TrueLife - Marcel Kuijsten - The Julian Jaynes Society

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Marcel Kuijsten is Founder and Executive Director of the Julian Jaynes Society. He is editor of three books on Jaynes’s theory: Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind, The Julian Jaynes Collection, and Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness. He is co-editor (with Brian McVeigh) of and regular contributor to The Jaynesian, the newsletter of the Julian Jaynes Society. He co-chaired and helped organize (with Rabbi James Cohn) The Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies, where he was also a speaker. He had also spoken on Jaynes’s theory at the Julian Jaynes Conference on Consciousness at the University of Prince Edward Island and the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, Arizona. Interviews with Marcel Kuijsten on Jaynes’s theory have appeared on the BBC, the Evolution Institute/This View of Life podcast, Red Ice Radio, Astraea Magazine & podcast, among others, and in the book Blood Rites by Jimmy Lee Shreeve and New Therapistmagazine.https://www.julianjaynes.org/product/conversations-on-consciousness-and-the-bicameral-mind/https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/jjs-publications/pre-order-conversations-on-consciousness-and-the-bicameral-mind/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the True Life podcast. We are here with an incredible author who's written multiple books. He's also the founder of the Julian Jane Society, of which we're going to going to be talking about the society and a new book coming out today. His name is Marcel Kaustin. And let's go ahead and introduce them. Marcel, could you talk a little bit about who you

are, what you got and what's happening today? Sure. And thanks for having me on. I founded the Julian Jane Society way back in 1997 just after Jane's passed away. And things kind of grew from a web-based community to publishing our first edited volume in 2006. And I followed that up with a book called the Julian Jane's collection in 2012, which brought together all of James's articles that were somewhat hard to find unless you were affiliated with the university library, as well as unpublished interviews, and a lot of question and answer sessions from discussions after lectures he gave that really answer a lot of the questions that people have about James' theory after they read his original the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. We did a big conference over three

days in 2013 that brought together people from all over the world and some of that material, as well as some others, was published in 2016 in the third book, God's Voices and the Bicameral Mind. and we're just getting ready to publish our fourth book called Conversations on Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind. It's exciting. For those who may not know Julian Jane's theory, do you think you can maybe kind of give us a little bit of background on it? Sure. And so one of the things Jane started to do shortly after his book was published was he started to present his theory as four key hypotheses. And this makes it, I think, much easier for people to understand. And so that's the same approach I take in the new book, breaking it into these four areas. And the first is that consciousness is based on language. The second is his idea of what came before we learned consciousness relatively

recently in human history, according to James. And that was what he called the bicameral mentality. The third is when did this transition take place? So dating this transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness. And the fourth is his neurological model for what might be happening in the brain. So those are the four key ideas. And we can kind of delve into those. But I think one of the most important things to understand about James' theory is that he hit on this idea that consciousness is something that we learn based on metaphorical language. And it's not biologically based. It's not innate. It's not something,

you know, we've all more or less inherited this idea from Darwin's theory of evolution, that consciousness emerges at some point in evolutionary history as brains get more complex. And some people date it to 50,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago or in primates before the origin of homo sapiens. And there's a lot of speculation about these things, but there's not a lot of evidence. And what Jane's did was looking back through the historical record. He discovered that introspection and this inner mind space kind of disappears in the most ancient texts, such as the Iliad. And then it begins to emerge and we can track its development through ancient texts and other sources of evidence. on the idea of language and consciousness when i when i think of language and consciousness and the ability

to think or introspect if that comes with the addition of language doesn't that kind of make our world made of language like we can only begin to see the world a certain way when we have the language built in us or when we come to the idea of language and i was just curious to get your thoughts on that like what do you mean can you flesh that that a little bit more like when you say language is not only it's conscious is not possible without language like what does that mean like right what jane's does in his book and that we elaborate in in this follow-up book is really slice away at all of the things that people have misconceptions about in terms of what consciousness is what how it's defined and because we are only conscious of what we're

conscious of, it's very hard for us to wrap our mind around this idea that consciousness is only a very narrow part of our total mentality. And so Jane explains in great detail how things like learning and reactivity, all of these things happen outside of consciousness. So all animals can learn. They can solve complex problems and they learn through stimulus and response. And they also have instincts and they can accomplish a tremendous amount of interesting things all without this introspectable mind space that jane's describes and so by stripping away all these layers of what consciousness is not we can suddenly see this profound transition that was previously overlooked that happened just 3 000 years ago and there we see all kind of consequences of this

this learning of this inner mental space, this ability to introspect through language, of the beginnings of the concept of history and being able to think about time and space in new ways and the beginnings of theater, for example, where you couldn't have acting before this type of Janesean consciousness developed and complex deceit. And all of these things that we can do when we can see ourselves narratizing out our life in our own mind rather than just being constantly living in the present moment. So it follows that children learn consciousness as they learn language. And there's good studies demonstrating that now that have come out since the publication of

James' book. And cases of children who don't learn language for various reasons, who when studied seem to lack many of the features of consciousness that James identifies in his book. One of the most difficult things to wrap one's mind around is that thinking and reasoning happens largely outside of consciousness. And so one of the examples he gives is experiments where people who were trained in introspection would hold two different weights, one in each hand, and they could determine which one was heavier, but there's no introspection that goes into that.

