer in just naturally imbued with their song.

1167
01:06:12,600 --> 01:06:14,760
Speaker 1: They have to learn the gift of the muse in

1168
01:06:14,880 --> 01:06:18,040
Speaker 1: order to hear it. So the society that the voice

1169
01:06:18,080 --> 01:06:20,680
Speaker 1: is becoming harder and harder for everyone to hear. So

1170
01:06:20,720 --> 01:06:23,000
Speaker 1: this might be kind of like how the oracles of

1171
01:06:23,040 --> 01:06:25,960
Speaker 1: these later periods, living in conscious societies have to go

1172
01:06:26,000 --> 01:06:28,920
Speaker 1: through elaborate rituals to get into the altered state of

1173
01:06:28,960 --> 01:06:33,120
Speaker 1: consciousness where they channel their non dominant hemisphere and let

1174
01:06:33,160 --> 01:06:35,880
Speaker 1: the voice of God speak. That's right, And he says

1175
01:06:35,920 --> 01:06:39,040
Speaker 1: that in the fifth century b C, we hear the

1176
01:06:39,600 --> 01:06:44,080
Speaker 1: very first hints of poets being peculiar with poetic ecstasy.

1177
01:06:44,160 --> 01:06:47,240
Speaker 1: That's this is quote there, So I want to use

1178
01:06:47,280 --> 01:06:49,000
Speaker 1: that from now on. If I'm like trying to get

1179
01:06:49,040 --> 01:06:51,640
Speaker 1: some writing done and somebody interrupts me, I'm like, hang on,

1180
01:06:51,720 --> 01:06:55,160
Speaker 1: I'm being peculiar. Yeah, so it basically just gets harder

1181
01:06:55,200 --> 01:06:57,240
Speaker 1: and harder to hear the voices of the gods until

1182
01:06:57,280 --> 01:07:00,560
Speaker 1: you're having to essentially make up the words yourself. It

1183
01:07:01,000 --> 01:07:03,440
Speaker 1: reminds me a lot of of how magic works in

1184
01:07:03,640 --> 01:07:07,600
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons because Dungeons Dragons you basically have three

1185
01:07:07,600 --> 01:07:10,880
Speaker 1: different types of magic users. You have the warlock who

1186
01:07:10,920 --> 01:07:14,040
Speaker 1: works their magic via enslavement to a god or god

1187
01:07:14,080 --> 01:07:16,640
Speaker 1: like being. So that's a bicamera being. Yeah, yeah, that

1188
01:07:16,640 --> 01:07:21,080
Speaker 1: would be the bicamera experience. A sorcerer learns to better

1189
01:07:21,320 --> 01:07:25,440
Speaker 1: channel magic that naturally emerges from their being. So this

1190
01:07:25,520 --> 01:07:28,440
Speaker 1: is like a transitional being. This is like one of

1191
01:07:28,480 --> 01:07:31,360
Speaker 1: the oracles in the late antiquity. Yeah, like it still

1192
01:07:31,360 --> 01:07:33,720
Speaker 1: flows through them, it still can flow through them, but

1193
01:07:33,880 --> 01:07:36,560
Speaker 1: they have to manage it. And then finally you have

1194
01:07:36,680 --> 01:07:39,400
Speaker 1: the arcane wizard, who has to master the workings of

1195
01:07:39,440 --> 01:07:43,000
Speaker 1: magic through study and academic effort alone. So these are

1196
01:07:43,120 --> 01:07:46,080
Speaker 1: the pathetic poets of the modern era who have to

1197
01:07:46,160 --> 01:07:50,280
Speaker 1: consciously compose their works exactly. Yeah, and uh, you know,

1198
01:07:50,560 --> 01:07:53,280
Speaker 1: in the same way that within Dungeons and Dragons you

1199
01:07:53,320 --> 01:07:55,240
Speaker 1: can you can have that, you can have sort of

1200
01:07:55,280 --> 01:07:57,840
Speaker 1: the attitudes of what the wizard is. And this is

1201
01:07:57,880 --> 01:08:01,560
Speaker 1: also kind of based on attitudes involving chews and wizards

1202
01:08:01,600 --> 01:08:04,960
Speaker 1: and in the real world in earlier periods. But there's

1203
01:08:05,000 --> 01:08:07,360
Speaker 1: the idea that the the arcane wizard is a master

1204
01:08:07,960 --> 01:08:12,920
Speaker 1: of of these forces, where lesser models are um you know,

1205
01:08:12,960 --> 01:08:15,880
Speaker 1: the magic is a master of them, which is, you know,

1206
01:08:15,960 --> 01:08:19,240
Speaker 1: not unlike the comparison between the bicamera and the conscious

1207
01:08:19,320 --> 01:08:22,639
Speaker 1: human right, And of course the idea is as uh

1208
01:08:22,840 --> 01:08:26,720
Speaker 1: conscious society exists for longer and longer, and the bicameral

1209
01:08:26,760 --> 01:08:30,000
Speaker 1: society goes farther and farther into the past. Our ability

1210
01:08:30,040 --> 01:08:32,519
Speaker 1: to access these states of consciousness, to be an oracle,

1211
01:08:32,680 --> 01:08:35,479
Speaker 1: or to be a muse possessed poet gets further and

1212
01:08:35,520 --> 01:08:39,560
Speaker 1: further from our grasp. Exactly he writes, And then the

1213
01:08:39,640 --> 01:08:43,439
Speaker 1: muses hush and freeze into myths, nymphs and shepherds dance

