From the Vault: Bicameralism, Part 2

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, are you welcome to stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
it's Saturday. Time to go back into the vault. Now.
If you were with us last Saturday, you were here
for our rerun of the classic episode, part one of
our exploration of the bicameral mind hypothesis and Julian Jaynes
from from September I think it was originally, and so

(00:26):
at the beginning of the last episode we talked a
little bit about what our thoughts about the bicameral mind
have been since we first talked about this idea. My
basic take is that I don't think it's correct as
a theory of where consciousness came from, yet it remains
a fascinating, comprehensive hypothesis to explore, even if its main
point is I think probably wrong. Some sub points that

(00:47):
Jane's makes within his argument are really interesting and may
in fact have some historical purchase. And it's also just
a great, fun, fascinating book to read. I also think
it's interesting how one can you can almost feel like
a religious zeal for it, you know, like and sometimes
I detected that in you. Yeah, Well, like I said
in the last episode, there's this there's this way that

(01:07):
the hypothesis can make the magic of religion and mythology, uh,
seem more believable and seem more possible. Uh, you know,
especially from more of a like a grounded skeptical point
of view, and uh and it but it's the kind
of thing too, I can imagine how like I can
easily envision some sort of alternate future or even an
alternate at present in which the bi cameral mind has

(01:31):
become a kind of religion. So anyway, it's a it's
a It was a fascinating pair of episodes to record,
and I wouldn't rule out returning to it at some
point in the future if we find enough new angles
to take on it and new things to say about it,
or find some individuals who would want to talk with
us about it. Yeah. I know. Since we did these episodes,

(01:52):
I've read articles about all of the all of the
like sort of popular mainstream academics and thinkers and sky
allers who are sort of secretly fans of this theory.
I think, maybe sort of in the same camp we are, Like,
they don't necessarily believe it's correct, but they're just they
can't stop thinking about it. I know I've seen Daniel

(02:12):
Dennett placed in this camp before that he's sort of
secretly a fan of it. I now have to say
that among the various ways I try and interpret attacks,
you know, you looking at it as literature, as as
some sort of you know, a true story, as some
sort of allegorical story, etcetera, I also throw in the
bicamera right mind, and I think, well, what's the bicamera

(02:32):
read on this? And it's a really fun fun way
to to to pass the time if you find yourself
being like bombarded with a kind of say, boring Bible story. Yeah,
I can totally see how it would play that kind
of role. I would be interested in returning to it
some day, especially if we could find a way of
bringing some fresh evidence to it, anything in in support
or in opposition. I mean, one thing I would I

(02:53):
have thought would be interesting is just try to find
lots of counter examples to Jane's idea that like ancient
literature is not display interiority, that the most ancient stories,
people don't seem to have inner minds, that they just
you know, their decisions come from deliverances of the gods,
and if you can just collect lots of examples where
that's not the case, that could provide some sort of

(03:16):
counter evidence to say, Okay, so he's probably not right
about this part of the theory, but other things might
might still have some purchase. Yeah. Absolutely, So on that note,
we're going to dive back in. We're gonna play the
second part of our bi cameral Mind episode we hope
you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from

(03:37):
how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
McCormick in today. This is going to be part two
of our two part series on Julian Jaynes and the
bicameral mind and the origin of consciousness in the Breakdown

(03:58):
of the bi cameral Mind. So as this is part
two of a two part episode. If you haven't heard
part one yet, you should go back and listen to
that one first. Sometimes we say, you know, if you
feel like jumping right in and go for it, this
is one where I feel like you're really going to
have a hard time following us if you haven't heard
part one yet, because that's gonna be where we explain
what Julian Jamee's main hypothesis is and how he arrived

(04:19):
at it. And then in the second episode we're gonna
be talking about evidence for it from the ancient world
and from the modern world. Yeah, this episode is going
to be full of like falling kingdoms and whispering statues
and other great stuff, but you need that first episode
to understand it. Now, as with the first episode, we
want to make clear that we're not necessarily endorsing this hypothesis.

(04:39):
This is a very controversial hypothesis. It's not something that
is at all considered proven or even necessarily very well
attested by evidence. It's something that is controversial but very
fascinating I think worth exploring as a hypothetical. Yeah, it
is a it is a radical hypothesis and if nothing else,
it is just a fascinating thought experiments. So as we

(05:01):
discuss it again, you're going to hear us Uh discussing
it as if it was fact, as if this is
actually how ancient people thought. But that is just a
part of our exploration of the hypothesis. Now, to briefly
recap the core of Julian James theory, and we should say,
Julian James, when did he live? Nine? Yeah? So nine seven.

