The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind

National Book Award Finalist: “This man's ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch 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. “Don't be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes... speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

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.

Fourteen years after its original publication this book remains as astounding and controversial as ever. At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution, but came into being as recently as 3,000 years ago. The implications extend into every aspect if human life.

At the heart of this seminal work is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but was a learned process that emerged, through cataclysm and catastrophe, from a hallucinatory mentality only three thousand years ago and that is still developing. The implications of this scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history, our culture, our religion -- indeed our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is "a humbling text, the kind that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how much thinking there is left to do." What is human consciousness, where did it come from, and how does it determine who we are and how we live in the world? At the heart of this book is the theory that human consciousness did not develop over time--that, in fact, ancient peoples from mesopotamia to Peru did not "think" as we do and therefore were not conscious. Drawing on laboratory studies of the brain and clos examination of archaeological evidence, the author concludes that consciousness is not a product of evolution but of catastrophic events in our own history, events that occurred as recently as three thousand years ago Content: Bk. 1. The mind of man. The consciousness of consciousness. Consciousness. The mind of Iliad. The bicameral mind. The double brain. The origin of civilization -- Bk. 2. Gods, graves, and idols. Literature bicameral theocracies. The causes od consciousness. A change of mind in Mesopotamia. The intellectual consciousness of Greece. The Moral consciousness of the Khabiru -- Bk. 3. Vestiges of the bicameral mind in the modern world. The quest for authorization. Of prophets and possession. Of poetry and music. Hypnosis. Schizophrenia. The Auguries of science. At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Jaynes's controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only 3,000 years ago and still is developing O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!