So your brain can solve that problem, can make that determination automatically outside of consciousness. He gives a example of a series of geometric figures like a triangle, a circle, a triangle, a circle. And if you're asked, what comes next, you instantly know it's a triangle. And there's nothing in your introspection that is involved in solving the circle. that problem. Those are simple examples, but he talks about how physicists and mathematicians and many people talk about how some of their most profound insights come to them when they're not

actually thinking about the problem at all. So a lot of the solution was solved in their non-conscious mind and suddenly the answer comes into consciousness. So it's crucial for people to understand Jane's narrow definition of consciousness as this introspectable mind space with an analog eye where we can project into the future and reflect on the past in order to understand the rest of his theory because if they're stuck on a more broad, vague definition of consciousness as being something that applies to all animals, the rest of the theory won't make sense. But James relegates a lot of these other things like sense perception, for example, to, to the, to the theory. The rest of the theory won't make sense. And I'm in the just that sensory perception. So vision is not, should not be equated with consciousness. And there's a lot of

books and a lot of discussion that really muddy things up. But Jane's offers this very precise definition that is really necessary if we're going to understand this recent transition that happened in human history. Wow. There's so much in that, what you said right there. And it's, I think the new book is going to be really exciting for people to read, especially for those of us who have kind of adored Jane's first book that came out and were able to follow some of your previous books that came out. When I think of Tesla, he heard voices, and I think of all these voice hearers who had these ideas come to them. Do you think that that is the remnants of the right hemisphere speaking back to the left, like kind of a throwback to how things were? Is that possibly that old way

in which genes was explaining things happening? So that gets to the question of this bicameral mentality. What is it? What was it like? And if consciousness is only 3,000 years old and is learned based on metaphorical language around that time, and the transition takes place in different times, in different places, as cultures are on their own trajectories, before that, what Jane's discovered in things. like the Old Testament and the Iliad and the linear B tablets and other historical sources was when

people were in a decision point, they heard a voice instructing their behavior. And they often attributed that voice to the gods or the king or their leaders or dead ancestors, depending on the culture. And this was a fascinating thing that no one had really looked at before. It was documented but no one knew what to make of it. They thought that this was just a literary device because one of the problems with these historical studies is there's a natural inclination for people to impose our modern psychology on ancient cultures.

And Jane's coming from the background of a psychologist looking at history, said, why don't we take these reports at face value as indicative of their actual psychological experience. So in these choice points, the stress hormones of even a minor decision would bring about an auditory hallucination, and it would be sort of a behavioral command. And what Jane's thought was that as we developed language over the last 50 to 75,000 years, the brain began to use language as a communication. device between the two hemispheres. So the stored up experience and knowledge in the right

hemisphere has to travel across a narrow band of fibers called the corpus callosum. And the best way to transmit that information was this new technology of language in what today we would call an auditory hallucination. There's a sense that people experience it as coming outside of themselves, and this probably has something to do with it coming from the non-dominant hemisphere for language, and for some reason our sense of self is associated with the left hemisphere, which for most right-handed people is their dominant hemisphere for language. And what you are getting at is the fact that many, many, many people today, far greater numbers that anyone had realized still have these type of auditory hallucinations.

in numbers that are far too great to just dismiss as some type of rare brain pathology. Millions of people meet the criteria for schizophrenia, which is where they're having voices to the point where it's having a debilitating effect on their life. But millions more hear voices that they don't tell anybody about and that don't really interfere with their life and that some have even a positive relationship. with. And it's kind of like a helpful guiding voice or a spirit guide or it's interpreted in different ways. But these experiences are much more widespread than was known at the time that James published his book. And we see examples of it with children too, in some cases with imaginary

companions. Sometimes it's more fantasy related, but they're finding often it is based on actual voices and sometimes visions. Yeah, it seems to me to be a strange rhyming of history. If I remember correctly, in the latter part of Jane's book, a lot of different cultures were upset that people were no longer hearing the voices. And there was this absence of the voice or the logos that they weren't hearing. And now it seems like this reemergence of the voice happening. It used to be people were worried that the voice left them. And now people are worried that the voice is talking to them.

So it just seems like it's gone full circle almost. Well, there was an interesting transition in history where for hundreds and hundreds of years, people associated this experience with gods or angels or ghosts or spirits. And then sometime around the 17th century, it just transitioned into this idea of associating these experiences with mental illness. and so people stopped talking about their voice hearing experiences because they didn't want to be stigmatized as mentally ill. And so for a couple of hundred years, it was just thought that this is something that only occurs with mental illness. And in the late 1800s, Francis Galton did a rare

exception of a study that looked at voices and visions and sane persons. And he found it was common, are much more common than was thought. And then until James' book came out, it really wasn't studied among the general population. And this idea in his theory was provocative. So they started looking at university students. It's usually the most common subjects for experiments. And they found indeed that a lot of university students were having this type of experience, sometimes just occasionally. And that finding was provocative. And then there was an explosion of hundreds of studies over the past 25, 30 years looking at auditory hallucinations in wilderness explorers, people in sensory deprivation, solitary confinement, stressful situations, combat situations,

the elderly after the death of a spouse. They've looked at it in various ethnic populations. And one of the interviews we do in the book is with the Stanford anthropologist Tanya Lerman. And she's looked at this voice hearing experience in populations all over the world. And she talked a lot about her interesting findings in the book. If you could give us a little hint, some of her findings, does she find a lot of common threads throughout different cultures and different languages of being tonal languages versus regular languages? Or does that matter at all?

