Stuff You Should Know - Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Psychologist Julian Jaynes came up with a stunning hypothesis in 1976, that human consciousness only developed in the last 3000 years. And he seemed to have proof in ancient texts. Scholars have been picking it apart ever since and today we join the club.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Slash host hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place? Because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life

Tell everybody yeah, everybody About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to frosted tips with the Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts Welcome to stuff you should know a production of I heart radio Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is stuff You should know the ongoing amazing mind-blowing edition

You've been into this stuff lately. What's going on with you? I don't know. I don't know man, but yes, I'm definitely into it lately. It's weird approaching 50 existential crisis I Don't know about crisis. Maybe more like pondering existential pondering. I don't think it's a crisis yet I've still got five years till 50. So give me time. Are you 45? I thought you were 47 I'm 45 and eight ninths Yeah, you got time

Yeah, great. Thank you for that But no, there's no like one thing that's making me say like hey, when did humans become conscious or when did humans become? Intelligent or what do we do if aliens come down like for some reason? It's just maybe a little more appealing to me than it has been in the past lately. I don't know But yes, I'm definitely into this kind of thing right now and this stuff what we're gonna talk about today It's based on a house tough works article that Robert Lam wrote and I'm not at all surprised that Robert Lam is into this But I just want to note that I've heard about this years and years and years ago and have been meaning to do an Article or an episode on it. So I don't want you to think this is something you just stumbled across

This is actually the fruition of years of planning and hope and dreams coming to pass in Maybe the best episode we'll ever make And of course Robert and not Robert Lam the lead singer of the band Chicago Just to make there's another Robert Lam and he was in Chicago Still is in Chicago. Is that Peter Satara stage name? No Satara was the bass player and part lead singer Along with Robert Lam who played keyboards and also sang lead on some and before Terry Kath died

He played guitar and also sang so they had three singers in the early days of Chicago That's just confusing but none of them are our colleague Robert Lam who along with our colleague Joe had been doing stuff to blow your mind for many many years another great show Yeah, and I didn't check but I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that they have their own Episode on this Julie and Jane's bicameral mind I bet they have and we should also shout out philosophy for life psychology today and Frontiers in psychology and I'm gonna make one up Psychology food young okay. I've got two more that aren't made up

late star codex and poster name hazard on the site less wrong It sounds like a great source. It is hazard knows what he's talking about. Oh and one more I'm sorry a guy named Joff Ward or Jeff Ward, but you know when they say yeah, Joff Yeah on medium so all of those combined with Robert Lam's article the coalescent again Probably the greatest episode we'll ever do. Yeah, and I sort of get some of this I think you're gonna help me out some because I do have some questions That I'll just throw out here and there because at times I found myself reading this stuff and going yeah, but isn't that just blank?

Okay, great. I'll do my best to answer and you're probably right when you're thinking that the answer's probably like yes All right. Well, I mean, I guess we should say then that the whole Hypothesis is that we're gonna be kind of breaking down today is Controversial and it's not provable necessarily scientifically speaking. Mm-hmm. So it's sort of one of those I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure definitely into true hypothesis land But it was proposed by a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Janes in the mid 1970s, of course Yeah, the year I was born Yeah, 76 baby

so what he proposed was an answer to a long-standing question and that was When did humans become conscious like when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came along like in the earliest archaic humans? Is it something that came along much later than that and how could we ever possibly answer that? Like what relics have been left in? history In prehistory that would say like hey, this is evidence of of consciousness And Julian Janes took that up and he did it as an outsider

Which was a huge strike against him because automatically Legitimate scientists are like well, I can't build upon this theory possibly this man is in a actually in my field of consciousness studies But the thing is is this this hypothesis is so Well liked it's just roundly like people just like it It's just such an interesting hypothesis that it just won't go away It hasn't gone away and in fact there's like a Julian Janes Institute There's like groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis and what he says in a very small nutshell is that sometime About 1,000 2,000 years ago