1214
01:08:43,520 --> 01:08:47,200
Speaker 1: no more. Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure

1215
01:08:47,240 --> 01:08:51,840
Speaker 1: inspiration gasps and dies into invention. The oral becomes written

1216
01:08:51,880 --> 01:08:54,280
Speaker 1: by the poet himself, and written it should be added

1217
01:08:54,479 --> 01:08:57,720
Speaker 1: by his right hand, worked by his left hemisphere. The

1218
01:08:57,800 --> 01:09:01,439
Speaker 1: muses have become imaginary and in in their silence as

1219
01:09:01,479 --> 01:09:05,400
Speaker 1: a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind. That

1220
01:09:05,560 --> 01:09:08,720
Speaker 1: is gorgeous. Yeah, And the whole book is filled with

1221
01:09:08,760 --> 01:09:11,920
Speaker 1: passages like that that're just beautifully written and uh and

1222
01:09:11,920 --> 01:09:15,760
Speaker 1: and and just really drive home, often emotionally, the subject matter.

1223
01:09:15,920 --> 01:09:18,120
Speaker 1: That's another reason I guess I got to be skeptical

1224
01:09:18,160 --> 01:09:22,120
Speaker 1: and suspicious of this hypothesis is that it's so well written.

1225
01:09:22,240 --> 01:09:25,000
Speaker 1: I feel like I need to be especially cautious about it.

1226
01:09:25,040 --> 01:09:27,680
Speaker 1: Like he he communicates it so well and it's so

1227
01:09:27,760 --> 01:09:30,840
Speaker 1: beautiful in the book that that it's like getting an

1228
01:09:30,920 --> 01:09:34,600
Speaker 1: unfair advantage as a scientific hypothesis. Yeah, yeah, I I

1229
01:09:34,880 --> 01:09:38,280
Speaker 1: can definitely get that argument. Maybe that's why most scientific

1230
01:09:38,280 --> 01:09:41,160
Speaker 1: papers are so horrible to read, Like why you know,

1231
01:09:41,360 --> 01:09:43,479
Speaker 1: it's really rare you come across the one that's really

1232
01:09:43,520 --> 01:09:46,920
Speaker 1: well well written, And it's because, well, maybe maybe you

1233
01:09:46,960 --> 01:09:50,280
Speaker 1: shouldn't let your writing skills make it stand out more

1234
01:09:50,320 --> 01:09:55,400
Speaker 1: than the theory itself deserves in terms of content. All right, Well,

1235
01:09:55,400 --> 01:10:00,320
Speaker 1: what's another lingering example of of the bicameral mind. Hey,

1236
01:10:00,360 --> 01:10:02,040
Speaker 1: can you think of a state in which people have

1237
01:10:02,160 --> 01:10:06,200
Speaker 1: altered consciousness or reduced consciousness and a tendency to obey

1238
01:10:06,320 --> 01:10:09,680
Speaker 1: verbal commands. Who sounds a lot like hypnosis to me.

1239
01:10:09,920 --> 01:10:12,000
Speaker 1: Ding ding ding. There you go. Now, we've talked about

1240
01:10:12,080 --> 01:10:15,559
Speaker 1: hypnosis on the podcast before, but just to reiterate what's

1241
01:10:15,600 --> 01:10:18,160
Speaker 1: going on with hypnosis is people seem to have wildly

1242
01:10:18,160 --> 01:10:22,000
Speaker 1: differing levels of susceptibility to hypnosis. Some people just can't

1243
01:10:22,040 --> 01:10:25,559
Speaker 1: be hypnotized, but for those that can, hypnosis does seem

1244
01:10:25,640 --> 01:10:28,559
Speaker 1: to be a genuine altered state of consciousness at some

1245
01:10:28,680 --> 01:10:31,960
Speaker 1: level in which the body is relaxed, focus is narrowed,

1246
01:10:32,080 --> 01:10:37,080
Speaker 1: inhibition is lowered, consciousness is reduced, and verbal obedience is increased.

1247
01:10:37,520 --> 01:10:41,240
Speaker 1: Sounds kind of like the model of bicamerality. With a

1248
01:10:41,280 --> 01:10:43,880
Speaker 1: lot of these public demonstrations of hypnosis that you see

1249
01:10:43,880 --> 01:10:45,360
Speaker 1: you know, or that you're on a cruise ship and

1250
01:10:45,360 --> 01:10:48,040
Speaker 1: somebody's doing a show. I think people following the hypnotist

1251
01:10:48,080 --> 01:10:52,080
Speaker 1: commands is not necessarily always a highly altered state of consciousness.

1252
01:10:52,120 --> 01:10:55,120
Speaker 1: It could be partially just a performance brought on by

1253
01:10:55,200 --> 01:10:58,120
Speaker 1: social pressure. But this is actually part of Jane's theory.

1254
01:10:58,439 --> 01:11:01,480
Speaker 1: He talks about the idea of collect of cognitive imperative.

1255
01:11:01,800 --> 01:11:05,680
Speaker 1: Group pressure enables different states of mind, and this is

1256
01:11:05,760 --> 01:11:11,120
Speaker 1: why you can have, uh, basically a culture dictating which

1257
01:11:11,200 --> 01:11:15,040
Speaker 1: mindset you adopt, the bicameral mindset or the conscious mindset.