There are a lot of similarities, and then there are cultural differences as well. And for example, in India, in other non-Western cultures, the experience isn't as pathologized to the degree that it is in Western cultures. So people sometimes have a better outcome because they're not given this label of mental illness. And there are other cultures where it's not pathologized at all. It's totally accepted and it's a normal part of their life experience. And there's all kind of shamanism and these kind of things that still go on today.

And there are cultures where the voices are still referred to as gods, which is interesting. And so there's all these connections with James's theory of the bicameral mentality that all of these voices that people are hearing today are kind of a vestige. of this previous mentality that we're still in some sense transitioning to this introspectable consciousness. It's still an ongoing process and not every element of bicameral mentality has been completely left behind. Have your books and Jane's books and theory, have they been more accepted in the East versus the West or the West versus the East or is there a thread there?

Well, that's difficult to say because all of the books are in English, and so that is a limiting factor. James' theory is known in places like India, for example, and there is enthusiasm about it there, but I don't know that it's known as greatly as in primarily English-speaking countries. I will say there's interesting things. His original book was published in English, then German, French. French, Italian, and Spanish. And in Italy, it never went out of print. And there is a large degree of interest that has continued in Italy. And a number of other works of his have been translated into Italian. So yeah, Europe, Australia, England, that's primarily where the most

interest is. And one of the other interesting things that I talk about in the interview with Tanya Lerman as well is this idea of what's called command hallucinations. So people often think that people must hear these random voices that are garbled or meaningless. But what they've found is actually the voices often command people's behavior or they criticize their behavior or comment on their behavior. But it's very centered on people's behavior. And again, this fits perfectly with James's predictions that these bicameral voices in the ancient world were helping to guide people's behavior in stressful decision-making moments. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about it. I'm fascinated by it. It brings me to a similar, there's another author named Ian McGilchrist, who's recently

written a book called The Matter with Things, and he had a previous book called The Master in his emissary. you read that book by chance? I read it when it first came out. Do you think he makes the point, I believe, I'm just kind of paraphrasing, but he makes the point that the left hemisphere is like this analytical scalpel and the right hemisphere is this more of symbolic understanding big picture type that is the king and the left side is this emissary who's kind of trying to take away the ability to communicate.

You give that any credence or does that fit into Jane's theory at all? It's a difficult question to answer because it's a big question and there's a lot of elements to it. First, I do want to say that McGilchrist's brief mention of James's theory is flawed. And I've explained that on the website where his critique, it's based on some misrepresentations or misunderstandings of James's idea. But he kind of had to, I think, do that because he's arguing in a sense for the opposite, if you really think about it. Because what Jane's is saying is that in the bicameral mentality, the brain hemispheres were less integrated than they were today. And that through language and writing and culture, we developed this introspectable mind space that in a sense, through culture,

culture, language was like a new technology that brought a greater integration of the two hemispheres. What McGilchrist is arguing, I believe, is that in the past, the brain hemispheres were more integrated, and that writing and a focus on language and writing created a over-dominance of the left hemisphere. to the detriment of civilization and that we've lost a lot of the wonderful things about the right hemisphere that are more related to art and music and peace and these kind of things. And people are very enamored with his ideas, but I think the evidence doesn't really support that it's a little, I think of an oversimplification. and there's been some critiques published that people can look at.

But the first half of his book is just a review of the studies of right and left brain hemisphere differences. And there are these differences. Some of it was carried away a little bit in the popular culture in the past where everything was right-brained or left-brained. And it got a little overblown. But there are these differences, but we know that we use our whole brain and many things. and I don't think we can boil down the problems in the first version of this book almost drew an East West distinction, and then they gave it a different subtitle. But there's this common theme of glamorizing non-Western cultures and practices

and sort of overlooking some of the more negative aspects. And so there's some interesting things about, I think, what he has to say but I think there's some oversimplifications. Yeah, it's interesting. I was just curious about it. I heard you give a metaphor about a flashlight. Is that representative of the mentality about how thinking and consciousness is outside of us? And then you used a really beautiful metaphor about a flashlight.

Can you share that with people? So in James's book, he uses this analogy of a flashlight to demonstrate the inability that we have to reflect on the limitations of our own consciousness. And so what he's saying is that consciousness is this very narrow part of our mentality, but because we're not conscious of what we're not conscious of, we have the illusion that it's all mentality. And with this analogy of the flashlight, he says, imagine a flashlight in a dark room.

and the flashlight is asked to look around and report what it sees. So it turns on the light and it looks around. And everywhere it looks, the room is brightly lit. So it's not aware of the fact that it's in a completely dark room. That's an analogy for our consciousness. Whatever we're holding in consciousness is all that's in consciousness. So all of this vast mental processing that's outside of consciousness, we're simply not aware of.

