Julian Jaynes was an eccentric Princeton psychologist with a tantalizing, if wholly speculative, theory about brain function. Using examples from early literature such as Homer’s Iliad (see p. 34), Jaynes argued that until three thousand years ago humans didn’t experience consciousness as we do. Instead, they performed ordinary human activities (eating, speaking, fighting, building) like automata, without any higher-order subjective awareness or facility for introspection.
Why? Because their brains were arranged in a bicameral, or “two-part,” fashion: the decision-making right hemisphere transmitted auditory hallucinations—voices telling it what to do—to the left, which interpreted these voices as “gods” and obeyed them accordingly. For millennia this arrangement persisted, bolstered by rigidly hierarchical societies where everyone had a clear sense of purpose. But as famine, war, and overpopulation took their toll, sometimes forcing mass migrations, the bicameral mind began to break down. Once humans realized they could speak to themselves, and as language itself grew more sophisticated, the gods’ voices faded away.
Believe it or not, The Origins of Consciousness was a great success. Lay readers loved it for Jaynes’s enthusiasm and gleeful portentousness. “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences,” it begins, “this insubstantial country of the mind!” His fellow scientists were more skeptical, pointing out that his ideas had little basis in neurological fact. Richard Dawkins declared it either complete rubbish or a work of genius, nothing in between.
It isn’t hard to find the romance in what Philip K. Dick called a “stunning theory,” nor to understand what Bowie saw in it—a whole new approach to mental illness. As noted elsewhere, the plight of his half brother Terry gave Bowie a deep appreciation for writers who found in schizophrenia special rather than shameful qualities. Jaynes saw schizophrenia as a partial relapse to the bicameral mind because of the way sufferers hear voices compelling them to carry out certain actions; the way the narrator of Bowie’s song “Look Back in Anger” experiences an angelic visitation falls into this category as well. In this sense, Jaynes thought, it was similar not only to demonic possession but to artistic creation, particularly the kind that operates under the radar of consciousness—like that in two of Bowie’s favorite art movements, Dada and surrealism, for example.