Humans became conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today They developed the ability to think about thinking they developed the ability to think about that other people are thinking they developed basically what's called subjective introspection and then as a result of that they Almost automatically gained free will in volition So what he's saying is that if we went back in time in the way back machine Chuck and we met somebody who lived 3,000 years ago 4,000 years ago They would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans that's right and he thinks that it was a learned thing and

And the idea that he throws down is that our our mind our brain is or was rather Very important was Because it no longer is right by cameral Which means split into two parts and we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres of the brain later on but in this case he means split into two parts where you have a Part that makes decisions and a part that follows and that neither one of them were conscious and And here's where I get a little tripped up Okay, right out right out of the gate sure is basically he says that instead of an internal dialogue which

We all have in which indicates a consciousness Like us talking to ourselves us saying things like everything from like, you know, hey I get up and go do this to just internally thinking about things like humans do that instead of that We were sort of like human zombies and that we were creatures of habit We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a tee and whenever something disrupted that behavior Which is when like a conscious mind you would think would speak up that instead of that the

In external agent in this case, they thought they were gods Would enter their brain and create an auditory hallucination Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed that auditory hallucination and that's what helped them get through novel Situations that they didn't have like a basically a prescribed script for you know a mindless Automatic thing something new came along that got in their way. This God would speak to them and say go around that rock It wasn't there yesterday. Don't worry about it. Just go around it and it could be one of their gods It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think one One I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to angels walking beside them

Or and this is really important later on. It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis It could be your local ruler the divine king who's in charge of you and everybody else that you know and love and have Ever lived among it could be that person guiding you in your life, too and the idea is They these people heard this in the same way like you said that we hear our own internal dialogue But they never chalked it up to themselves. It was always coming from the outside All right, here's I guess where I have my first issue kind of grasping this is Is there were no gods speaking to them and guiding them? This was just their internal dialogue

They just didn't know it Yes, yes, yes, there was no gods But to them and this is a really important point to them It definitely was a God talking to them or an ancestor talking to them and in the same way that if if an actual God got into your brain and like was speaking to you and you Responded to it if you could have looked at their brains lighting up presumably in like a wonder machine It would it would respond the same way So it was entirely real to them in the same way that a placebo effect has real effects on your body

This would have been the same thing and then in addition to that it was culturally supported everyone that they knew believed the same thing that the gods were talking to them and So like that just lent support to this idea so that no no one questioned it. It was just that's the way it was Well, so this I guess brings me to Let me macro this out a little bit in my own dumb brain and it may just be 20 a century 21st century person thinking right that I'm engaging in but if the idea is that

Before this there was no consciousness But what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness. They just didn't recognize it as such Is that the whole point was that if you do not recognize it as consciousness? Therefore, you are not conscious. Yes, because you're not Experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just kind of Julian James referred to what this guy's doing now. Okay, so so but the thing is is there's like a lot of Scholarly discussion on like okay, what did James mean exactly how literal was he because he used words like automaton He never called them zombies other people called them like zombies

But that no one talked about zombies back then. No, that's true But well evil dead head or not evil dead living dead night living dead had come out by then. Yeah, but it wasn't like today Okay, no, no, I know they're definitely over So he called them automaton's and it's essentially the same thing that they were they just behaved automatically They didn't stop and think about how they felt they and this is really important to Chuck Of course, they still had feelings. They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group They had feelings about their local ruler. They had feelings about You know

Stubbing their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever It's that they weren't they didn't reflect on their inner life They didn't think about thinking they didn't they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness And in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition of consciousness And then on top of that, he also goes to great lengths to say, hey I understand that you're gonna get all up in a tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious I'm not talking about consciousness in general and I think that you over over estimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives

Okay, how about we take a break? Okay I'm gonna go rip a bong Kidding We'll take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about what lots of other stuff right after this Hey everybody when you're staying at an Airbnb You might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse And the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb dot ca slash host Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place? Because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh god. Seriously. I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband Michael