1258
01:11:15,320 --> 01:11:17,320
Speaker 1: And it's also the reason that you can, through these

1259
01:11:17,320 --> 01:11:20,800
Speaker 1: elaborate rituals, say like the Oracle at Delphi, produce these

1260
01:11:21,240 --> 01:11:26,360
Speaker 1: these amazing uh you know, metered prophecies out of your

1261
01:11:26,520 --> 01:11:30,000
Speaker 1: right brain because group cognitive pressure is putting you into

1262
01:11:30,000 --> 01:11:33,479
Speaker 1: that mindset. And so he's saying hypnosis maybe maybe in

1263
01:11:33,520 --> 01:11:37,360
Speaker 1: fact a modern reapproximation of the left brain operation of

1264
01:11:37,360 --> 01:11:40,599
Speaker 1: a bicameral person. But instead of having the right brain talk,

1265
01:11:40,680 --> 01:11:44,320
Speaker 1: you're having the hypnotists talk. And again this makes me

1266
01:11:44,360 --> 01:11:47,520
Speaker 1: think of yoga classes where I just let the individual

1267
01:11:47,600 --> 01:11:49,760
Speaker 1: tell me what to do for an hour and a

1268
01:11:49,800 --> 01:11:53,840
Speaker 1: half and it it feels so liberating. Now, another big

1269
01:11:53,880 --> 01:11:56,439
Speaker 1: area that the Jane spends a lot of time with

1270
01:11:56,800 --> 01:12:00,760
Speaker 1: is the condition of schizophrenia. Now, this is obviously going

1271
01:12:00,800 --> 01:12:03,240
Speaker 1: to be very relevant because it's one of the features

1272
01:12:03,240 --> 01:12:07,840
Speaker 1: of schizophrenia is hallucinations, especially auditory hallucinations. Yeah, it is

1273
01:12:07,840 --> 01:12:12,440
Speaker 1: a condition defined by voices, by auditory hallucination, voices that criticize,

1274
01:12:12,600 --> 01:12:16,479
Speaker 1: voices that tell us what to do it with under

1275
01:12:16,479 --> 01:12:19,320
Speaker 1: the tent of the bicameral mind hypothesis. It would seem

1276
01:12:19,360 --> 01:12:23,400
Speaker 1: to line up pretty well. And uh, and so James

1277
01:12:23,479 --> 01:12:29,280
Speaker 1: argues that schizophrenia is essentially a relapse into the bicameral mind. Now,

1278
01:12:29,320 --> 01:12:31,880
Speaker 1: he argues that in the sculptures, literature, murals, and other

1279
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:35,880
Speaker 1: artifacts of the great bare bicameral civilizations, we do not

1280
01:12:36,040 --> 01:12:39,559
Speaker 1: see instances of individuals who suffer madness in a way

1281
01:12:39,600 --> 01:12:44,559
Speaker 1: that differentiates them from their fellow humans. There's idiocy, but

1282
01:12:44,560 --> 01:12:47,800
Speaker 1: but he says, there's no madness. Uh. They're like, there's

1283
01:12:47,800 --> 01:12:50,280
Speaker 1: no insanity in the Iliad, for instance. Yeah. Now by

1284
01:12:50,280 --> 01:12:52,880
Speaker 1: the time we get to Plato, Plato speaks of madness,

1285
01:12:52,960 --> 01:12:56,519
Speaker 1: but in these ancient civilizations, Jane says, you don't see it. Yeah.

1286
01:12:56,520 --> 01:12:59,040
Speaker 1: He says that the first instance of insanity discussed in

1287
01:12:59,080 --> 01:13:03,040
Speaker 1: the conscious period, uh is in Phaedrus or Plato calls

1288
01:13:03,040 --> 01:13:06,559
Speaker 1: insanity quote a divine gift and the source of the

1289
01:13:06,680 --> 01:13:11,040
Speaker 1: chiefest blessings granted two men. And then he goes on

1290
01:13:11,120 --> 01:13:14,040
Speaker 1: to a Plato ends up identifying four types of madness.

1291
01:13:14,360 --> 01:13:16,599
Speaker 1: And you'll and just again think of the bicameral mind

1292
01:13:16,640 --> 01:13:20,480
Speaker 1: and reference to all of these prophetic madness ritual madness,

1293
01:13:20,600 --> 01:13:24,719
Speaker 1: poetic madness, and of course the erotic madness. Huh okay,

1294
01:13:24,760 --> 01:13:26,080
Speaker 1: so these kind of line up with some of the

1295
01:13:26,080 --> 01:13:31,080
Speaker 1: categories we've just been talking about. The Greeks wrote on paranoia, uh,

1296
01:13:31,360 --> 01:13:36,280
Speaker 1: he argues, which is literally having of two minds. Over time, however,

1297
01:13:36,360 --> 01:13:38,760
Speaker 1: madness is no longer and no longer has these sort

1298
01:13:38,760 --> 01:13:43,160
Speaker 1: of divine categories that Plato identified, But it becomes a

1299
01:13:43,240 --> 01:13:45,639
Speaker 1: part of an ill, a part of a disease. There's something,

1300
01:13:45,680 --> 01:13:48,000
Speaker 1: there's an ailment at work with the human being. Now

1301
01:13:48,040 --> 01:13:51,879
Speaker 1: this maybe James thinks, as there is more conscious takeover

1302
01:13:51,960 --> 01:13:55,800
Speaker 1: of society by the conscious culture, that it becomes untenable

1303
01:13:55,920 --> 01:14:01,000
Speaker 1: for for bicameral society to exist and work within itself.