So it's impossible to reflect on things that are happening outside of our conscious awareness until it comes into consciousness. And so we often have the illusion that we arrive at all of our thoughts and beliefs and opinions and ideas through conscious deliberation and careful analysis. But there's a lot of evidence that suggests that even things like, you know, for example, political affiliations are to a certain extent, not entirely, based on innate genetic temperaments that we're born with. And then as we mature, we start to identify with ideas that mesh with our innate temperaments. And we feel like we've thought about this quite a bit and arrived at the most

logical, rational conclusion. But that's why we see these clusters of beliefs. that don't really have much to do with one another. And so there's all these fascinating things that really call into question the extent that we're arriving at all of our thoughts and opinions through a conscious process. A lot of it may be a bit of an illusion. Yeah, I also, I believe I heard you say that,

maybe you didn't say it exactly like this, but this is the way that I understood it was that the only real consciousness we have is this small, short amount of time between stimulus and response. And most people are not really aware of it unless they've had like a traumatic event or they've somehow been conditioned to see this little flash in the pan. Right. We can learn to widen that gap and through like anything through practice.

And it's not something that James really addresses in his book, this whole concept of free will. But there's a lecture he gave to a group who were enthusiasts of another theorist, and he was drawing a connection between the ideas of that theorist and his theory. And he says how for all non-human animals, behavior is instinctive or based on learned, operant conditioning, and stimulus in response. And it's only humans and humans with language that have developed this. ability to insert a pause between stimulus and response where we can deliberate our behavior

and reflect on past events and go with our mind into the future and plan how we mentally rehearse how we might respond to a certain situation. And a lot of people are still, most of the time, simply reacting to events around them. But through practice, we can, can pause and choose our response to various situations. Yeah, that's, I struggle with that sometimes. I try to really listen and then say what I want to say or ask a question. However, a lot of times I find myself immediately answering somebody without even really taking time to think about it. And sometimes it makes me a little bit sad. I'm like, what am I doing? I'm just throwing this answer out there. I didn't even really take time to give that person a

enough thought and respect to say what I had to mean. And I think everyone shares that experience, even the most highly trained meditative practitioners. And I think it's an innate behavior that we have that we have to really work at. When you think of Julian James' work and your work, by the way, with the multiple books that you do have, do you think it's an exciting time? Like maybe we're beginning to really understand this.

this thing called communication. Maybe this identification of the time before stimulus and response is like this first spark of us really beginning to understand. This is beginning to open up a way for us to solve problems. Is it an exciting time for your work and James' work? Well, I think what your question gets at is a broader idea that was often posed to James after his lecture, And that is if consciousness is learned and it's learned relatively recently in human history and we're still in this transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness, then what is the future potential of consciousness? Can it be further developed and what things can we look forward to and what enhancements might we see in the future? And of course, no one really knows, but the point of emphasis here is that it is learned. And we don't think of consciousness as learned because it happens naturally in our environment, in a culture that we're embedded in of conscious people with language.

So we learn it from our parents and teachers and the culture that we're embedded in and it's passed on to each successive generation. But as any learned skill, it could possibly be taught more effectively, more uniformly. we could see right now, of course, cultural and individual variability in how consciousness is learned. And because it's so embedded in our ideas that it's this biologically innate thing, we're not even trying to really address this. With a few exceptions, people such as Brian McVeigh in his books and writings, looking at what exactly are the features of consciousness, both that Jane's identifies and that people like McVeigh build on, and how are they learned, how can they be better taught,

how can they be further developed on one's own throughout one's lifespan? And so it's an exciting thing to think that we're not stuck with some fixed amount of consciousness at birth, but it's something that we can develop through various practices. And then perhaps over time, we could see new features of consciousness. One of the things that Jane speculated about was that, say, for example, the idea of self-control, so much of our behavior feels like it's outside of our own control. And if you think specifically about bad habits or things that you're trying to change. And if someone's trying to quit smoking or stop biting their nails, and these things can be very, very difficult to control consciously.

But through things like hypnosis or self-hypnosis, through ways that aren't really fully understood, sometimes very successfully, there's rapid behavioral change. And perhaps in the future, we could just simply decide, okay, I'm not smoking anymore. And we wouldn't be as much at the mercy of these non-conscious habitual type of behaviors. Yeah, that is fascinating to think of. I have some other questions. I wrote them down right here. Let me throw them out at you.

So a lot of mental illness are, in fact, the byproducts of learned consciousness. What kind of mental illnesses do you think are the byproduct of this learned consciousness? Right. So, Janes talked a lot about what he called the consequences of consciousness. So there's positives, and we've touched on some of those already, and there's negatives. And this was something he intended to address in a full-length book that, unfortunately, was never completed or published. But he hints at some of these ideas in the afterward that he wrote in 1990 to his book and in other essays and articles.

And a lot of what we talk about as mental illness are problems in our internal dialogue. So, for example, with depression, this is a situation where someone's internal dialogue has turned very negative. And in anyone's life, in any given moment, we can focus on all kind of positives or all kind of negatives. And in psychology, they call it reframing. And if someone's going through a divorce, it could be extremely upsetting. Or you can reframe it as kind of a new beginning or a new opportunity. There's many examples of that. But in depression, non-conscious emotions, which are driving the internal dialogue, have gone very negative.