(05:23):
Julian James was an American psychologist. He's primarily known for
this book that was published in nineteen seventy six called
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
And the thrust of that book is, until about three
thousand years ago, human beings were not conscious. They did
not possess consciousness and the way we do today. And

(05:44):
around that time, roughly three thousand years ago, modern human
consciousness began as a cultural invention, probably in Mesopotamia that's
spread around the world over time. And before that time,
for thousands of years, almost all humans were not conscious
in the way we are, but instead we're unconscious beings
commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices that they

(06:08):
called gods or another way of putting it. And uh,
and James himself put it this way, everybody was schizophrenic
sort of. Yeah, I mean, so schizophrenia, as Jane's imagines,
it is one form or a modified version of a
regression to this bicameral mind state that used to be
the norm for how humans and ancient civilizations lived and

(06:30):
so this norm would be that most of the time
you would be going around unconsciously behaving out of habit
you know, you have a stimulus response behaviors, and you
would have habitual behaviors that you would enact, and this
would serve to do most things that would be you know,
recurrent repetitive behaviors over the day. But whenever something new happened,
whenever you needed to make a decision and there was

(06:53):
a stress point induced by that decision, you would be
told what to do by a hallucinated auditor or voice
that you would perceive as a god, and that you
would enact that. Now, this is, as you said, a
radical hypothesis. Yeah, because again the idea here is that
everybody heard these voices, that this was the universal human experience,

(07:13):
this was the norm, right, And so obviously I mean
that that sounds kind of crazy to us, now, like
what really could could that be true? So if there
is any truth to Jane's theory, and as we said before,
we're not necessarily endorsing it as true, just entertaining it
as an interesting hypothesis, we should be able to find
some evidence of that theory. And so we can look

(07:35):
at psychiatry, and we can look at neuroscience, and we
can look at evidence from the ancient world. And today
we're going to start by looking at evidence from the
ancient world, from history, from archaeology, from ancient literature. If
there was a bicameral mind state, this divided mind state,
where one half of the brain spoke to the other
as the voice of a god and commanded the unconscious

(07:56):
other half, we should be able to see that in
the behaviors of a people's and the traces left of
those behaviors. Right, So, a lot of this episode is
going to be uh, Joe and I discussing some of
the examples that James brings up in the book. We
can't possibly touch on all of the examples because much

(08:16):
of the book, and much of the real joy of
the book is is him bringing up these various examples
from from historical accounts, from archaeology, from literature, and using
that to support the idea of the by bicameral mind. Yeah,
and one of the pleasures of the book is even
if Jane's hypothesis does turn out to be entirely incorrect,

(08:38):
you know, if there never was any bicameral mind, if
consciousness is not a recent invention. If he's wrong about
all that, it's still a fascinating book just because of
the way he pulls in so many different disciplines and
ranges throughout history, incorporating evidence in such an amazing and
fascinating way. All right, well, let's jump into it a

(08:59):
bit here and are discussing some of the evidence that
James brought up in the book. Okay, Well, one of
the things that we probably should be able to think
about is if ancient people's perceived auditory hallucinations that they
regarded as gods, and these gods told them what to do.
There should be some evidence of this in what traces
they left of their relationship to the gods they believed in. Right, Yeah,

(09:23):
And one of those examples, Jane's argues is the positioning
of the houses of the gods. So this is the
basic idea. Well, so today you travel to a big city.
Let's say you go to Washington, d C. All right,
this is our example, not James. So I'm in Washington,
all right, and you seek out the grandest, most centralized home,
the one that just really stands out from the rest,

(09:44):
is the most protected it has them. You know, the
most central status of any other habitat. Okay, so I'm
imagining it is the home of an extremely tall, thin
person that stands looking out over the water. Yeah, that's
that's one one interpretation. No way, that thing isn't a home,
is it. No, well, it's not a home. But I
mean that is an example of a of a building

(10:05):
of prominence with a with a statue in it, which
kind of gets into some additional arguments that we're going
to make here. But no, no, no no, you'd expect to
find the home of a king, right, yeah, yeah, you would.
That's the thing, right, you would want to you would expect,
all right, this is the center of the town. The
whole town is built around this. It occupies a spatial
center as well as just the center of meaning and purpose.

