8 ms·

There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early c

by bloak 8y ago

There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a literal description of a real experience. For me one of the biggest problems with the theory is how people's perception (whether they hear voices or not) could change en masse, presumably because of a change in culture or education, because I don't believe there can have been a biological change over that period. Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. So I'd like to see a detailed description of one of those groups. Then I could perhaps believe that the phenomenon was mainstream in ancient Greece.

david_ar 8y ago
In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?
- phylomortis 8y ago
  Not only ancient people. The concept of a “foreign” inner voice exists in islam and is called vesvese in Turkish. It is commonly attributed to being deceit from satan and as a child you get taught to actively repress it.
  - posterboy 8y ago
    I tried to record myself, to capture my inner monologue, and found it really painful to listen to. I'm also not very good at role play or impersonation. But a professional performer, like a priest or entertainer, has to do it more than just habitually, and their manners become adapted and people might affect a whole dialectic. Whereas children rather randomly babel and come up with unique manerism that are uncommon and consequently deemed unfit. Further, if you grant that deus ex machina could be a bodyless voice in plays and earlier temple ceremonies, it stands to reason that people would consequently spin these messages further and reanalyse their inner monologue as word of god, not the least to shift responsibility, e.g. to the uber-ich, in Freud's terms.
bencollier49 8y ago
I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sample of people who'd trained themselves to lucid dream, you'd find a high proportion of people who heard voices. Specifically upon sleeping and waking.
- hliyan 8y ago
  I'd be a counter-example. I frequently dream lucidly. But I never hear voice or see anything even remotely resembling hallucinations. I'm also one of those individuals who are not susceptible to hypnosis (I've had a professional try and fail repeatedly).
  - WaddyJones 8y ago
    There is no such thing as an individual who is not susceptible to hypnosis because all hypnosis is self hypnosis. In fact you had to hypnotize yourself into believing that you’re not susceptible to hypnosis, which proves that the opposite is true. On another note— Actually, you do hear voices. You just don’t notice them because you assume that they are your “inner voice.” If you just gave the process of thinking your thoughts a different label, you could easily call it “hearing a voice.” I’m not trying to be a smart ass here, don’t you think that this is true ? IMO, the idea that “thinking thoughts” and “hearing voices” are just different vague metaphorical labels for the same internal phenomenon makes a lot of sense.
    - scarcely 8y ago
      Agreed. It's not for nothing we talk about "thinking out loud". That suggests that there is some kind of vague awareness that thinking and speaking are not fundamentally different activities (compare: "feeling aroused/jealous out loud" which doesn't even make sense) Sometimes I wonder if human acquired the ability to "silently" think thoughts only recently. That the ability to silently think evolved much like how the ability to silently read evolved (even today I sometimes run into country folks who have little ability to read without audibly reading, or cannot transfer their password from phone to computer without broadcasting it to everyone around) Presumably audible thinking and audible reading were the original forms. Then silent thinking and silent reading evolved because of their obvious utility (it's fitness enhancing to be able to hide your thoughts from your enemy blah blah)
goto11 8y ago
I actually don't reject the theory that accounts of Gods appearing and speaking to people could be actual mental processes, guided by culture. I find this more believable than it is all fiction or lies (or that Gods have physical existence outside the human mind). But I do reject the bicameral hypothesis that we either have Gods speaking or we have consciousness, and that shift happened a particular point in time around the eight century.
- xfs 8y ago
  Surely the hypothesis has be to rejected in all its specificity but what new hypothesis can be proposed in the negation of the previous one? Could it be that the shift happened but not in the precise time or not all at once or the shift manifested in a more individualistic manner instead of a collective manner? Precisely in Lacanian psychoanalysis the symbolic consciousness (language) emerges as the reaction to an external traumatic encounter with the chaotic impossibility of the real. The hypothesis of bicameral mind may not have much scientific value but isn't it interesting to coincide so much with structuralism?
- spc476 8y ago
  I just finished reading the book. In it, he doesn't state that it happened at once everywhere. There was one passage that implied that the Aztecs were still mostly bicameral (or were in the immediate period after the bicameral breakdown) when the Spanish arrived in the 16th Century. Also, the breakdown is not instantaneous, but happens over time. Once it starts, you get religion and oracles (the Oracle at Delphi for example) as the populous attempts to hear the gods' voices for direction. Oracles lasted for about a millennium after the initial breakdown in Greece, and over time, the gods' voices were head less and less. He also states that modern remnants of the bicameral mind exist in hypnosis and schizophrenia (but in the case of hypnosis, how it works is very culturally dependent).
starbeast 8y ago
>There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The sane ones know better than to tell people that they hear voices. >"Research supports the view that hearing hallucinatory voices is not by itself an indicator of mental illness. Estimates of the percentage of people in the general population without a known psychiatric illness who report auditory hallucinations vary widely. One review of seventeen surveys from nine countries found prevalence estimates as low as fewer than 1% to as high as 84%. Estimates of college students who have reported hearing hallucinatory voices have ranged from 13% to 71%. The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations. Taking into consideration such methodological differences, some researchers estimate the prevalence of hearing voices in the general population to be between 5% and 28%, with 75% of people who report hearing voices to be psychologically healthy. Research suggests also that the prevalence of auditory verbal hallucinations varies by gender, age and culture." https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/longing-nostalgia/201803/research-is-shedding-new-light-hearing-voices https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/longing-nostalgia/...
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Between 1 and 84% isn't a very useful range "The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations." Kind of burying the lead. "Taking into consideration" Making shit up I'm more interested in how many people actually hear voices, not memory, interior monologue, or day dreaming. Unbidden commentary by a voice of another that is distinguishable from reality only by deduction.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    Did you check through the referred papers at the end? It doesn't seem, via reading them, that they are just making shit up. You seem to be taking issue with a turn of phrase in the article, rather than the papers the article refers to. Are you making shit up and didn't actually check if they were making shit up?