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life Step by step not another one. Uh-huh kids relationships life in general can get messy You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody Yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen So we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology But from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life in India

It's like smoking you might not smoke But you're gonna get secondhand astrology and lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast Tantric curses major league baseball teams canceled marriages k-pop But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology My whole world can crashing down situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father

And my whole view on astrology It changed Whether you're a skeptic or a believer. I think your ideas are gonna change too All right, so I've kind of read my head around what this guy's saying now. It's uh, I will admit it's a little navel-gazy for me On when it comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses I get a little bit like What's the word Maybe I can be a little too concrete or if the French might Concrete and literal yeah in my thinking

Because it's not you know Friday night in college It like two in the morning kind of discussion, right? So I think that's where I am now But I do think it's very interesting in that he I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting But I think it's interesting that he thought around the first or second millennium BC is when things to him changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of Well eventually language, but specifically metaphor Which is to say that all of a sudden we could make analogies in our brain. We could link things together

we saw ourselves as Almost as if they were characters Mm-hmm ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make his characters Yeah, and that as these things like connected in the brain Then it created just an effect like a domino effect basically. Yeah, where all of a sudden We could work out our own solutions or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions Well, it wasn't God saying a God saying walk around the rock

They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. Yes, but it's but in part of that that also Required them to be able to reflect on the idea like you said that that they were able to now make their own decisions, right? And you said something earlier where you're like, you know, you were talking about your own internal dialogue Where you you think hey, I should get up and go outside for a second Like that's that's different, right? You're thinking about you yourself and you realize that you are thinking about yourself That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time would have thought is Get up and go outside And they would stand up and go outside without questioning because God had just instructed them to do that

So it must be important and they didn't think about where it came from They definitely didn't think it was from themselves and they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it That's Jane's position and that if you compare those two things you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life And it's so different. He said that this is that what we understand is consciousness Just wasn't around until a couple thousand years ago Okay, I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in this pool. Okay, good good But here's the thing it's really important to realize like you said something that you're a literalist, right? That's actually really appropriate to approach this because Julian James one of the very radical things that he did was he took

the ancients literally because when he started looking around and we'll talk more about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts that would prove his Hypothesis or lend support to it at least and he was an expert in ancient languages, right? So he was it was really appropriate he could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian and he took what they were saying when they said things like You know the gods told us to do this that that they thought that the gods told them to do this Not that they were using metaphors so he took them literally on their word and there's a real departure from anybody else Who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying?

Yeah, and I think it's also something we should point out now even though it comes up later in our research is that When you think of an auto I guess an automatic society or a society of automatons That's not to say that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful, you know ancient civilizations that existed But I think his contention is that it was a hive mind all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to Get accomplished and not the conscious mind right and he didn't I don't think he ever used it as like I don't think ever explicitly said that it was an emergent property of a hive mind But that's kind of what he was describing kind of like if you take one stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone

Carriers and multiply that unit by 500 and give it a year you have a ziggurat built That that's just that's just all those people knew what to do They knew their position and their place and they just did it and so yeah You could totally do that with people who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious You could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought I'm above this This work is is not suited for me. I should be doing something else or why is the form and being so mean to me today? Like they didn't think like that under Jane's Hypothesis so they would probably get the work done more

Efficiently at least more quietly. I would guess oh, I mean Consciousness proposes her brought along a whole host of problems. It's true. I imagine If you're the ruling class, I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned About what what is it Janes? Not Jynes Janes. Yeah Janes thought about I love Robert Lam's Janes Addixon joke in here by the way That was mine. Oh, that was yours. Mm-hmm. No way to go. Thanks You said Janes says and then in parentheses you put ha It's pretty good joke, but what Jane said was that