(10:26):
Or maybe sorry, that was probably my sexism talking to
a king or a queen. In any case, you would
expect the ruling person to live there. But what have
you entered into this grand building at the center of
the city and you found that it was home only
to a quote hallucinated presence, perhaps a statue of that
presence in the case of Abraham Lincoln, if you will.

(10:47):
But still for our purposes here an unreal entity, a god,
a goddess. Um. You can also look to two cities
in which a church still occupies the central ground, and
James argues that this is an ect, perhaps an echo
of the bicameral past. So why would that, why would
that be evidence of a bicameral past. To find churches

(11:07):
or temples at the center of a city as opposed
to the house of a king. Well, the idea here
is that the voice occupied the center of our thoughts,
and so to it occupied the center of the town
or the city, and that the house of the God
or the house of the gods was quite literally the
house of the gods. Yeah, yeah, this is true. So
if I remember hearing when I was a kid people saying,
you know, be be respectful when you're in church because

(11:30):
it's God's house. But the churches I was going to
didn't literally believe that the God they worshiped lived in
the church. That was just where humans congregated to worship.
That's not so much the case in ancient religions. It
really does seem like in many ancient religions, the place
of worship or the the you know, the sacred building
was literally where the God inhabited. Yeah, where the God inhabited,

(11:53):
and then as things sort of go on, the place
where God may visit, the place where God maybe uh
contact did so. He draws on examples from the god
houses at Jericho, the zigarato or which we discussed in
our Tower of Babbel episode, as well as the city
of Hatasus, the Bronze Age capital of the hitt Eede Empire,

(12:16):
and in the ladder this was actually a mountain shrine
with images of the overwatching gods rather than a city center,
but he said it's kind of an exception that that
also lines up with the argument. He also looks to
the old mec and Mayan empires as Bicameral Mesoamerican empires
due to the presence of quote huge otherwise useless, centrally

(12:39):
located buildings, in chief among these the Pyramid of TiO
Tiwakan in modern Mexico. And I love how he mentioned,
you know, otherwise useless buildings because this touches on on
our discussions in the Tower of Babbel episode regarding the ziggurats.
A lot of our our study of the past has
been us trying to figure out what was this for purpose?

(13:01):
And a lot of times we try and figure out
a practical purpose. You know what purpose did this structure have? Absolutely?
I mean these building projects consumed vast resources. I mean
to build the most prominent and the highest and well
defended building in the middle of an inhabited space. That
just seems like, why would you waste that on being

(13:22):
there for a being that is not that does not
physically need a house. Yeah, unless you are a people
for whom the voice of God is real. Again, this
is just the wonder of this theory is that it
turns so much of ancient history on its head. Uh.
And and then also you know more recent history, as
this is all an echo of the past. Now, in

(13:44):
the previous episode, we pointed out that you know the
by the voice of the bicameral mind it is it's
coming in to help you deal with novel experiences that
pop up, and how it might be helpful but it
might also be destructive. Well, in the same way that
a conscious person can make good decisions or can make
bad decisions, the God guiding the behaviors of the unconscious

(14:05):
bicameral person, if this person ever existed, could be giving
good advice or bad advice. I mean it's based on
the integrated powers of the brain. In both cases, it's
just that is it consciously happening or is it being
delivered to you as a command that must be obeyed. Yeah.
And and along these lines, he attributes the construction of
ancient meso American cities that are located in inhospitable areas,

(14:29):
such as you on top of a mountain or uh,
in the middle of a swamp on the you know,
on the side of a cliff. He says that, uh,
that these are areas that yeah, again, we're inhospitable, and
they may have been abandoned at some point later on. Uh.
And this is because they were linked to the commands
of quote hallucinations, which in certain periods could be not

(14:50):
only irrational but downright punishing. Now that's possible, but it's
also possible that we in the modern world are just
not seeing correctly what the benefits of these spaces were.
That's right, I mean, we're always working with imperfect data. Um.
He does not reference this, but I couldn't help but
think of Montezuma Castle in modern Arizona. These were cliff
side dwellings of the Sinegua culture that were abandoned around

(15:13):
four after centuries of occupation. Now now, various explanations for
the abandonment of Montezuma Castle include a drought, resource depletion,
tribal conflict, and interestingly enough religious religious inclination to move.
Now you can get into a discussion of of how
that would possibly line up with james timeline for the

(15:36):
bicameral mine, but he does point out that by the
time the Incans encountered Europeans in the fifteenth century, uh,
there was perhaps a combination of things bicameral and things
proto subjective subjective. Yeah, and that is one feature of
his theory that for a long period of time it
wasn't just like everyone was bicameral and then everyone was conscious.