gaius 8y ago
they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill The scope for this is highly in flux at present.
deepnet 8y ago
Most imaginative people can imagine voices and often discuss things with themselves. The acceptable version of Janes' hypothesis is that ancients attributed much of their imagination and interior life to objective reality. A stronger version of Jayne's bicameral mind only requires that the ancient doubted ownership of certain of their emotions and trains of thought and discussed and wrote of them as real - the internal narrative, the train of thought, the stream of consciousness did not exist as a literary device and consequently the ancients did not possess it as a tool of thought. As Gods and supernatural events were generally accepted in ancient times, the idea that internal dialogue was the voice of 'Gods' or deceased relatives was entirely reasonable as far as they knew back then. The ancient might say the sea calls me home and the modern would understand the same emotion as guilt at not seeing ones parents. Dreams are unbidden, uncontrolled internal imaginings we all have and anyone who stays awake long enough will start to hallucinate while awake. Likewise stress and PTSD can induce unbidden thought, and uncontrolled imaginings and terrors. We then attribute this to the unconscious mind, so we entertain a certain bicamerality. Even so many of us moderns still entertain superstitions and use ritual to absolve ourselves from 'bad luck'. The Jungian hypothesis is that the unconscious responds to symbol and ritual and we require understanding our life course in heroic and mythic terms to properly become our own selves apart from our parents' views and social programming. We are self aware enough to correlate certain cravings for particular sugary treats to advertising influencing us - is the desire for that product truly our own thought ? We might say that a person lacks wit, empathy or is quick to anger - the ancient talks of them as under a planetary astrological influence or a symbolic event, a raven attending their birth, the reason for their behaviour - the same things are being communicated but the cause is differently attributed. Jaynes proposes that minds were recently completely bicameral and did not posses our modern consciousness until bicamerality broke down - which is difficult to swallow, haven't we always been this human ?
wpietri 8y ago
This point is one I've chewed on some: > Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. My (entirely made up) theory here is that it's mediated through stress and exhaustion. Even today there's something called "brief psychotic disorder" where during a period of extreme stress somebody can experience delusions, hallucinations, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_psychotic_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_psychotic_disorder There are also a variety of religious traditions where modern people will hear the voice of god, enter trance states, channel spirits, etc. And we all know that sleep deprivation can produce all sorts of mental effects. Given that civilization is mainly marked by improvements in life quality over time, it seems reasonable that the further back we go, the rougher people have it. So figure less sleep, worse nutrition, more desperation, more trauma, both direct and through the frequent death of children, friends, family. So it seems reasonable to me that early on in civilization people were on average pretty bonkers. And social creatures that we are, that we'd be jointly bonkers; if our parents and siblings and and neighbors experience parts of themselves as the voice of particular gods, we would be likely to as well. As our lives over generations get slowly better, the stress level drops. So too does the level of biologically driven psychosis. Which undermines the cultural elements that support and channel it, which might collapse relatively suddenly. (A reasonable modern parallel might be the European collapse in religious belief over recent generations.) All pure speculation, of course. Jaynes's theory is certainly fun to think about, but we would have a hard time getting real experiments past an IRB.
- sandinmytea 8y ago
  For anyone reading this above comment, I believe wpietri has the gist of it. To form a conception of this otherwise impossible to conceive-of social/psychological dynamic, one has to imagine people and civilization which has no reverse focus on the self whatsoever. There would be no collectively determined subjective language to refer to one another and to oneself. For example, I could say "NAME1 verbed NAME2!" and "NAME3 verbed NAME1!" Even when NAME3 is "myself" remember that there is no "myself." That is to say "I verbed NAME1" would not be a statement. NAME3 would be "me" without there being a concept of "me" whatsoever. To make matters even more difficult, the "past tense" would be very shaky or even non existent without attributing an almost ritualistic re-occurrence to the action, and in addition to that, a driving force which was the "god" or spirit equivalent of that force. In Jayne's theory, the phase of "bicameralism" was a middle phase that allowed for hydraulic agricultural civilization without something that could be described as "literacy of the self." To express day-to-day behavior, there would be no conceptual active participants to describe AT ALL. Instead, an external force would be used to explain most behaviors - namely gods, ancestors, what have you - who ever's voice would be identified with the behavior. The "hearing voices" part is both real and figurative, as it would be necessary without that neurological self having existed. It came into existence, according to Jaynes, right along with the language "I" "myself" "you" and so on, and a careful reading of antique civilization's language would help one to notice that there truly was no such language structure to describe the self until that concept formed civilization-wide. Until then, there was no "it" except that which was attributed to a very real pantheon of voices and compulsions which moved people to act. [edited for clarity]
freeflight 8y ago
> There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. I've always wondered how much of that comes down to definition and perception? I can "hear" my own thoughts, so I pretty much have "voices" in my head. That I recognize them as my own, probably isn't a given. Because when I try to talk about this with friends&family, most of them don't even seem to understand what I'm talking about with "hearing yourself think" like they have no active thoughts of their own?! As such I don't think it's something that has established itself on a large scale across the whole population, I think there are still very big differences between how individual humans think and perceive their own thinking, which by now we might label as being "somewhere on the spectrum".
WaddyJones 8y ago
Dude you’re a fool. There is such a group, it’s called sleep deprived people. Stay up for five days and I literally guarantee you will hear voices and realize that jaynes theory is 100% correct.