1304
01:14:01,320 --> 01:14:04,559
Speaker 1: So people who experience the bicameral mindset within a conscious

1305
01:14:04,560 --> 01:14:08,679
Speaker 1: culture have they essentially have no cover, They have no

1306
01:14:08,680 --> 01:14:12,840
Speaker 1: nobody to like be part of their culture right now.

1307
01:14:12,880 --> 01:14:15,439
Speaker 1: He also points out that the voices of schizophrenia these

1308
01:14:15,439 --> 01:14:17,960
Speaker 1: tend to be when I say the voices of schizophrenia,

1309
01:14:18,000 --> 01:14:21,720
Speaker 1: the voice is heard by individuals with schizophrenia, Uh, they

1310
01:14:21,760 --> 01:14:25,000
Speaker 1: tend to be authority figures created out of cultural expectation.

1311
01:14:25,640 --> 01:14:28,000
Speaker 1: And the hallucinations also seem to have access to more

1312
01:14:28,040 --> 01:14:31,040
Speaker 1: memories in the patient. There in many cases and in

1313
01:14:31,080 --> 01:14:34,840
Speaker 1: many cases they replace thought. The they frequently take on

1314
01:14:34,920 --> 01:14:38,800
Speaker 1: religious overtones because he says the condition emerges from the

1315
01:14:38,840 --> 01:14:41,880
Speaker 1: neurological structures bound to the birth of religious thought to

1316
01:14:41,920 --> 01:14:45,880
Speaker 1: begin with right, and he says that the there's also

1317
01:14:45,920 --> 01:14:49,840
Speaker 1: a frequency of religious experience overall in the waking state

1318
01:14:50,280 --> 01:14:54,760
Speaker 1: for human consciousness, the the hypnopompic state that is often

1319
01:14:54,760 --> 01:14:58,040
Speaker 1: accompanied by vivid, lingering imagery. We've discussed this in terms

1320
01:14:58,080 --> 01:15:03,400
Speaker 1: of sleep paralysis and supernatural experience before. James writes that

1321
01:15:03,439 --> 01:15:06,200
Speaker 1: these parts of the brain are quote released from their

1322
01:15:06,240 --> 01:15:10,720
Speaker 1: normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia

1323
01:15:10,760 --> 01:15:15,000
Speaker 1: and particularized into experience. This is also telling. He points

1324
01:15:15,040 --> 01:15:18,120
Speaker 1: to the relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person.

1325
01:15:18,600 --> 01:15:21,719
Speaker 1: Think again to our discussions of eye and me. There's

1326
01:15:21,760 --> 01:15:25,240
Speaker 1: this draw a person test or adapt test, and it's

1327
01:15:25,320 --> 01:15:29,320
Speaker 1: used to help identify schizophrenia and other conditions by asking

1328
01:15:29,360 --> 01:15:31,840
Speaker 1: the individual to draw a person. Now, if you have

1329
01:15:31,920 --> 01:15:35,720
Speaker 1: trouble drawing a whole person, that kind of makes me

1330
01:15:35,760 --> 01:15:39,040
Speaker 1: think about those disembodied body parts you talked about With

1331
01:15:39,120 --> 01:15:42,080
Speaker 1: reference to the iliad and UH. And I have to

1332
01:15:42,120 --> 01:15:44,080
Speaker 1: point out this is another thing I see my son

1333
01:15:44,200 --> 01:15:47,800
Speaker 1: having to do on kindergarten tests and UH in evaluations

1334
01:15:47,880 --> 01:15:50,920
Speaker 1: draw a person and and see I mean they're also

1335
01:15:50,920 --> 01:15:52,720
Speaker 1: looking to see with what degree of accuracy you can

1336
01:15:52,800 --> 01:15:56,760
Speaker 1: pull them together. But but yeah, in this case, are

1337
01:15:56,800 --> 01:16:00,240
Speaker 1: you able to draw a complete person at all? Now,

1338
01:16:00,280 --> 01:16:02,360
Speaker 1: not all people who have schizophrenia are going to have

1339
01:16:02,439 --> 01:16:05,559
Speaker 1: trouble drawing a person, right, but when they do it

1340
01:16:05,800 --> 01:16:11,400
Speaker 1: is UH is extremely diagnostic. Also with schizophrenia, narratization can

1341
01:16:11,439 --> 01:16:15,839
Speaker 1: also become impossible. You see these like fractured self stories rtues.

1342
01:16:16,760 --> 01:16:20,679
Speaker 1: And then there's also body image boundary disturbance or boundary loss.

1343
01:16:20,920 --> 01:16:23,960
Speaker 1: And this again this ties into this UH, this lost

1344
01:16:24,320 --> 01:16:29,520
Speaker 1: sense of I or me. And remember too that schizophrenia

1345
01:16:29,640 --> 01:16:34,120
Speaker 1: has a genetic inherited basis to the underlying biochemistry. Natural

1346
01:16:34,160 --> 01:16:37,559
Speaker 1: selection James Argue would have favored it for a while.