(15:56):
You had a long period of the slow death of
bike emeral society turning into being taken over by conscious people.
You know, this makes me think of shows like Game
of Thrones and other fantasy worlds where magic slowly bleeds
out of the world, because that's essentially the argument here
is that over time, fewer and fewer people are hearing

(16:18):
the voice voices of the gods. Fewer people are hearing
the voices of the spirits of the departed loved ones, etcetera.
And yet they're surrounded by the cultural memory of people
who did hear the voices of the gods, or people
who still hear the voices of the gods today even
though they can't. So you have this society in which
there are conscious people who are are constantly being reminded

(16:40):
that they could be in contact with the gods, but
they're not, and this, I imagine is very distressing and
frustrating to these people. And you know, this is also
interesting in that you eventually have this clash between the
Inca Empire and the Spanish Empire. And he says that
this was as close, too close to anything in our
history as to a meeting of these two different minds,

(17:01):
of the bicameral mind and the conscious mind, like two
different cultures uh encountering each other. Um And yet he
points to a number of different arguments for and against
the Inca Empire being a bicameral empire. Well, it could
have been an empire in transition, as many of these
others were for so long. Yeah, I think basically, he

(17:22):
says that he believes that if there was a transition
from a bicameral society to a conscious society. That it
began in Mesopotamia about you know, roughly one thousand BC. Uh,
you know, a few hundred years on each side. It
was a slow transition and spread around the world from there. Yes.
So with the Inca in particularly, he um, he points

(17:45):
out that on one hand, uh, the administrative demands and
politics were probably beyond something that a purely bicameral culture
could handle. Yet they had a god king who was
the Inca among them, and there were you know, other
aspects of bicameral culture as well. Uh. And these may
have been again to your point, mere traditional echoes of
the past, but he points out that that you you

(18:07):
had these gold and jeweled spools that members of the
top of Inca hierarchy they wore in their ears and
sometimes with images of the Sun on them. That these
may have indicated that those same ears, we're hearing the
voice of the Sun, since the Sun was a god. Yeah. Yeah.
So he spends a lot of time with various examples
discussing the importance of eye symbolism, ear symbolism, as as

(18:30):
showing that that the individual or the statue is somehow
involved in speech or hearing. Now, one of the things
I wanted to revisit from our last episode is just
the idea that James is not necessarily saying that, for example,
the bicameral mind is not as good as the conscious mind.
I know, we with our conscious bias, uh, you know,

(18:51):
would naturally kind of feel that way. But it's not
necessarily that conscious minds are better or more valuable or
even smarter. Mean, that's not just that's just not necessarily
the case. It's that they have different adaptive strengths, and
so having different strengths, a sudden clash of a conscious
culture against a bicameral culture could be very disastrous for

(19:13):
one or the other. Yeah, I mean, this is this
is basically the the the key example of an outside
context problem in our world. And uh, and James has
a just a beautiful little description of how this would
have gone down. Assuming that this is a meeting of
a bicameral or partially bicameral culture in the Inca and
a conscious culture in that of the Spaniards, He says, quote,

(19:36):
it is possible that it was one of the few
confrontations between subjective and bicameral minds that for things as
unfamiliar as Inca at a Wappo was confronted with these rough,
milk skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead
of from their scalps, so that their heads looked upside down,
clothed in metal, with avertive eyes writing strain ange lama

(20:00):
like creatures with silver who's having arrived like gods in
gigantic quampas uh teared like mockagan temples over the sea,
which to the Inca was unsailable that for all this
there were no bicameral voices coming from the sun or
from the golden statues of Cuzco in their dazzling towers,

(20:20):
not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive or to nar narraw
to rize out the deception of others, the Inca and
his lords were captured like helpless automatons. Oh man, it's
a horrible thing to imagine, as I mean, reading anything
about the European conquest of the Americans is always like
a horrible thing to Yeah, you don't have hold have