by bloak 8y ago

david_ar 8y ago

In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?

phylomortis 8y ago
Not only ancient people. The concept of a “foreign” inner voice exists in islam and is called vesvese in Turkish. It is commonly attributed to being deceit from satan and as a child you get taught to actively repress it.
- posterboy 8y ago
  I tried to record myself, to capture my inner monologue, and found it really painful to listen to. I'm also not very good at role play or impersonation. But a professional performer, like a priest or entertainer, has to do it more than just habitually, and their manners become adapted and people might affect a whole dialectic. Whereas children rather randomly babel and come up with unique manerism that are uncommon and consequently deemed unfit. Further, if you grant that deus ex machina could be a bodyless voice in plays and earlier temple ceremonies, it stands to reason that people would consequently spin these messages further and reanalyse their inner monologue as word of god, not the least to shift responsibility, e.g. to the uber-ich, in Freud's terms.

bencollier49 8y ago

I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sample of people who'd trained themselves to lucid dream, you'd find a high proportion of people who heard voices. Specifically upon sleeping and waking.

hliyan 8y ago
I'd be a counter-example. I frequently dream lucidly. But I never hear voice or see anything even remotely resembling hallucinations. I'm also one of those individuals who are not susceptible to hypnosis (I've had a professional try and fail repeatedly).
- WaddyJones 8y ago
  There is no such thing as an individual who is not susceptible to hypnosis because all hypnosis is self hypnosis. In fact you had to hypnotize yourself into believing that you’re not susceptible to hypnosis, which proves that the opposite is true. On another note— Actually, you do hear voices. You just don’t notice them because you assume that they are your “inner voice.” If you just gave the process of thinking your thoughts a different label, you could easily call it “hearing a voice.” I’m not trying to be a smart ass here, don’t you think that this is true ? IMO, the idea that “thinking thoughts” and “hearing voices” are just different vague metaphorical labels for the same internal phenomenon makes a lot of sense.
  - scarcely 8y ago
    Agreed. It's not for nothing we talk about "thinking out loud". That suggests that there is some kind of vague awareness that thinking and speaking are not fundamentally different activities (compare: "feeling aroused/jealous out loud" which doesn't even make sense) Sometimes I wonder if human acquired the ability to "silently" think thoughts only recently. That the ability to silently think evolved much like how the ability to silently read evolved (even today I sometimes run into country folks who have little ability to read without audibly reading, or cannot transfer their password from phone to computer without broadcasting it to everyone around) Presumably audible thinking and audible reading were the original forms. Then silent thinking and silent reading evolved because of their obvious utility (it's fitness enhancing to be able to hide your thoughts from your enemy blah blah)