1347
01:16:37,760 --> 01:16:41,200
Speaker 1: There's a certain tirelessness in schizophrenic individuals. They seem to

1348
01:16:41,200 --> 01:16:44,519
Speaker 1: have a lot of energy, and in the bicameral individual

1349
01:16:44,600 --> 01:16:46,920
Speaker 1: this would have become this would have become very important

1350
01:16:47,200 --> 01:16:50,559
Speaker 1: if you were say building pyramids or are there great works? Yeah,

1351
01:16:50,600 --> 01:16:52,240
Speaker 1: I mean we were talking about one of the advantages,

1352
01:16:52,320 --> 01:16:54,360
Speaker 1: or one of the possible advantages of a bi cameral

1353
01:16:54,439 --> 01:16:57,040
Speaker 1: mind would be mental endurance, much more so than a

1354
01:16:57,080 --> 01:17:00,120
Speaker 1: conscious person could muster. So James basically says that the

1355
01:17:00,160 --> 01:17:03,680
Speaker 1: modern schizophrenic is an individual that's essentially in search of

1356
01:17:03,720 --> 01:17:08,160
Speaker 1: a bicameral culture quote, but he retains usually some part

1357
01:17:08,240 --> 01:17:12,200
Speaker 1: of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive

1358
01:17:12,240 --> 01:17:15,679
Speaker 1: mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control

1359
01:17:15,760 --> 01:17:18,400
Speaker 1: in the middle of a mental organization in which the

1360
01:17:18,479 --> 01:17:22,080
Speaker 1: hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is

1361
01:17:22,120 --> 01:17:25,360
Speaker 1: a mind barred to his environment, waiting on God's in

1362
01:17:25,360 --> 01:17:30,439
Speaker 1: a godless world. Okay, So you convinced yet, Joe. I mean,

1363
01:17:30,760 --> 01:17:33,959
Speaker 1: it's tough because I do find his argument very compelling,

1364
01:17:34,720 --> 01:17:37,439
Speaker 1: but it just may be the case that he was

1365
01:17:37,479 --> 01:17:40,679
Speaker 1: wrong about how about some of the evidence that he claims,

1366
01:17:40,760 --> 01:17:43,400
Speaker 1: or about how he interprets some of that evidence. So

1367
01:17:44,400 --> 01:17:47,880
Speaker 1: I don't know. I find the bicameral mind thesis very

1368
01:17:47,920 --> 01:17:51,200
Speaker 1: interesting and very compelling, but I do not consider myself

1369
01:17:51,280 --> 01:17:54,400
Speaker 1: convinced that it is correct true and with like with

1370
01:17:54,439 --> 01:17:57,559
Speaker 1: the schizophrenia evidence, for instance, is this is this truly

1371
01:17:58,240 --> 01:18:02,360
Speaker 1: more evidence in supported by cameral mind theory, or is

1372
01:18:02,439 --> 01:18:07,160
Speaker 1: this schizophrenia as explained with bicameral mind. Yeah. I mean

1373
01:18:07,240 --> 01:18:09,360
Speaker 1: one way you could look at the bicameral mind is

1374
01:18:09,400 --> 01:18:12,080
Speaker 1: you could say it's a theory that explains a lot,

1375
01:18:12,240 --> 01:18:15,440
Speaker 1: or you could say that it is a very interesting,

1376
01:18:15,560 --> 01:18:19,960
Speaker 1: carefully conducted story that's overlaid on lots of evidence that

1377
01:18:20,000 --> 01:18:23,280
Speaker 1: we already knew about. So what would be really interesting

1378
01:18:23,280 --> 01:18:27,240
Speaker 1: about it would be can it predict new discoveries like,

1379
01:18:27,360 --> 01:18:31,080
Speaker 1: based on the assumption of the bicameral mind hypothesis, would

1380
01:18:31,120 --> 01:18:33,360
Speaker 1: you be able to predict will find X, Y and

1381
01:18:33,439 --> 01:18:37,479
Speaker 1: z about the ancient world and about neuroscientific discoveries in

1382
01:18:37,520 --> 01:18:40,920
Speaker 1: the future, say with you know, uh a neuroimaging, And

1383
01:18:41,040 --> 01:18:43,240
Speaker 1: that would be a real good way of testing whether

1384
01:18:43,320 --> 01:18:45,720
Speaker 1: it has any predictive power and thus whether we can

1385
01:18:45,760 --> 01:18:48,240
Speaker 1: have any confidence that it will continue to have predictive

1386
01:18:48,240 --> 01:18:50,640
Speaker 1: power in the future, which is pretty much synonymous with

1387
01:18:50,680 --> 01:18:53,040
Speaker 1: saying there's something to it that it might be true.

1388
01:18:53,920 --> 01:18:55,920
Speaker 1: Uh So I tried to look up you know what

1389
01:18:55,960 --> 01:18:58,280
Speaker 1: if people said about it and the theory. It's had

1390
01:18:58,360 --> 01:19:00,960
Speaker 1: lots of critics, It has lots of people, you know,

1391
01:19:00,960 --> 01:19:03,880
Speaker 1: it's always been controversial ever since it was first introduced.

1392
01:19:04,240 --> 01:19:07,120
Speaker 1: It's had supporters. Some people think that it's uh, it's

1393
01:19:07,200 --> 01:19:10,040
Speaker 1: really interesting, there's something to it. Some people think it

1394
01:19:10,160 --> 01:19:13,639
Speaker 1: might shed some light on some issues, even if it's wrong. Overall,

1395
01:19:14,120 --> 01:19:16,160
Speaker 1: it's had a lot of people who think it's just bunk.