And so with things like cognitive behavioral therapy, they try to retrain. that inner dialogue, one of the features of consciousness, narratization, in a more positive way. Another example would be what we see in things like anxiety. So Jane talks about a two-tiered theory of emotions. So you have non-conscious affects, like in this case fear, and consciousness acting on fear gives us anxiety. So if you have a non-conscious animal and there's a frightening stimulus, say a bird sees a snake and it flies away and it lands somewhere else and there's no snake and everything goes back to normal. With humans, we have consciousness acting on that fear and so we can develop long-term anxiety. So these are the negative consequences of consciousness or in non-consciousness.

animals, you might have anger as a means of stimulating aggression to a confrontation in a fight or flight situation. Consciousness acting on anger leads to long-term, what we might call hatred. And in the animal kingdom, we have mating and procreation and often very complex reproductive strategies. But in humans, consciousness acting on that gives us sexual fantasy And James talks a lot about how we can document this as another way of looking at the timing of the transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness because we see this transition in ancient Greece, for example, a very chaste, non-sexual art to a society that becomes almost very sexually obsessed. And it's very hard to account for this transition unless James' is timing for all of this. this is correct. Yeah, it's mind-blowing for me to kind of wrap my mind around. You know, there's so much in there. You spoke too about shame. We see in non-human animals, but consciously

operating on shame produces guilt. So many people suffer from guilt, and I could see how that could be a broken record just going on and on in your mind and leading to, you know, I think even in Julian James' book, he spoke about some schizophrenics, and they asked the schizophrenia. So frenics, why do you do what the voices say? And the gentleman that they were interviewing said that the voice that he hears is like having someone right close to his face yelling at him, like, you must do this. Exactly. And we actually interview, I should mention that the new book is all based on interviews. And the thinking was that if we can present James's theory in a conversational format, it might be more accessible to people. And even people that understand the

theory might enjoy that approach and get more out of it than reading strictly article-based explanations. And two voice hearers are interviewed in the book, and they describe what the experience is like. And like you said, it's very hard to turn away from an auditory, hallucination. You can't turn the sound down. You can't close your eyes like with something in your vision. And so they can't get away from their voices. And so sometimes it's very hard for them not to obey the behavioral commands. And again, the idea that these voices center on people's behavior really only makes sense in light of James's theory of bicameral mentality. There's not another alternate explanation that I'm aware of why so many millions of people,

even today, hear voices that comment on, criticize, or command their behavior. It's simply reported and taken as fact, but there isn't another theory that really accounts for why that would be. Yeah, cool. Can you tell us who are some of the people that you interviewed for this book? Well, we go through the first hypothesis, and I'm one of the people that was interviewed. It started out a colleague of mine named Brendan Lee. He is a Chicago-based filmmaker with an interest in James's Theory, and he was doing interviews toward producing a documentary on James' theory that is hopefully still going to be completed.

And it occurred to me that we could, in the meantime, start presenting some of the transcripts of these interviews in book form. And he thought that was a great idea. And so during the pandemic, I started conducting these type of interviews that we're doing now and then put them all together. And so some of the interviews are with myself, some are with Brian McVeigh,

who is a real scholar of James' theory. And then with regard to consciousness and language, the first hypothesis, Brendan talks to Ted Remington, who is an expert, expert on the metaphorical language aspects of James' theory. And he does a fantastic job of explaining what is actually one of the more difficult parts of James' book of specifically what are the working parts of metaphor and how does this all create this inner mental space based on metaphors of physical space.

And then we talked to Bill Rowe, who goes through some of the child development studies that look at how children learn consciousness as they learn language. And Jan Sloadles, who is a Dutch philosophy professor at the University of Leiden, and he talks about how James' theory compares with other contemporary theories on philosophy of mind. He describes one of the early critiques of James' theory by the philosopher Ned Block, and then he refutes that critique very meticulously. And then in the second portion on bicameral mentality, I mentioned the interview with Tanya Lerman,

which is a really fascinating interview about all these cross-cultural differences in the voice hearing experience. And also in people's theory of mind, which also differs much more dramatically, I think cross-culturally than most people tend to be aware of. We talk to voice hearers, and then we talk to,

several experts on hypnosis, which Jane talks about is kind of an interesting possible vestige of bicameral mentality. And Lawrence Sugarman at the Rochester Institute of Technology and at Wardo Casiglia, who's an Italian professor of medicine and John Kilstrom, who is a well-known psychology professor recently retired from the University of California at Berkeley. And what's great about that is part interview. and part back and forth discussion. And he really encouraged this process of, you know, he had some possible points of disagreement with Jane's.

And I said, well, I can't just print this without responding. He said, you don't have to agree with me. Let's have a back and forth discussion. That's what science is all about. So we have a little bit of a debate, which is really nice. And I think that really brings out some of the more nuanced aspects of the theory. and it could be ideas that other people share that I can address in a conversational format. So that was a lot of fun.

And then for the dating of this transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness, we have the late Rabbi James Cohn, who was a biblical scholar, a rabbi, and he talks about all of the evidence in the Old Testament for bicameral mentality. And he talks about the problems inherent in translating and translating and dating these ancient texts. And Todd Gibson, who's the scholar of Tibetan studies, people often say, well, Jane's talks about Egypt and Mesopotamia and Greece, but what about the rest of the world? Well, Todd Gibson has really looked at the evidence for this transition in ancient Tibet. And then Brian McVeigh also talks about the research he's done on evidence

for bicameral mentality in the Old Testament. He explains Michael, Carr's research on the evidence for bicameral mentality in ancient China. And then we have a really interesting interview with Bobendetovic, who is at the University of Chicago, studying ancient languages and learning Middle Egyptian and ancient Akkadian and looking at the evidence in the Iliad and the Odyssey for this development and transition that we see when we compare the Iliad, which is reflecting an older mentality versus the Odyssey where we see all of these features of consciousness coming into play.