(20:41):
to imagine a separate state of mind for it to
be a rather horrific uh encounter, But yeah, that is
One of the features of his hypothesis is, so one
of the things that consciousness gives us is a capability
for treachery. Yes, that really the bicameral person, and it's
not very much capable of treachery. I mean, they can't

(21:03):
prolong a deceptive behavior, right because they can't run this
internal narrative of how they should behave if they were
to believe one thing versus how they you know, really
what goal they'll be working towards secretly, it just doesn't
seem like that works out very well. But these conscious
people are capable of extreme deception and treachery and the

(21:27):
ability to just be jerks all right. Now. Another area
that that he brings up is that of essentially the
love to dead. He points to the burial of the
dead as if they were still alive as being a
key evidence for by the bicameral mind. So we've covered
a number of different mommification practices on the show over
the year. So I think everyone here knows the drill

(21:49):
the corpse as an astronaut on a cosmic journey to
the other side. You know, there's some sort of an
elaborate tomb. Maybe fill that tomb with items that that
individual loved in a low life and therefore might continue
to need on a trip. And then beyond that, you
may even supply them, as we see in the case
of Egyptian tombs with food stuffs, with with perishable goods

(22:11):
to to aid them in the journey. And the idea
here is that if this goes beyond the mere idea
that oh, well, they like to cheeseburger, so let's put
a cheeseburger in there as a you know, a token
is some sort of uh, just a tribute to them.
It's the idea that that no, I still hear their voice,
they are still speaking to me, even though the body

(22:33):
has stopped moving. I will put a cheeseburger in there
for them to eat, exactly. Yeah. So we think of
tokens to the dead today primarily as uh, it's something
representing the way the living feel. Yeah, But no, the
belief here was that the dead person still needed that. Yeah.
And he says that this spills over to the treatment
of ordinary dead as well as royal dead in many

(22:55):
of these ancient cultures. But the concept of bearing the
dead in massive tombs, pres irving their bodies, providing them
with physical luxuries and even food. Uh, this is key.
And and in cases where there was no food, such
as the graves at Larsa and Mesopotamia from around that Uh,
he says there these areas were foodless because the tombs

(23:17):
were beneath human habitation, so that the dead essentially still
lived among the living, so that they would wander up
into the house and you would literally hallucinate them doing
so and telling you what to do. Yeah. Now, James
admits that grief could have been the core motivation and
most of these rights, and certainly, I think that's the
way we think about it when we're trying to put

(23:37):
ourselves in the shoes of ancient people. Right. I Mean,
another very plausible and perhaps the more probable answer is
just that people wished their loved ones were still alive
and wanted to behave as if they could be. Now. Yeah, Now,
he argues that grief alone wouldn't be able to account
for all of these practices. I mean, I think it

(23:57):
depends on your example and uh, and you know what
your experience with bereavement is. I think that a lot
of his can a test that. Yeah, that that the
loss of a loved one or even the loss of
just a you know, I loved celebrity in many cases
can can have a big impact, a huge impact on
your life. So uh yeah, I don't know to what
extent I completely agree with that assessment, but I still

(24:20):
think it's a it's an interesting case to be. Yeah,
I mean, in a bicameral culture, you could imagine that
when Prince died, everybody would still be hearing him sing
into their ear. Yeah, because what is Prince but a
you know, royal of the modern age. All Right, we're
gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we will keep looking at evidence from the ancient world
that may indicate a bicameral past. Okay, we're back. You know, Joe,

(24:44):
you mentioned uh uh statue of Lincoln to the top
of this episode. I know, Oh, you know what, I think.
I think I was talking about what's it called the
obelisk the Washington Oh, I think you mean when you
were talking about a statue of a tall, slender figure.
I thought you meant Lincoln. You know this can tell
slender dude. There's a miscommunication that so easily comes with

(25:05):
our conscious inability to communicate. Well, you've been you've seen
Lincoln his statue in Washington. Yeah, he's just sitting in
that chair, but he probably has not spoken to you.
And I mean I don't mean that in a in
a metaphorical sense or anything. I mean that statue has
not literally spoke. You have not heard the voice of
that statue. No, But if I were a bicameral person,