1396
01:19:16,320 --> 01:19:20,400
Speaker 1: So you know, there's opinions all over the place. One

1397
01:19:20,439 --> 01:19:23,320
Speaker 1: paper I found that I thought summarized well some of

1398
01:19:23,360 --> 01:19:27,200
Speaker 1: the neuro scientific evidence and implications is a paper by

1399
01:19:27,280 --> 01:19:30,640
Speaker 1: Leo Share published in the Journal of Psychology or Psychiatry

1400
01:19:30,640 --> 01:19:33,640
Speaker 1: and Neuroscience in two thousand. UH. Leo Share is a

1401
01:19:33,640 --> 01:19:36,240
Speaker 1: professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai and New York, and

1402
01:19:36,320 --> 01:19:38,880
Speaker 1: in the short piece he collects some relevant reactions to

1403
01:19:38,960 --> 01:19:43,320
Speaker 1: Jane's hypothesis and argument. Uh. Some reactions to Jane's include

1404
01:19:43,360 --> 01:19:46,839
Speaker 1: He finds that in nine seven, Assade and Shapiro published

1405
01:19:46,840 --> 01:19:50,400
Speaker 1: a criticism of Jane's work in the American Journal of Psychiatry,

1406
01:19:50,840 --> 01:19:53,640
Speaker 1: and they write, quote, the difficulty which we find with

1407
01:19:53,760 --> 01:19:56,519
Speaker 1: Jane's hypothesis is that the conclusions he draws have a

1408
01:19:56,600 --> 01:20:01,600
Speaker 1: questionable basis in neuropsychiatric fact and quote. If Jane's hypothesis

1409
01:20:01,600 --> 01:20:05,519
Speaker 1: were to coincide more accurately with anatomic fact facts about

1410
01:20:05,560 --> 01:20:08,439
Speaker 1: what we find in the body. The right temporal area

1411
01:20:08,520 --> 01:20:12,240
Speaker 1: in question would more likely coincide with Broca's expressive area,

1412
01:20:12,560 --> 01:20:16,400
Speaker 1: a notion that does not conveniently fit Jane's theoretical constructs.

1413
01:20:17,040 --> 01:20:20,320
Speaker 1: Assad and Shapiro. Shapiro also claim, according to Share that

1414
01:20:20,400 --> 01:20:24,679
Speaker 1: quote lesions of the right sided areas corresponding to Broca's

1415
01:20:24,720 --> 01:20:28,120
Speaker 1: and Wernicke's areas seem more related to the negative symptoms

1416
01:20:28,120 --> 01:20:32,720
Speaker 1: of schizophrenia, like restricted affect than to the positive hallucinatory

1417
01:20:32,800 --> 01:20:37,200
Speaker 1: symptoms unquote, and they also claim that Jane's oversimplified the

1418
01:20:37,200 --> 01:20:43,240
Speaker 1: phenomenology of hallucinatory experience to make them fit his hypothesis better. Um.

1419
01:20:43,280 --> 01:20:47,720
Speaker 1: Also in ninet, the International Journal of Psychophysiology published a

1420
01:20:47,800 --> 01:20:51,240
Speaker 1: letter that wrote, quote, after many years of psychophysiological studies

1421
01:20:51,479 --> 01:20:54,200
Speaker 1: mainly carried out in the field, if evoked to neurocognitive

1422
01:20:54,240 --> 01:20:57,519
Speaker 1: bioelectrical events, I feel I can safely state that the

1423
01:20:57,560 --> 01:21:01,840
Speaker 1: concepts of the mind slash brain and brain slash behavior dualisms,

1424
01:21:01,880 --> 01:21:06,360
Speaker 1: with their ancient, widespread and persistent philosophy, are now all outdated,

1425
01:21:06,400 --> 01:21:09,439
Speaker 1: as are those of the bicameral mind or the double brain.

1426
01:21:10,200 --> 01:21:13,639
Speaker 1: Then again, however, Share says in nineteen a paper published

1427
01:21:13,640 --> 01:21:16,880
Speaker 1: in The Lancet by Olan claimed that research in neuroimaging

1428
01:21:17,360 --> 01:21:21,400
Speaker 1: has quote illuminated and confirmed the importance of Jane's hypothesis.

1429
01:21:21,800 --> 01:21:25,080
Speaker 1: And this research includes a paper in The Lancet nine

1430
01:21:25,800 --> 01:21:28,320
Speaker 1: by Lennox at All in which a right handed person

1431
01:21:28,400 --> 01:21:33,400
Speaker 1: with schizophrenia underwent neuroimaging during hallucinations and the authors found

1432
01:21:33,439 --> 01:21:36,680
Speaker 1: that the auditory hallucinations occurred in the right hemisphere but

1433
01:21:36,760 --> 01:21:40,440
Speaker 1: not the left hemisphere, which would match up with Jane's predictions,

1434
01:21:40,479 --> 01:21:44,559
Speaker 1: the predictions made by the bicameral mind hypothesis. So I'd

1435
01:21:44,600 --> 01:21:46,840
Speaker 1: say it's still in the realm of something that is

1436
01:21:47,000 --> 01:21:51,680
Speaker 1: interesting but definitely not proven. But just imagine how fascinating

1437
01:21:51,680 --> 01:21:54,160
Speaker 1: it would be if more and more studies start lining

1438
01:21:54,240 --> 01:21:57,280
Speaker 1: up with stuff that could be predicted directly by the

1439
01:21:57,280 --> 01:22:01,479
Speaker 1: bicameral mind hypothesis. Indeed, Yeah, I mean, that's that's the

1440
01:22:01,680 --> 01:22:04,559
Speaker 1: great thing about the about this particular hypothesis is that

1441
01:22:04,800 --> 01:22:07,000
Speaker 1: we can continue to study it. We can continue to

1442
01:22:07,080 --> 01:22:11,360
Speaker 1: see how how it potentially lines up with their modern

