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Author: Marcel Kuijsten
Quotes of Author: Marcel Kuijsten

Marcel Kuijsten _ Reflections on the Dawn of
What triggered these hallucinations? I suggest it was even the slight stress of making a decision in a novel circumstance, whereas in ourselves in modern times the stress threshold for such triggering of a verbal hallucination is much higher. The reason they are so prevalent in all cultures today, in the hospital patients and homeless I have talked about, in children and speechless quadriplegics, is because they were once the genetic basis of this ancient mentality, and the genes for this potentiality are with us today. Verbal hallucinations, we think, evolved along with the evolution of language during the late Pleistocene10 as the response part of the brain register of all admonitory information.
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Marcel Kuijsten _ Reflections on the Dawn of
Less than a decade later there was experimental support for the right hemispheric involvement of "intrusive" experiences into awareness. Although imaging technology has shown us that the cerebral volume in which "mind space" exists is configurational and complex, the results strongly support Jaynes's essential thesis. But perhaps the most compelling congruence with Jaynes's insights is genetics. Within the last five years science has found that single point mutations on genes can produce permanent changes in speech production. There is now evidence that point mutations, whose mechanisms must still be discerned, can diffuse within decades throughout entire populations. There have been approximately 15 million changes in our species' genome since our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. There are human accelerated regions in the genome with genes known to be involved in transcriptional regulation and neurodevelopment. They are expressed within brain structures that would have allowed precisely the types of phenomena that Jaynes predicted had occurred around 3,500 years ago. Related genes, attributed to religious beliefs, are found on the same chromosome {for example, chromosome 10} as propensities for specific forms of epilepsy {partial, with auditory features} and schizophrenia. From what we now know about antibody titres and viral infections, the concept of a relatively swift and pervasive change in the microstructure and function of all human brains is no longer that improbable.
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Marcel Kuijsten _ The Jaynesian: Newsletter of
Completely unrecognized is the whole presumption of this saying according to which individual body parts could possess independent volition and as such can inform {sway/direct} the acting of the whole body. Even more seriously - the presumption that self-mutilation can stop or somehow influence higher mental processes. Even the person who is not a trained psychologist or psychiatrist can recognize that we are dealing with a seriously pathological state of mind. I am inclined to believe that gospel sayings represent atavism - a regression to older stages of development. It is one of the vestiges of development of modern consciousness. This is an example of physiological metaphor which never made it through the whole process to unification of consciousness. On the contrary it remained stuck somewhere in stage III. In this stage physiological hypostases represent internal stimuli and are starting to create internal spaces where metaphored action can occur. In this position they hypertrophied unable to move into the next stage of unification into one consciousness. Already at the time of recording in the gospels this saying was perceived as anomalous. Luke, the most educated and refined of synoptical authors, preserved the immediate context, but edited out most of the peculiar parts concerning disseminated volition and self-mutilations. Further and broader contexts which may be mentioned and discussed: other Greek and Hebrew physiological and anatomical metaphors; the popularity of a metaphor of the body for structuring and functioning of society in Hellenism; the ancient practice of religious self-mutilation; the potential for facilitating our understanding of brutish penal codes or modern self-mutilations.
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Marcel Kuijsten _ Reflections on the Dawn of
There is no distinction made by the child between subject, action, and object because for him they are effectively all the same - he is the locus of the action, both its subject and its object at once."15
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Marcel Kuijsten _ The Jaynesian: Newsletter of
A Jaynesian understanding of consciousness and its implications for rhetoric also helps explain the deep distrust of rhetoric that emerges at the same time rhetoric itself does. From the first writings overtly discussing persuasion as a civic art, we also see attacks on rhetoric as a practice that disregards the truth, can make what is bad seem good, and has an uncanny power to enrapture an audience. One of the best examples of this sort of skepticism is in Plato's dialog The Menexenus, in which Socrates describes the effects of hearing a speech praising the virtues of Athens. Although he knows that much of what the speaker says is exaggeration and distortion, Socrates says he felt himself transported to another realm - an "out of body" experience that affects his very perception of the world around him. The usual understanding of this sort of allegation about rhetoric's spellbinding power over an audience is that it is simply a poetic description of the sensation that we all experience today: the ability of powerful words to move us in unexpected ways, ways that often go beyond the logical or didactic. But I suggest that if Jaynes is right about the time frame for the development of consciousness, such descriptions by rhetoric's critics may be less poetic than usually thought, and much closer to the actual experience of early audiences of the relatively new art of rhetoric. If full consciousness in Greece emerged only after the Homeric era, would we not expect that for several generations after its advent, the power of language would indeed seem mysterious, almost mystical? Wouldn't there continue to be a collective social memory of language as something that came from the gods? I suggest that the early apprehension about rhetoric's near magical powers are not simply metaphorical amplifications, but descriptions of how audiences, only lately emerging from a bicameral world, would have experienced hearing an orator with the ability to artfully use language to move them.
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