(25:27):
apparently I might, like I could go to pay reverence
to that statue, but I wouldn't just be paying reverence,
I'd be getting advice on what to do exactly. So
that's the next point that the James made, is that
we have these idols of the speaking stone that that
that play into all these different cultures. So we've already
mentioned that, all right, your your father's voice is still

(25:49):
in your head, like literally in your head. You're still
hearing it after they have died because of this confusion
to take place about about the nature of death. So
your your parents did die, yet you still hear their admonitions, right,
and then the king dies, you still hear the voice
of the king. So one of the first humans just
raised up the corpses and skulls of their dead loved

(26:12):
ones and their dead leaders. Uh, and after that we
would turn more and more to two various artificial likenesses
of those individuals in varying degrees of detail. So we
we can find crude humanoid figurings dating back to a
roughly UM fifty six hundred BC in what's modern day

(26:33):
Turkey and Uh and relatively these are relics that were
already ancient when the pyramids were built. Now Frasier would
have classified such carvings as just fertility figures, but James
points out that that was the horse. He was right,
and he was trying to cram everything into those boxes. Yeah.
But but James points out that you you can find

(26:54):
them in very fertile parts of the world, such as
what they all metal civilization, and he points to some
of the areous um attributes of these likenesses open mouths,
exaggerated ears, as if the statue is going to listen
to you and speak to you. And in the case
of the Old Mix, the creation of such idle skyrocketed

(27:15):
about seven hundred see but Jayne's questions whether this was
due to the cease of the voices, So did the
voices stop so that you you were crafting more and
more of these details to try and bring them back
or was it due to a multiplication of them, So
you know, you're having to deal with the chaos of
all these voices. Now, he argues that many artifacts might

(27:39):
have been quote semi hallucinatory uh mnemonic aids for the
non conscious people. So they're all it's also about remembering
things and um, you know, adding order to life. But
he argues that quote some of these small objects, we
may be confident we're capable of assisting with the production
of bicameral voices, and he points to Mesopotamian ie idols

(28:03):
from around three thousand bees. He and the eyes of
these and numerous others were figures were important to focus
because of our involved dependency on eye contact for communication.
Yeah yeah, and then it's only left for the statue
to speak to us and speak they did, uh, not
only according to bicameral mind theory here, but also just

(28:25):
according to various accounts. Um Uniform literature he writes provides
examples of speaking statues. If you turn in your Old
Testament to a sequel one, there's an example of a
Babylonian king who said to speak to idols, which were
known as a terrup Yeah, they're there are all kinds
of accounts of this throughout the ancient world of us.

(28:46):
I mean, this is another case of like we were
talking about in the last episode with ancient literature. You know,
you read it and you feel you send something alien
about the characters, and you're like, is that something I'm
just not getting that's getting lost in translation or were
they truly alien to my mentality? A similar thing is
going on with when it describes the practices of hearing
God speak. You could think like, okay, well I don't

(29:09):
usually hear God speak. Um, so maybe there's just something this,
you know, this like a literary device or something that's
getting lost in translation. Or you could just say, no,
I'll just take this literally. I'll take it at face value.
Something was speaking to them and it was the other
hemisphere of their brain. Yeah, So we get to this
point where these statues, these artifacts become kind of focus

(29:30):
points for the voice, like in a way to in
a way summon the voice even when it's not, you know,
directly called up by stressful circumstance. He has numerous tidbits
to support this. Some of the really fun ones I
found was he adds that to quote the conquered Aztecs

(29:51):
told the Spanish invaders how their history began when a
statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture
spoke to their leaders. So I just love the mental
image of you know, these tribal individuals coming across the
statute built by someone else, and it it summons the
voices just to look at it. You can also imagine, though,

(30:11):
how if this model is correct, conscious people would react
very negatively to encountering bi cameral people and and the
voices of their gods. Right, Oh yeah, I mean that's
another example he makes is that you have the Spaniards,
who again are conscious individuals steeped in Catholicism, and they
come in and they encounter the native peoples and they

(30:34):
actually reported that the people of the of Peru were
a quote commanded by the devil. In that quote, the
devil himself actually spoke to the Incas out of the
mouths of their statues. So that could just be you know,
historical cultural slander, or it could be them trying to
make sense of practices they saw. Yeah, you know, before

(30:57):
really getting into the bi cameral mind theory, I would
have easily just said, well, that's just obviously just a
bunch of xenophobic foreigners from another continent coming in and saying, oh,
they have statues. They probably stand around listening to their
voices and they obey the statues. I mean, either way,
they are putting their their dominant racist spin on it.
But it could be that they were actually observing a practice. Yes.