And it's something you mentioned earlier was that consciousness I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that is can largely be Still automatic on a lot of levels. Yeah, and this is from the actual book in 1976 and it's a little little mind-blowing I kind of like it Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of Because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of it's like asking a flat and this is where it kind of comes home to me It's like a asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it So that's where it comes home to me is when you and hey, it's metaphor. So how about that? Mm-hmm

He he lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more Yeah, because you know, wherever the flashlight looks there's light in his light Yeah, and his point is is wherever your conscious mind looks there's consciousness but that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place and Yeah, Robert Lam does uses a really good example of unloading a dishwasher, right? Like when you're unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people who put like all of your knives in one place All of your forks in one part of the basket all your spoons and so on right a maniac in other words sensible human

If you do it like that, it's you can you can just be on autopilot because you've done it so many times But when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time and so in the bicameral mind God would have said I command thee to pick up thine fork butter fingers and you would lean over and pick up the fork and that was that Instead you you might not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically But it's still out of the norm. It's still different You have to kind of think about it a little more than just unloading the dishwasher

Now if you take that dishwasher metaphor Chuck mm-hmm and you realize that It's three five nine thousand years ago. There were no dishwashers. There was no ice cream scoop There was no cookie scoop. There was no avocado splitter. There was nothing like that. Wait, what's that? Is that a thing now? Yeah, you don't know you don't have one of those. No. Oh, I'll send you one. You're missing out It's a it's a multi-tool for cutting avocados Getting the pit out and then slicing them as you scoop them out They're essential as a matter of fact. All right, I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these Okay, I'm gonna get you one for Christmas

So the point is is that like there wasn't a big variety of stuff So there wasn't that many novel situations like we encounter novel situations like almost constantly That's just modern life and that's the basis of James's Like hypothesis that the reason that consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis So it maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every 30 seconds Or maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind of evolved out of that But the point is life was much less complex back then so you could have something like a bicameral mind

You could have somebody who who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't been introduced to enough experience in life and with that experience came the The the fork falling on the floor in other words Yeah, or you know, there's a lot more dishes to put away in much more different dishes to put away rather than just forks You know, okay, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, or you have one fork and you just carry it with you everywhere You know, like you don't have to think about that. There was just less stuff to think about is what I'm saying Well, now you're speaking my language because if I had it my way every member of my family would have One fork one spoon one knife one bowl one cup one plate. Yeah

And they were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away man every time I hear one cup I'm like, there's a joke in there somewhere, but I even if I come up with that I wouldn't be able to say it. Oh Yeah, that's true. All right. So now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit more about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing about this change and So what James was throwing down in 1976 besides apparently a bunch of roach clips was a The emergence of agricultural society is kind of changing everything and that all of a sudden

We are not living in groups of you know, 10 or 12 people that are hunting and gathering where Even if there was sort of a leader within that group, it was very easy to disseminate information and follow that leader Once we started settling down planting and growing things engaging in trade with other people's That that did a lot of things that complicated every process and it meant that societies were much much larger and That rulers couldn't necessarily Speak directly to people anymore Yeah, so the another part not to specific people like they could lay down and eat it and that would get disseminated in other words

right, so like I've read before back when I was an anthropology student that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no more than 30 People like that was the absolute mass and once you reach that you'd split off into two different bands So yeah, like the person in charge was like part of your moment-to-moment life And if you're if you have if you're suddenly in a civilization and you're building a ziggurat for somebody's probably not daining to talk to you and part of Jane's Hypothesis is that this this bicameralism emerged from you know all those new novel situations like learning to plant crops learning to domesticate cows learning to engage in trade and talk to other people that we started to like need direction from the gods more and more and

It started to kind of get faster and faster But in the meantime It was a form of social control because one of the people you could think was talking to you was that local ruler who you were Building the ziggurat for so that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population in check Right and as they got bigger and bigger and they started, you know trading with people like we were saying that You know, that's was sort of the beginning of the end for his Not his bicameral mind, but the bicameral mind and one of the biggest problems with all of that was when we started writing stuff down because all of a sudden