goto11 8y ago

I actually don't reject the theory that accounts of Gods appearing and speaking to people could be actual mental processes, guided by culture. I find this more believable than it is all fiction or lies (or that Gods have physical existence outside the human mind). But I do reject the bicameral hypothesis that we either have Gods speaking or we have consciousness, and that shift happened a particular point in time around the eight century.

xfs 8y ago
Surely the hypothesis has be to rejected in all its specificity but what new hypothesis can be proposed in the negation of the previous one? Could it be that the shift happened but not in the precise time or not all at once or the shift manifested in a more individualistic manner instead of a collective manner? Precisely in Lacanian psychoanalysis the symbolic consciousness (language) emerges as the reaction to an external traumatic encounter with the chaotic impossibility of the real. The hypothesis of bicameral mind may not have much scientific value but isn't it interesting to coincide so much with structuralism?
spc476 8y ago
I just finished reading the book. In it, he doesn't state that it happened at once everywhere. There was one passage that implied that the Aztecs were still mostly bicameral (or were in the immediate period after the bicameral breakdown) when the Spanish arrived in the 16th Century. Also, the breakdown is not instantaneous, but happens over time. Once it starts, you get religion and oracles (the Oracle at Delphi for example) as the populous attempts to hear the gods' voices for direction. Oracles lasted for about a millennium after the initial breakdown in Greece, and over time, the gods' voices were head less and less. He also states that modern remnants of the bicameral mind exist in hypnosis and schizophrenia (but in the case of hypnosis, how it works is very culturally dependent).

starbeast 8y ago

>There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The sane ones know better than to tell people that they hear voices. >"Research supports the view that hearing hallucinatory voices is not by itself an indicator of mental illness. Estimates of the percentage of people in the general population without a known psychiatric illness who report auditory hallucinations vary widely. One review of seventeen surveys from nine countries found prevalence estimates as low as fewer than 1% to as high as 84%. Estimates of college students who have reported hearing hallucinatory voices have ranged from 13% to 71%. The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations. Taking into consideration such methodological differences, some researchers estimate the prevalence of hearing voices in the general population to be between 5% and 28%, with 75% of people who report hearing voices to be psychologically healthy. Research suggests also that the prevalence of auditory verbal hallucinations varies by gender, age and culture." https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/longing-nostalgia/201803/research-is-shedding-new-light-hearing-voices https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/longing-nostalgia/...

michaelmrose 8y ago
Between 1 and 84% isn't a very useful range "The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations." Kind of burying the lead. "Taking into consideration" Making shit up I'm more interested in how many people actually hear voices, not memory, interior monologue, or day dreaming. Unbidden commentary by a voice of another that is distinguishable from reality only by deduction.
- starbeast 8y ago
  Did you check through the referred papers at the end? It doesn't seem, via reading them, that they are just making shit up. You seem to be taking issue with a turn of phrase in the article, rather than the papers the article refers to. Are you making shit up and didn't actually check if they were making shit up?

gaius 8y ago

they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill The scope for this is highly in flux at present.

