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Book: Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited
Quotes of Book: Reflections on the Dawn of
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  1. 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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  2. 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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  3. 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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