This these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on what to do There was there was now stuff down on paper That you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around and post on the you know on tablets at the walls of the city or whatever and That was all of a sudden you weren't waiting around for a god to tell you what to do. You could just go read that tablet Yeah, so the power that we gave to the gods commands were kind of transferred to The written word and yeah, that seems to have been like the death knell for the bicameral mind, right? And there's something really interesting that's worth pointing out

James apparently didn't have any high hypothesis on what came before the bicameral mind Because he said it started as a result of the increasing Organization that agriculture brought along and that there wasn't bicameral minds before then But he doesn't say what was before then and people even asked him like okay. What about you know? Hunter gatherer societies that are still around today, you know Where would they have gotten consciousness and he never really answered that but it's it's definitely worth pointing out that that's an open question But he basically says bicameralism Or the bicameral mind I should say bicameralism is the Senate in the house

But the bicameral mind lasted from the advent of agriculture about 11,000 years ago till about 2,000 ish Maybe 1,500 or no 3,000 ish years ago. So it was about a 7,000 year span of Bicameral mind and then as life got more and more sophisticated. We started thinking for ourselves and what he says is that language and in particular the written word but also language got more and more Sophisticated and as they got more sophisticated There was more of a potential for us to start thinking in metaphors and metaphors as you said is the basis of

Consciousness and the way we think in Julian Jane's mind and there's actually a lot of support for that Charles may I oh Please so that post by hazard on less wrong. Oh, yeah, let's see what hazard has to say It's called consciousness as metaphor what James has to offer and what hazard says Is that it like hazard just puts out like a paragraph from like an economic report and it's about Recessions in Europe and it talks about Germany plunging into recession or the UK falling deeper into recession or France Emerging from a recession and what hazard points out is that all of these descriptors Imagine a recession as a three-dimensional physical thing that we can entire nations can move into and out of that's not true Recessions aren't three-dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge from them

You can't fall into them, but we just think about it like that and that's metaphor So right we think in metaphors so frequently We don't even recognize it anymore and that was James point that When we gain the ability to think in metaphors we became conscious we started thinking for ourselves We became capable of introspection and it was the evolution of language that led us to that point Like basically it just we just hit a threshold where suddenly language is sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts in our brains and in turn it unlocked consciousness. I mean that makes sense because You know and a metaphor is literally not literal and if you were if you did if that was not a thing yet

Then it chibes with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up to that point Yes, and that that would have been a pretty seismic shift If you can compare like with like, you know all of a sudden yeah, and you even see this in like like movies that are trying to emphasize how Backwards or back in time, you know some group is And they emphasize it by having that group take everything literally usually to comic effect Like in Kingpin when Randy Quaid was an Amish person, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah He took everything literally and it was hilarious hilarity ensued

But it was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was he couldn't he couldn't engage in metaphors He didn't think like that. That's actually based on I don't know whether on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian Jane's hypothesis. Yeah, and you know what that's a nice segue to children Because when you have a human child It's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years. Yeah, and that they don't understand metaphor they don't understand certainly don't understand things like sarcasm and You have to change the way you talk to get little kids because they do take everything so literally and think so literally and

children are our reference are referenced with James at the idea that I Think what age like kids up until the age of five basically Don't really have much of a human consciousness And it's and you know the idea that children are just little narcissist walking around is a fun joke But it's true because they don't know that other people think differently than they think up until about the age of five They don't realize there are other Lines of thought and ways of thinking and ways of feeling about things right that other that other people have exactly that's what's called theory of mind right and

On slate star codex Scott Alexander went to great lengths to basically say The that Julian Jane's using the term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily Yeah, you just use theory of mind It would have made a lot more sense and Scott Anders Scott Alexander I think I said Anderson Scott Alexander makes some really a really good case for it And that's kind of what he's pointing out is you know like it's it's possible that Because you learn It's not you're not born with it. You would you learn it through experience