And in the final section, which is on James' neurological model, I explain all of the new evidence for James's idea that it's these non-dominant language areas in the right hemisphere that become active during auditory hallucinations. And there's been 20 years, years now of fMRI studies showing that jane's predictions which couldn't be tested the technology was

not available in the late 70s to do this that he was spot on with this so i go through a number of those studies is very exciting because it really vindicates this bicameral mentality the neurological model for bicameral mentality and in the final interview we talked to iris summer and her graduate student Santa Brederu also in the Netherlands. And Iris Summer is one of the world's foremost researchers of the neurology of auditory hallucinations. And her lab has done a lot of these fMRI studies showing this right left by camera interaction when people are experiencing auditory hallucination. So in the book, people don't have to take my word for it or my interpretation. We go to one of the world's foremost experts on this, and she explains it. And they also have another

really interesting finding, which is that the degree to which language is lateralized in people's brain. And what I mean by that is, if you're right-handed, I'm right-handed, most of your language is in the left hemisphere. For left-handed people, it can be reversed, so their language ability can be in the right hemisphere or it can be mixed. But everyone has language lateralized to varying degrees. So it's on a spectrum. And the degree to which people's normal language ability, I'm not talking about auditory hallucinations, just regular language ability, the degree to which that is more spread in both the right and left hemispheres is predictive of the degree to which they will experience

auditory verbal hallucinations. So again, it's another way of showing that James was right about this interaction between the brains to language areas during auditory verbal hallucinations. So that's

a lengthy summary of everything that's in the book. Wow, that's exciting. You have really traveled the globe, span, time talking to people from so many different different parts of education and so many different just areas. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for the book. I'm excited to read it. And I think that everybody listening to this

should be excited to read it. Yeah, all of the feedback I've received is that both the conversational format and presenting the ideas, James's theory, in those four parts, has really helped people to understand a lot of aspects. of the theory that they didn't understand before. And we've gotten fantastic feedback on the book by people like the psychologist Martin Seligman, who's very well known for his work on positive psychology. And Richard Rhodes and a number of other scholars have all given us really, really positive early feedback. So we're really excited to get into people's hands in the next month or two. Yeah. It seems like all that cross-pollination is not only helping inform and

educate people like me, but it also seems like it's bringing those people together to continue to forward the ideas of it. Yeah, it's a very interdisciplinary theory. And what's great is in this book, people can hear from scholars in such a wide range of academic disciplines and as you said from different countries. And you're really getting a lot of interesting perspectives from all kind of different people on these different aspects of James's theory. Yeah. It almost seems like James's theory is it seems to me that we've just gone off in this world of specialization. But it seems to me by camera mind is a way to, I don't know if this is true or not, but it seems to me, just on what you told me about all the people you're interviewing and things coming together,

like it's, do you think that this theory has the ability to change the way we, our culture is, if culture is learned or if consciousness is learned, and we begin applying James's theory more to our, our culture, can that change the way we learn our consciousness? I think it can.

And I think you're also hitting on something else in that the, the academic disciplines have become highly specialized and narrowly focused and part of that is necessary you know there's such vast knowledge at this point that in order to make progress in any discipline a certain degree of specialization is required and a lot of what happens in science is sort of adding the next step to the previous body of knowledge in a in a very narrow specialization area, looking at specific actions between, you know, single neurons or things like that. And so a lot of it is out of necessity, but there's also a real need for a more global view that James brought and people to tie very different areas together and to connect the dots between

different disciplines. And I think that's something that we really need a lot more of is interdisciplinary studies and bringing scholars from different disciplines to collaborate together on projects. And you see some of that. Tanya Lerman again is an anthropologist who works with psychologists. And so there's sort of a bridging between these disciplines. But one of the reasons that James' theory was not discovered previously, even though there was such a vast amount of evidence for bicameral mentality staring everyone in the face, was that classicist and historians weren't really concerned with psychological phenomena. So they were documenting all of these fascinating behaviors like dressing and bathing and

feeding idols and taking them out on parades and talking. about how the idols were speaking to them. And they documented these fascinating things, but didn't really think about those behaviors in psychological terms. And James came along as a psychologist looking at ancient history, and he connected the dots between modern voice hearing and these ancient practices and ancient descriptions of people having voice hearing type experiences and he said, wow, there's a continuum that goes from today all the way back through the Middle Ages and people like Emmanuel Swedenborg and Joan of Arc and many other voice hearers, monks who were engaging in self deprivation and self-injurious type behaviors to

elicit the voice of God, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians that we see this auditory, hallucinacy. and visual hallucination experience going all the way back. And there isn't this false distinction that was created between modern mental illness and ancient voices and visions. And all of the major religions were founded on voices and visions initially. So it's interesting how James was able to tie all this together. Taking this very interdisciplinary approach that we just don't see enough of. Yeah, that's so true. Do you think it seems to me that if we can get more people to read this book and understand this theory, I think you could have radical positive ramifications for therapy for people.

Yes, I really think there are a lot of practical implications of James's theory. It certainly helps people who hear voices to give a context, a historical context for their experience. and that has for some people been tremendously helpful. There was a voice hearer named Patsy Hague in the Netherlands in the 80s who had read James' book and she took James' book to her psychiatrist Marius Rama and said, read this. Read James' book. It'll help you understand hearing voices. And he read it and he was impressed by it. And it really created this idea that hearing voices is to a certain extent, it's a normal part of the spectrum of the human condition.