1443
01:22:11,439 --> 01:22:15,040
Speaker 1: scientific understanding of consciousness and the brain. So yeah, I

1444
01:22:15,040 --> 01:22:17,000
Speaker 1: guess we can start wrapping up here. But I want

1445
01:22:17,000 --> 01:22:19,320
Speaker 1: to say in the end, though I'm not convinced by it,

1446
01:22:19,400 --> 01:22:23,559
Speaker 1: I'm not advocating it as true. It's fascinating, very well argued,

1447
01:22:24,160 --> 01:22:26,600
Speaker 1: I would say, arguably quite brilliant in the way it

1448
01:22:26,600 --> 01:22:29,960
Speaker 1: pulls from so many disciplines into a coherent picture of

1449
01:22:30,040 --> 01:22:34,800
Speaker 1: a cross disciplinary hypothesis. But can't yet endorse it. Yeah, yeah,

1450
01:22:34,800 --> 01:22:37,320
Speaker 1: I would, I would agree, But it is it is

1451
01:22:37,360 --> 01:22:39,960
Speaker 1: fascinating to use it as a thought exercise for looking

1452
01:22:40,000 --> 01:22:42,720
Speaker 1: back on past cultures. And uh, you know, after I

1453
01:22:42,760 --> 01:22:45,160
Speaker 1: was reading it, I kept I was wondering, well, why

1454
01:22:45,200 --> 01:22:48,200
Speaker 1: don't we see this reference to more works of fiction. Well,

1455
01:22:48,439 --> 01:22:50,920
Speaker 1: it turns out it was apparently one of the key

1456
01:22:50,920 --> 01:22:54,479
Speaker 1: influences on Neil stephen snow Crash, which we mentioned in

1457
01:22:54,479 --> 01:22:57,479
Speaker 1: our Tower of Babble episode. It's a cyberpunk classic of

1458
01:22:57,560 --> 01:23:02,519
Speaker 1: that involves a linguistic momentic weapons um which you know,

1459
01:23:02,520 --> 01:23:04,479
Speaker 1: go back and listen to that episode of certainly reads

1460
01:23:04,520 --> 01:23:06,760
Speaker 1: snow Crash if you want more than that. But I

1461
01:23:06,840 --> 01:23:09,920
Speaker 1: was not familiar with this book. There is a two

1462
01:23:09,960 --> 01:23:14,080
Speaker 1: thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The Rage of Achilles,

1463
01:23:14,760 --> 01:23:17,120
Speaker 1: and get this it's a novel of the Trojan War

1464
01:23:17,640 --> 01:23:22,760
Speaker 1: told within the confines of the bicameral mind hypothesis. So

1465
01:23:23,000 --> 01:23:27,560
Speaker 1: Odysseus is a conscious modern man in this and Achilles

1466
01:23:27,680 --> 01:23:31,480
Speaker 1: is a bicameral killing machine. That is a brilliant concept

1467
01:23:31,520 --> 01:23:34,559
Speaker 1: for a novel. And if there's any truth to Jane's vision,

1468
01:23:34,600 --> 01:23:37,160
Speaker 1: this might have actually been possible. Like during the long

1469
01:23:37,280 --> 01:23:41,000
Speaker 1: slow breakdown to the bicameral mind, conscious people and bicameral

1470
01:23:41,000 --> 01:23:43,719
Speaker 1: people would have had to encounter and deal with one another.

1471
01:23:44,280 --> 01:23:48,479
Speaker 1: And can you just imagine all the difficulty that would create. Yeah,

1472
01:23:48,720 --> 01:23:52,080
Speaker 1: but for both sides, because on one hand, the conscious

1473
01:23:52,160 --> 01:23:55,720
Speaker 1: human is capable of deception that the bicameral human has

1474
01:23:55,760 --> 01:23:58,360
Speaker 1: no ability to. Like basically comes down to that that

1475
01:23:58,479 --> 01:24:02,439
Speaker 1: duel in a game of throwing owns between the Mountain

1476
01:24:02,680 --> 01:24:06,240
Speaker 1: and uh, what's his name? The Ober and Martel. Yeah,

1477
01:24:06,280 --> 01:24:09,040
Speaker 1: where one is one is crafty and deceptive and the

1478
01:24:09,080 --> 01:24:13,320
Speaker 1: other one is just pure brute strength and NonStop killing action. Yeah.

1479
01:24:13,400 --> 01:24:16,519
Speaker 1: So you're saying the Mountain is bicameral and the Red

1480
01:24:16,600 --> 01:24:19,160
Speaker 1: Viper of Dorn is conscious. I think so, And really,

1481
01:24:19,200 --> 01:24:24,280
Speaker 1: I mean he only becomes more bicameral. Story progresses. All right,

1482
01:24:24,560 --> 01:24:28,200
Speaker 1: So there you have it. Do you have an anything else, Joe, No,

1483
01:24:28,400 --> 01:24:30,519
Speaker 1: I guess that's it for now. I I found this

1484
01:24:30,560 --> 01:24:33,639
Speaker 1: a really fascinating topic to explore. It's one of those

1485
01:24:33,640 --> 01:24:35,640
Speaker 1: that I've said this a few times now, but I

1486
01:24:35,680 --> 01:24:37,800
Speaker 1: just want to stress again. It's like I feel this

1487
01:24:37,880 --> 01:24:42,320
Speaker 1: conflict within me about ideas that are so cool. I

1488
01:24:42,360 --> 01:24:45,280
Speaker 1: feel like I have to be especially suspicious of them,

1489
01:24:45,920 --> 01:24:48,559
Speaker 1: Like the more interesting they are, the more I feel

1490
01:24:48,560 --> 01:24:50,920
Speaker 1: like I have to really check my desire for it

1491
01:24:50,960 --> 01:24:55,640
Speaker 1: to be true. Yeah, especially an idea that's this expansive.