It just kind of evolves in you as you grow as a person and experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more almost like a Cosm of what happened in civilization a few thousand years ago. Yeah, you gain theory of mind So the fact that you can learn and that you do learn something that Integral to consciousness Really supports the idea that maybe consciousness as we understand it was learned it did evolve It was an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated language It's a fascinating thing to see happen in a child's life

To see these little light bulbs come on Seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it is you know, very much a learned thing man. I bet very fascinating All right, I say we take a break and we'll talk a little bit about Just some other fascinating stuff when we get back right after this Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could What could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house of her Childhood home now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb dot c a slash host

Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place? Because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh god. Seriously. I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband Michael Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life Step by step not another one kids relationships life in general can get messy

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so tell everybody Yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen So we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to frosted tips with the Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm Mangeh Shatikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology But from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life in India It's like smoking you might not smoke But you're gonna get second-hand astrology and lately

I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast Tantric curses major league baseball teams canceled marriages k-pop But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology My whole world can crashing down Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father And my whole view on astrology

It changed Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are gonna change too Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts I was gonna summarize what we were gonna talk about but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden before the break I think that's nice. It's loosey-goosey I think that's how it should be. Can I talk about one of my favorite parts of this this The hypothesis definitely is we were we're kind of jumping around now, but jumping back to where We talked about

Writing things down all of a sudden It was around here in human history That there was a collapse of societies In the Mediterranean around the Middle East. It was called the late bronze age collapse And it didn't take that long and it met like these very advanced sort of societies in a matter of decades a number of them Uh, a lot of their culture was lost That was it's sort of they called it in fact the Greek dark ages and it lasted for hundreds of years and

Jiving with this was when humans started to lose and it kind of all makes sense that they were losing Um with the written word with metaphor and language coming along. They were losing this voice as a god They were they felt like they were losing their gods because all of a sudden the gods were silent to them They weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were gaining consciousness And here's where it gets super interesting James has a hypothesis That says it's about here where Where the organized religions that we know today were born out of a kind of nostalgia basically

For these gods that left them, right? Yeah, I think that idea is really interesting It is and I mean the the timetable really jibes and it is really interesting that that late bronze age collapse happened when it did Um, but but the idea is not just nostalgia, but also uh desperation Yeah, because these people had guidance. They didn't have to think and this poor set of generations over a few hundred years Are maybe some of the most pitiful humans that ever lived Yeah, because they went from just knowing what to do because the gods told them what to do to having no idea What to do because their gods had abandoned them and they that as a result of that they started forming

Uh religions they started, um, you know beseeching the gods to to give them a sign This is when oracles started to become a thing profits started to become a thing superstitions Like omens grew like there was a Sumerian omen if a horse comes into your house and bites you you will soon die And your family will soon be scattered stuff like that, right? So this this didn't exist before because the gods were in charge of everything now They were suddenly gone and I just think it must be must have been really pitiful and dark to live through that time Yeah, I mean they were lost I guess

Mm-hmm as a people Yeah, and and I mean that was figuratively they were lost but literally too because that late Bronze Age collapse They think was brought on at least in part by climate change and probably invasion There's this mysterious group called the sea peoples that seem to have overrun different cultures And so like culture after culture would fall those people would become refugees Descend upon another culture end up Pushing that to the breaking point that culture would fall. It was just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once So they really felt like the gods had abandoned them like they'd angered them or something like that. They were genuinely lost

So what James did uh to help support his hypothesis, which makes sense was to go back and look at literature And of the time and see if it sort of supported this I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in 1976 was that it was Homer's Iliad Because he's kind of like here's proof right here. I mean if you look at the Iliad They were basically automatons. They they just listened to the gods and did what the gods said and they substituted um like the words that we would use