And out of that interaction between the two of them, they did a radio program where they asked people to call in and they did sort of a radio survey where people I think wrote in. And they found this, again, startling finding that many, many more people were having this voice hearing experience than anybody realized. And out of that was a whole new therapeutic approach to hearing voices. They started what they called the hearing voices movement and that developed into what's called the Hearing Voices Network. And it's a worldwide network of support groups for voice hearers to try to learn. to coexist peacefully and productively with their voices. And the standard psychiatric approach has always been to say, let's try and get rid of the voices.

And let's use medication to try to get rid of the voices. Well, maybe in some cases, that's possible and successful. But in many, many cases, it's not possible and it's at least not yet often unsuccessful. And for those people, this alternate approach that was. essentially originally based on James' theory, has been very, very helpful to many, many people to learn to relate to their voices. And they have all kind of aspects of this therapy that people can read about in the new book that are very helpful to people. And then Brian McVeigh, he knew Julian James at Princeton University where he got his PhD, Brian did in anthropology. He taught anthropology

for many years. He studied Japanese culture for more than a decade from an anthropological perspective and documented many vestiges of bicameral mentality such as spirit possession. People forget that this is a side note, but the spirit possession is ongoing. It's worldwide. And there's all these fascinating things that are other vestiges of bicameral mentality besides hearing voices. But Brian then transitioned to mental health counseling. And he's publishing a book, this summer called the self-healing mind, where I'm really looking forward to seeing more of what he has to say about specifically applying James' ideas of consciousness to mental health counseling into therapy. Yeah, that's going to be exciting, too. There's a lot of different avenues

to explore with this theory, and it seems like it just keeps producing fruit and bearing flowers And on the idea of spirituality, too, it makes it not so taboo for some different cultures, the idea of this theory, right? Hearing voices and spirituality. Yeah, a lot of non-Western cultures still value the voice hearing experience in a way that we don't see as much in Western culture where it's really been more pathologized. and they do still interpret their voices in the terms of spiritual communication and the voices of dead ancestors and things like that. But James, just to be very clear, did feel that the gods that people heard in the bicameral world were coming from their own brains.

So he wasn't suggesting that these were actual. gods or spiritual. He was a he was a scientist in the Western material tradition. And so sometimes there's a misinterpretation that he was talking about actual gods and things like that. But this is still something that's based in the physical brain. Right now, that's how much is an alien from space, but you feeling alien because you're hearing something that you've never heard before. It is a really fascinating aspect that I haven't seen people address. And that is why are the voices generally experiences coming from outside of oneself? And my suggestion, and I read this in a few places, is that for reasons unknown, and I hinted at this earlier, but our

sense of self, and the self is a whole other fascinating topic that, again, the sense of self couldn't develop until we developed consciousness just 3,000 years ago, is associated with our language areas of the dominant hemisphere. So when these non-dominant hemisphere language areas become active, it feels like it's somebody else. It feels like it's coming from from outside of oneself. There is a spectrum to the voice hearing experience. Some people experience it as very external. Others experience it as somewhat internal, but still not from their self. So it's coming from where their own brain, they perceive it, but as somebody else. There's other people who describe

their experience as inserted thoughts. So it's, now we're talking about experiencing it as their own thoughts, but that are placed there by someone else. So if you, we've learned a great deal more about the details of the voice hearing experience since just in the last 25 years or so and all of these very nuanced and fascinating aspects to it. For example, one of the things we talk about in the book is hearing voices among the homeless. And a lot of people don't realize that many, many homeless people are suffering from mental illness. And when you see them sometimes talking, they're having a dialogue with their voices.

And so it's a very difficult, complex societal problem because, again, where is the line between taking away someone's freedom and putting them in treatment generally against their will versus respecting their freedom but not being able to get them maybe the help they need? It's a very, very difficult problem. but a lot of them cycle in and out of prison and jail and things like that, but this is a real problem because prisons are just not equipped to deal with mental illness. So it's, it's kind of a real tragedy that's happening right now. And again, a greater awareness of James's theory, a greater awareness of all of these issues would really help shed light on all of this and lead to better ways of dealing with all of these difficult, difficult issues. Yeah, it's, it's such a fascinating concept in so many ways.

And a lot of the times, I live in Hawaii, and Hawaii has a really large homeless population. And if you go into certain parts of town, you will definitely see people talking to themselves. And you get to hear their inner dialogue. And you can sometimes pick up on how destructive it is. However, on the other side of that, I know lots of really intelligent. people that if you catch them alone, they're just talking to themselves all day long. And so it's fascinating to think about the inner dialogue and having this conversation with yourself and how that hopes you solve problems sometimes, you know, if it's an outside voice

or an inside voice or it's fascinating. Sometimes I wonder, this is kind of way out there a little bit, but it's interesting to think how maybe the speech has migrated from one side of the brain to the other side of the brain. And now we can, our sense of self may be located in, in this opposite side of the brain. Wouldn't it be interesting if the next evolution is for you to hear my thoughts? So it's like this telebathy. Like you can hear, you know, like you can hear, you can hear your own thoughts. What about when I can hear your thoughts? Wouldn't that be a better form of communication? That could be. It also, I think, would be very frightening for a lot of people to have their inner thoughts, it sounds almost like a kind of scary science fiction, dystopian novel, right?

