Product Description
At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion -- and indeed our future.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 155 reviews)

Revolutionary by William J. Ross

4 Stars
December 28, 2009
Read this as a young (1st year) psychology student at Cal State not long after it was published and it simply captured my imagination. That rather than thinking of what we call "thinking", the everyday experience of thinking as a dialogue in my head, as a sundry process, but as a vehicle of revelation and communication with the Gods and something that happened once in a while was astounding and revolutionary. And that the bridge between everyday experience and that revelation happened over the course of physiological development when a bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain at last wired itself together in a rather quick amount of time (several thousand years) was quite a revelation to my young mind. Fast forward 20 years and nothing much has come of Jaynes' theories, I in fact went into an engineering career, but it still to this day reminds me of a time when I found learning really exciting. I remember this book being a fascinating read, I only give it four stars as I also remember it being so out there I had a few problems with some of the offered premises. Never the less this needs to be on the shelf along with Jung, Skinner, and the rest.

the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind by Frank Jakubowsky (oakland, CA usa)

1 Stars
November 30, 2009
the ideas are too far to be accepted. He doesn't have an understanding of what is mind. his ideas about consciousness don't include what is mind. His ideas don't explain what is the difference between animals and humans. Consciousness for him isn't a reality, but a state of awareness.

Genius by Traveler (Northeast)

5 Stars
November 10, 2009
Much has deservedly been written about Jaynes' theory, so I won't offer more of the same. It is brilliant and beguiling. But I suggest the reader attend first to two things: 1) THE OBVIOUS - Jaynes recognizes (as so many of us will not) that humans are evolved animals, and that that which distinguishes us from the other animals was not, at some arbitrary moment, injected from above. 2) THE OVERLOOKED - Early in the book, Jaynes offers one of the most excellent definitions of "consciousness" that I've ever come across. It is foolish to argue Jaynes' theory on the evolution of consciousness if you don't attend carefully to what it is that is evolved. You have to fight with the linguistic chapter a bit, but the sections on 'what consciousness is not' are importantly instructive. Watch, finally, for a summary definition on page 50-something that reads: "Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up like a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision." This is the best distillation to keep in mind as you read on. I've had it in memory for over 30 years. Jaynes was a genius, and he was most certainly right in original, critical ways, even as he ventured beyond his best insights into speculative areas of doubt. Read this book!

Certainly Interesting but More Hypothesis then Anything by S. Pactor (San Diego, CA United States)

4 Stars
October 25, 2009
Julian Jaynes was an obscure, non-tenure academic when he published this book in the late 1970s. His outlandish thesis was that consciousness was a relatively recent invention, dating basically to the 1000 BCs. Before then humans were directed by the voices of gods that they heard in their heads. His argument is well constructed and spectacular in its scope. Starting in Sumerian Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC he discusses how Kings from that time were always depicted talking directly to their gods. People of that time had little idols that they kept in their homes (to tell them what to do) and people actually kept their gods in little god houses. Jaynes theorizes that this voice is something that comes the inactive right side of the brain (language is concentrated in the left part of the brain.) In the second part of the argument, Jaynes contrasts the Sumerian/Akkadian Mesopotamians to the Assyrians, who showed up circa 2000 BC. Unlike the Sumerian/Akkadian leaders, who were always shown literally getting their orders from their God, the Assyrian kings were shown talking to empty thrones. They were also terribly cruel and their letters are full of behavior that prefigures consciousness (plotting, scheming, anxiety.) During the end of the 2000 BCs there was a several hundred year period of chaos that manifested in the West as the destruction of Mycenean civilization, but had impacts all over the Middle East. Jaynes theorizes that this chaos resulted in the abandonment of people by their gods. I.e. they could no longer hear the gods talking to them. Jaynes is at his weakest when he tries to explain what exactly happened inside the brain during this period. He speculates that it was the remnans of these bicameral ("god talks to me") people who became "the Hebrews"- based on the fact that the word Hebrew derives from the Akkadian term for "crazy people who wander in the desert." Thus, in Jaynes thesis, the Bible is the ultimate example of humans evolving consciousness- from "God speaks to us" to "Where has god gone" in one book. He also talks about the Odyssey vs. the Iliad, and even talks about how modern schizophrenia is a remnant of the bicameral mind. Can Jaynes "prove" any of it? Not really, not enough evidence. But I found it pretty convincing.

Then when did "consciousness" appear? by Rick (Austin, Texas)

5 Stars
September 25, 2009
On rereading this work from a vantage point of thirty years, I can heartily agree that it is not "science," and it may well be that this thesis can never be "proved" in any meaningful way. But readers who reject it outright must nevertheless address the issue of when exactly the mind of homo sapiens did become "conscious" in a contemporary sense. Unless we accept the notion that many, if not most, mammals are "conscious" in the way humans speak of the subject (and that only pushes the question farther back into evolutionary history), we must acknowledge that our present conception of consciousness must have arisen at some point in human development. Whether texts presumably written around 1000 B.C.E., and available archaeological artifacts, provide evidence of the "late" development of consciousness is not a question I'm qualified to answer. But the brilliance of Jaynes's thesis, and particularly its explanatory power, should be credited. It was, and remains, a provocative theory. I am reminded of the calumny that was heaped upon Alfred Wegener almost a century ago when he proposed that continents had "drifted." For almost fifty years, that thesis was ridiculed by mainstream geologists (and many others) simply because no one could imagine a mechanism by which such movement might have occurred. We all know how that turned out. If Jaynes's argument promotes serious thought, which I'm afraid has not been the case for most neurologists and literary scholars, then it deserves high praise.

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