To substitute in for the Iliad to indicate consciousness just weren't there Right, so they were more like physical descriptors like my belly was quivering or my heart was fluttering or something like that not Um, I think the example that's used is fear filled Agamemnon's mind Yeah, well, there wasn't a mind. So they would describe fear in other physical terms, right? It's like a stomachache Yeah, and that it wasn't until later on when um new translations were coming along that people who were now conscious Turned the stuff into metaphor and James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before They meant it as literally and they didn't have descriptors for minds and when they say the gods were guiding them along

They meant it literally and he was saying that the the Iliad in particular Um started to be written about 1100 BCE and then around 700 BCE It was like in its form that we see it today but along the way it was kind of added to and it It it was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness So right he sees it as basically a document that that traces that transition. Yeah, very interesting. There was some other stuff too, right? Literature wise. Yeah, so that wasn't the only one. Um, he also found in some of the religious texts Like evidence that people felt like God had abandoned them. There's something a Mesopotamian poem

called the Lidlul Bel Nemeke And it says my God has forsaken me and disappeared My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance the good angel who walked beside me has departed And again, most other scholars would say There's something happened. This guy was blue. He was in a funk. Who knows, but it's all metaphorical and James is saying No, this guy had God talking to him. Now he doesn't anymore So should we talk a little bit about actual science here with the brain? Yeah, I think so because this is something we've covered before in the past when we talked about

uh alien hand syndrome Oh, is that where it came from? From a gazillion years ago. Um, we There were there was evidence that when the Um, there there were certain epilepsy epilepsy patients who where it was so severe That they would uh sever the corpus callosum undergo a corpus callostomy And the corpus callosum is basically the the thing that makes the two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another And with alien hand syndrome, I think they found that it could be brought on by

this surgery Where all of a sudden the left arm was doing something and without being told to do it by the the right brain And they have uh Janes I think are people uh since janes and was it janes or was it just people trying to uh Uh Sort of proof his theory. I think that people saw this these experiments as support for janes's theory Okay, so they looked at these surgeries these corpus callosumies And they they're called split brain patients basically where they you know after the surgery

It's not like they felt all out of whack. They felt like a regular, you know, whole human being But they learned that there were these little things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take an action Uh based on this information that it didn't have access to and the example they gave was Uh, if they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen Uh, and they would get up and walk to the kitchen, but they would say hey, why did you get up and walk to the kitchen? The language the left hemisphere the language dominant hemisphere Uh is the only part that can respond to that But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up and the really fascinating part is that

They wouldn't say well, I don't know. I'm not sure why I just did that. I just did it They would make something up on the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting up and uh going to make a bowl of cereal Right, and it's it's almost like we had this natural instinct to BS somebody When faced with a question that we can't answer about why we did something Yeah, because the the left hemisphere wants to explain things it wants to tell the story Using metaphors usually and this is this became the left brain interpreter theory and it kind of supports Jane's idea that the the consciousness is a flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and it just can't find it and um the idea is that

That the the left hemisphere creates the explanation the stories for our behavior even if it doesn't know why we did something But that's just what it does and there's a saying in consciousness research Among people who subscribe to the left brain interpreter theory is that Consciousness isn't in the oval office like it thinks it is it's more in the press office Like it's the one that's public facing and explaining what you're doing, but it might not have all the information So sometimes it's just BSing It's very interesting stuff. Yeah Uh and sort of tying in with the kid thing

Um, who is this? How do you pronounce the name of that one researcher kushjin? Ashton kutcher k k u i j s e e n Oh, yeah I'm just gonna say kushjin. I think that's pretty pretty dead on that's the the person who runs the julian jane's Um, uh society today because jane's died in 1997. I don't think we ever pointed that out. Yeah, uh, But this person basically says hey if you look at people who hear voices And that's not necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia because that is

uh one percent Of the population Apparently is the highest 10 percent of the population And can you know does hear things basically so these uh It's the idea of the the command voice basically is to to do something and If you're hearing a voice that says, you know move to the window and look out on the street That's one thing if you hear a voice that says take the knife from the drawer and