deepnet 8y ago

Most imaginative people can imagine voices and often discuss things with themselves. The acceptable version of Janes' hypothesis is that ancients attributed much of their imagination and interior life to objective reality. A stronger version of Jayne's bicameral mind only requires that the ancient doubted ownership of certain of their emotions and trains of thought and discussed and wrote of them as real - the internal narrative, the train of thought, the stream of consciousness did not exist as a literary device and consequently the ancients did not possess it as a tool of thought. As Gods and supernatural events were generally accepted in ancient times, the idea that internal dialogue was the voice of 'Gods' or deceased relatives was entirely reasonable as far as they knew back then. The ancient might say the sea calls me home and the modern would understand the same emotion as guilt at not seeing ones parents. Dreams are unbidden, uncontrolled internal imaginings we all have and anyone who stays awake long enough will start to hallucinate while awake. Likewise stress and PTSD can induce unbidden thought, and uncontrolled imaginings and terrors. We then attribute this to the unconscious mind, so we entertain a certain bicamerality. Even so many of us moderns still entertain superstitions and use ritual to absolve ourselves from 'bad luck'. The Jungian hypothesis is that the unconscious responds to symbol and ritual and we require understanding our life course in heroic and mythic terms to properly become our own selves apart from our parents' views and social programming. We are self aware enough to correlate certain cravings for particular sugary treats to advertising influencing us - is the desire for that product truly our own thought ? We might say that a person lacks wit, empathy or is quick to anger - the ancient talks of them as under a planetary astrological influence or a symbolic event, a raven attending their birth, the reason for their behaviour - the same things are being communicated but the cause is differently attributed. Jaynes proposes that minds were recently completely bicameral and did not posses our modern consciousness until bicamerality broke down - which is difficult to swallow, haven't we always been this human ?

wpietri 8y ago

This point is one I've chewed on some: > Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. My (entirely made up) theory here is that it's mediated through stress and exhaustion. Even today there's something called "brief psychotic disorder" where during a period of extreme stress somebody can experience delusions, hallucinations, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_psychotic_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_psychotic_disorder There are also a variety of religious traditions where modern people will hear the voice of god, enter trance states, channel spirits, etc. And we all know that sleep deprivation can produce all sorts of mental effects. Given that civilization is mainly marked by improvements in life quality over time, it seems reasonable that the further back we go, the rougher people have it. So figure less sleep, worse nutrition, more desperation, more trauma, both direct and through the frequent death of children, friends, family. So it seems reasonable to me that early on in civilization people were on average pretty bonkers. And social creatures that we are, that we'd be jointly bonkers; if our parents and siblings and and neighbors experience parts of themselves as the voice of particular gods, we would be likely to as well. As our lives over generations get slowly better, the stress level drops. So too does the level of biologically driven psychosis. Which undermines the cultural elements that support and channel it, which might collapse relatively suddenly. (A reasonable modern parallel might be the European collapse in religious belief over recent generations.) All pure speculation, of course. Jaynes's theory is certainly fun to think about, but we would have a hard time getting real experiments past an IRB.

sandinmytea 8y ago
For anyone reading this above comment, I believe wpietri has the gist of it. To form a conception of this otherwise impossible to conceive-of social/psychological dynamic, one has to imagine people and civilization which has no reverse focus on the self whatsoever. There would be no collectively determined subjective language to refer to one another and to oneself. For example, I could say "NAME1 verbed NAME2!" and "NAME3 verbed NAME1!" Even when NAME3 is "myself" remember that there is no "myself." That is to say "I verbed NAME1" would not be a statement. NAME3 would be "me" without there being a concept of "me" whatsoever. To make matters even more difficult, the "past tense" would be very shaky or even non existent without attributing an almost ritualistic re-occurrence to the action, and in addition to that, a driving force which was the "god" or spirit equivalent of that force. In Jayne's theory, the phase of "bicameralism" was a middle phase that allowed for hydraulic agricultural civilization without something that could be described as "literacy of the self." To express day-to-day behavior, there would be no conceptual active participants to describe AT ALL. Instead, an external force would be used to explain most behaviors - namely gods, ancestors, what have you - who ever's voice would be identified with the behavior. The "hearing voices" part is both real and figurative, as it would be necessary without that neurological self having existed. It came into existence, according to Jaynes, right along with the language "I" "myself" "you" and so on, and a careful reading of antique civilization's language would help one to notice that there truly was no such language structure to describe the self until that concept formed civilization-wide. Until then, there was no "it" except that which was attributed to a very real pantheon of voices and compulsions which moved people to act. [edited for clarity]

freeflight 8y ago

> There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. I've always wondered how much of that comes down to definition and perception? I can "hear" my own thoughts, so I pretty much have "voices" in my head. That I recognize them as my own, probably isn't a given. Because when I try to talk about this with friends&family, most of them don't even seem to understand what I'm talking about with "hearing yourself think" like they have no active thoughts of their own?! As such I don't think it's something that has established itself on a large scale across the whole population, I think there are still very big differences between how individual humans think and perceive their own thinking, which by now we might label as being "somewhere on the spectrum".

WaddyJones 8y ago

Dude you’re a fool. There is such a group, it’s called sleep deprived people. Stay up for five days and I literally guarantee you will hear voices and realize that jaynes theory is 100% correct.