Where you're starting to be not just targeted or punished for your behavior, but for your thoughts. But yeah, I mean, also that kind of gets to this idea of future integration between brain and technology. And where will that all lead? And will future things like artificial intelligence help us or will it the more that starts to be done for us will that in some ways diminish our consciousness and i think you could make the case either way we've always looked at current technology as a metaphor for the mind going way back in history to the steam engine and various machine metaphors and then the computer and now with quantum computer We see talks already, is the brain a quantum computer.

And sometimes these metaphors help us to think about things in a new way or an innovative way. They can help us frame problems. But metaphors can also be very limiting. And we have to remember the brain is not a computer. And sometimes if we think about those things in those terms, it can actually constrain ideas about it. Yeah, like when I see the Elon Musk brain chip, like it just seems like a false promise to me or like an attempt to make the copy better than the original. Like we, I think we can overcome people have lost their ability to speak when having a stroke and then found a way to rewire their brain to speak again. And I think that through maybe different types of therapy, you can retrain.

your brain to do that, I think organism is vastly superior to mechanism and what we're seeing right now, I'm just kind of on a tangent, but it seems to me that there's this race between biology and technology. I am on team biology. I think that we are learning, we are evolving. We're not even close to being done and to try to stick a crude chip in your brain to do something you're not quite sure of as destructive. There's a lot of, I guess what you could call technological utopianism. There's a lot of placing a lot of hope and belief that technology is going to solve every problem.

And, you know, I'm a fan of technology and I enjoy technology. But just like consciousness, every new technology generally has its pros and cons. And I think a lot of the predictions, like you said, are, they're very ambitious. They're very unrealistic. and I think it's going to be probably beyond our lifetime before we see artificial intelligence emulating human consciousness or a melding of our brains with machines or any of those kind of things that you often see predicted in the very near future. Yeah, I agree.

I'm having an absolute blast talking to you. And I don't think we've mentioned the name of the book enough or at all. Let's go with it. Tell us about the name of the book and where people can find it. It's best to get it on the website or give us all the lowdown, please. Sure. So the new book is called Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind, interviews with leading thinkers on Julian James' theory.

And people can order it, pre-order it right now at Julianjains.org, depending on when people are listening to this. And by ordering it directly from the Julian Jane Society, it really helps our mission. We like Amazon, but it helps us more if people, order it directly from us. We're going to be shipping all those pre-orders. And the pre-orders all come with bonus articles that we're going to send to people that you can't get anywhere else. And then we're going to start shipping those pre-orders in early July, actually throughout the month of July. And then in August, you'll be able to order it immediately from the society. And in late August,

it will have a broader distribution on Amazon sites worldwide. And at that point, you'll also, if this is someone listening internationally, you'll be able to go into pretty much any major bookstore around the world and have them order it for you through their normal distribution channels. You might not see it on the shelf, but they'll be able to special order it for you if you're someone living in Australia or in Germany or some of these other places where, you know, when I started all this with the first book, I could ship a book anywhere in the world in a flat rate envelope for about $11.

And that's more than doubled now. So we're excited to be able, people to be able to order it without international shipping, just wherever they're located around the world. Yeah, I'm excited. Everybody who's listening to this, do yourself a huge favor. And just you should start, if you just start with this book, I guarantee you go back and buy all the books. You should get all the books. It's really fascinating. And it's just this unbelievable, liberating idea that can change the way you see the world.

And I'm being honest, it changed the way I see the world by doing so the way I interact in it. But that's not all. Tell people about the website and what you do there and the extra things they can get there and interviews. It's an amazing site. Thank you. Yeah. It's very hard to do justice to James's theory in any short conversation. And I think you're making a good point that when people read his book or the follow-up books on their own, there is just such a rich tapestry there that we can really only hope to scratch the surface of. So on the website, Julianjains.org, and that's J-A-Y-N-E-S, we have a tremendous number of articles for people to read. And we have a member's area where people can support the society, which is a nonprofit.

So all the memberships are tax deductible donations. And within the members area, we have, for example, all the lectures from the conference we did on Jane's theory. We have videos of Jane's giving lectures that are very rare. We have audio interviews with James and audio lectures of James and all kind of other resources that help elaborate each of these four different hypotheses that make up his. theory. Yeah, it's, it's so fascinating. Is there anything else that you want to leave us with that that we didn't touch base with so far? Boy, we covered a lot. Yeah, nothing comes to mind. I think

we covered a lot of different aspects of the theory pretty well. Yeah, I think so too. I think we gave people a really good preview of what they can expect. And I want to say thank you to you for taking time to come and talk to me and my audience, and I'm real appreciative of everything you're doing and the work that you have done and you're doing, and you're probably going to even have another book after this one. So I'm really looking forward to your work and the people on your side, I want to say thanks to everybody at the Julian Jane Society for contributing. You guys are all making the world a little bit better and hoping people like me become more educated. So thank you. Well, thank you for that. It really means a lot. And we could not do what we're doing without the

of people like you and our other members and donors. And thank you so much for having me on to talk about the theory in the book today. I really appreciate it. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Go to the website, become a member, donate, pick up the books, and become a better you. That's what we got. We'll put all the notes and the show notes, too, for all the links so people can find it easier, too, if you're listening to this now. So that's all we got for today, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you for your time. Aloha.