You know put it in someone's head Then that's another thing all together and uh, we were talking about kids earlier You know the idea of the imaginary friend Kind of jibes with this lack of consciousness 65 percent of kids Uh have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friends. My daughter had uh per year is what she called her ghost friends Which is a lot creepier way to put it Uh, but I think that's all just sort of to say that like

That nine percent of people who are hearing voices Who are not Suffering from schizophrenia is that's proof of that initial bicameral mind at work, right? Yeah, and and I mean, um, Julian janes believed that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state as evidence by that development of theory of mind Or as evidence by imaginary friends Um, and that they they're kind of recreating what society or the human species went through thousands of years ago as they age and develop Very interesting. So, um, there you might be out there, especially if you're a concretist like chuck

Um thinking like you you might be rocking in your seat right now face flushed about to faint out of rage Oh, wait, is my camera on? Like this is by definition Unscientific it's not provable in the form that janes put it forth. It's more of a concept Uh an idea and apparently he was well aware of that. He didn't tout it as as anything more than that but um kushin The director of the julien jane society likes to point out that It was he was basically laying the groundwork for an entirely new way of looking at things

So that other people could come along and you know, take it up and and figure out How he was wrong how he was right what needed fleshing out what made sense in its that form And uh people have been doing that again This is this is like a crackpot theory that has never gone away Yeah, because the more people pay attention to it and the more we start to understand about the brain The more sense it kind of makes uh, and it it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it over the Like 50 years that it's been around I think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not rocking in my chair

David Bowie loved it. He said that the um the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind I think that was it the book song No, he said it was one of the um top hundred books to read Oh, all right. I believe that totally. It's a very Bowie thing for sure And other people too And then one other thing another way to put all this to kind of sum it up that I saw it put is that um, we developed at some point Back in the in history a left brain bias

That's it, you know, which kind of ties into your original view of the whole thing which was You know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious Right. I like that You got anything else? I might but I might just not be aware of it man As I said, this is the best episode we've ever done Since Chuck Giggles, which everybody loves I think then it's time for listener mail

Uh, this is about the freedom of the press episode And this was a josh request Hey guys, how freedom of the press works struck a particular chord with me I used to work as a science teacher But was finding more and more students were being duped by pseudoscience on the internet And weren't being provided the tools to recognize this so I did a masters in library and information science and now a school librarian on a mission to vanquish disinformation

Awesome. Uh, while I've included the topic of journalism in terms of approaching news critically As with any online source of information your recent podcast On how freedom of the press works really inspired me to put forward more information and content about media freedoms and the risks for journalists Uh, here in sweden, uh, it's very easy to take freedom the press for granted Last year in sympathy with my american colleagues. I put up a display of banned books uh tracked by the ala And each book had a tag Listing the years and ranking

A book was challenged and I encouraged the students to guess what for it led to a lot of really good That's it. I love this experiment. I've been students I led to a lot of really good discussions many students Hadn't realized the scale of how many books have been banned or challenged We're horrified to see their own favorite books on display And we're also shocked by the justification As are we always Now the coveted restrictions are being lifted. I'm very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books

The dowet isaac library in the malmer archives As a new mouth. Yeah, uh, so that students can see the extent of Both limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world Uh, thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series kind regards Uh, medvengliga helsnegar That is uh, must just be a Salutation in swedish. Mm-hmm. That comes from miss miss alice

Antonsen she her hers. Thank you alice. That is amazing. I'm so glad we got to that listener mail because I've been proud of That person for a very long time ever since that email came in Totally, how about sweden, huh keeping the american dream alive? I love it And chuck also before we sign off there's something i've been meaning to address that you said earlier You said you have a dumb brain. No, you don't Did I say that? Yeah, you did Okay, so if you want to get in touch with us like alice did and show the world what a hero you are We would love to hear that kind of thing. You can email us to stuff podcast at iheart radio dot com

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