1492
01:24:55,800 --> 01:24:59,080
Speaker 1: The concerns the history of our species and our civilizations

1493
01:24:59,560 --> 01:25:02,280
Speaker 1: and the very nature of consciousness. So it's not like

1494
01:25:02,640 --> 01:25:05,280
Speaker 1: buying into a single idea like, oh, well, actually I

1495
01:25:05,280 --> 01:25:08,559
Speaker 1: think the Chinese discovered North America, you know, before the

1496
01:25:08,680 --> 01:25:11,320
Speaker 1: Vikings something like that, which I'm not saying that doesn't

1497
01:25:11,320 --> 01:25:16,040
Speaker 1: have large historical ramifications, but it's not something that just

1498
01:25:16,120 --> 01:25:20,200
Speaker 1: affects the absolute understanding of our species in our way

1499
01:25:20,200 --> 01:25:23,840
Speaker 1: of thinking. All right, well, of course we'd love to

1500
01:25:23,840 --> 01:25:25,559
Speaker 1: hear from all of you out there. What are your

1501
01:25:25,640 --> 01:25:29,280
Speaker 1: thoughts on the bicameral mind. Do you buy into it?

1502
01:25:29,560 --> 01:25:31,680
Speaker 1: Do you do you think it's complete bunk. Do you

1503
01:25:31,880 --> 01:25:34,559
Speaker 1: have some sort of middle ground there? And what are

1504
01:25:34,600 --> 01:25:38,080
Speaker 1: some really cool examples of its utilization in various sorts

1505
01:25:38,120 --> 01:25:40,479
Speaker 1: of fiction that you've encountered. Here's something I would like

1506
01:25:40,520 --> 01:25:44,680
Speaker 1: to employ your imagination on. If this could happen, if

1507
01:25:44,720 --> 01:25:46,320
Speaker 1: you could go from a bi cameral mind to a

1508
01:25:46,360 --> 01:25:50,479
Speaker 1: conscious mind, how much more could human mentality change? Oh? Yeah,

1509
01:25:50,600 --> 01:25:53,120
Speaker 1: Like if you go three thousand years into the future

1510
01:25:53,200 --> 01:25:56,880
Speaker 1: from now, could our mindsets be as different from from

1511
01:25:56,960 --> 01:26:00,000
Speaker 1: hours now as the conscious mind is from the hypothetic

1512
01:26:00,040 --> 01:26:03,280
Speaker 1: call bicameral mind? Yeah? I mean, am I engaging in

1513
01:26:03,320 --> 01:26:06,800
Speaker 1: a bicameral experience when I let my GPS device tell

1514
01:26:06,800 --> 01:26:10,240
Speaker 1: me where to drive? I don't know, you totally relinquished

1515
01:26:10,280 --> 01:26:14,479
Speaker 1: conscious control? Yeah? Almost, It's almost to that level. Uh

1516
01:26:14,720 --> 01:26:17,000
Speaker 1: that I was hanging out with my family over the

1517
01:26:17,000 --> 01:26:19,960
Speaker 1: weekend and my sisters were like asking me, like, why

1518
01:26:19,960 --> 01:26:21,320
Speaker 1: did you make this turn in that it's said of

1519
01:26:21,360 --> 01:26:23,080
Speaker 1: this turn? And I'm like, I just do what the

1520
01:26:23,120 --> 01:26:25,880
Speaker 1: machine tells me to told me to drive into the ocean. Yeah,

1521
01:26:25,920 --> 01:26:29,080
Speaker 1: I put my trust in the machine. It's by and

1522
01:26:29,160 --> 01:26:32,000
Speaker 1: large there's a less uh, there's less of a chance

1523
01:26:32,120 --> 01:26:33,800
Speaker 1: that it will drive me in the ocean. That I

1524
01:26:33,840 --> 01:26:36,920
Speaker 1: will drive me into the ocean. So uh, that's how

1525
01:26:36,920 --> 01:26:39,040
Speaker 1: it shakes out, all right. Well, you can find is

1526
01:26:39,040 --> 01:26:40,960
Speaker 1: It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where

1527
01:26:40,960 --> 01:26:43,960
Speaker 1: you'll find all the episodes that you will find, blog

1528
01:26:44,000 --> 01:26:46,120
Speaker 1: post videos, you will find links out to our verious

1529
01:26:46,120 --> 01:26:50,400
Speaker 1: social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and more. Hey,

1530
01:26:50,439 --> 01:26:54,360
Speaker 1: Facebook has that great uh discussion module group where you

1531
01:26:54,400 --> 01:26:57,040
Speaker 1: can join up and you can uh interact with us,

1532
01:26:57,080 --> 01:27:00,400
Speaker 1: but also other listeners to the show and you can

1533
01:27:00,640 --> 01:27:04,519
Speaker 1: discuss episodes such as these with those individuals. And if

1534
01:27:04,520 --> 01:27:06,559
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with us directly, as always,

1535
01:27:06,560 --> 01:27:08,880
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how

1536
01:27:08,960 --> 01:27:21,920
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands

1537
01:27:21,960 --> 01:27:47,120
Speaker 1: of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com