(31:17):
Now again we always get into the same situation though,
where they was this a practice that was based on
on an existing bicameral experience or is it an echo
of a bicameral past. Yeah, it could be either one.
If there's anything to this theory. Another thing that I
think is one of the most important takeaways of this

(31:38):
whole theory is that if James is correct, it's not
that people used to be more religious and now they're
less religious. That's not the progression. It's that ancient bicameral
religion and modern conscious religion are completely different types of things.
Conscious religion requires an emphasis on things like faith and

(32:01):
belief and organized systems of dogma. You know, they say
here's what we believe and here's why you should believe it,
and so it's like regulated by ecclesiastical authorities. It's addressed
to an object that is not immediately apparent. Not so
for bicameral religion. Right, So bicameral religion would have had

(32:21):
no need for the concept of faith, because what's the
point in telling people to believe in the gods that
literally talk to them and appear before them all the time?
That's right, I mean, the gods are speaking to you household,
God's household spirits are speaking to you. Uh so you
really there's not really any room to doubt there if
doubt was even a thing that your mind can do. Yeah,

(32:43):
I mean, our modern concept of religion you could look
at as something that came to exist after the disappearance
of the direct experience of the gods. Likewise, I mean
could it could heresy even exist in such a world
like everybody is I mean, certainly you're still going to
have a structure to society, but everyone is hearing voices

(33:04):
of the God. Everyone has has their their their radio
set to the other world. Yeah, I mean, this is
a world where the voices are speaking to everyone. Okay,
I think we should look at one more thing about
features we see of the organization of ancient societies before
we start to look at some ancient literature. So how
about the theocratic organization of ancient society. What what does

(33:27):
that tell us about whether or not a bicameral mind
ever existed? According to Julian James, well, in this we're
getting into a topic that we've discussed before, the idea
of divine kings. What does it mean that the king
is either you know, the right hand man of God,
works for God, or in some cases is God. That's
an important distinction, and James makes that distinction. You know,

(33:49):
there are two main types of kings for him, the
steward king and the god king. Right, that's right, the
steward king, this is where the king is a stand
in for God and then the god king. The king
is God. And James believe that both tides developed out
of the more primitive bicameral situation where a new king
ruled by obeying the hallucinated voice of a dead king,

(34:12):
which sort of that gives you, like the you know,
the succession order, right, Yeah, in fact, you're never really
obeying you're never really obeying the new king, You're always
obeying the old king through a sort of intermediary And
in this he I mean, he even argues that the
ziggurat centered civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia that in these cases
it's not you can't even really look at it, like

(34:33):
the human beings were the ones that were ruling, Like
the ruling powers were the hallucinated voices of the various gods. Right,
So it was not the left brain or the dominant
side of the brain of the actual king, but it
was the other hemisphere of their brain ruling, the dominant
side ruling the people. Right. And he also gets into how,

(34:54):
you know, we've talked about, Okay, you're reacting to statues
humanoid figures, but on top of this we also end
up with all additional uh, religious imagery symbology. That's that's
this used even written language. Uh. He points out the
quote reading in the third millennium BC may therefore have
been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating

(35:15):
the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than
visual reading of syllables in our sense. Oh, that's that's fascinating.
So you think about how reading takes place for us today.
It is largely an unconscious thing if you're an adult
that's been reading, not if you're a kid who's learning
to read. Or if you know, at any point in
your life, if you're learning to read, you do have

(35:36):
to think about the constituent parts of words and sentences,
like you have to sound them out and put them
together in your mind using your conscious mind. Eventually reading
becomes unconscious. I mean, I wonder if in this, in
this bicameral framework, you would learn to read in an
entirely unconscious way, the same way that maybe you get

(35:57):
better at shooting basketballs or something in an unconscious way. Yeah, yeah,
that's so. Now. No, another thing that another point that
he makes about language is that in reference to ancient Egyptians, uh,
much like the language of the ancient Sumerians, he says
that these languages were concrete from first to last, and
that interpretations involving abstract thought, uh, these are the These

(36:22):
are modern modern intrusions, and that basically the gods commanded
rather than created. Yeah, and we'll see that more when
we look in literature in the next section. Now, I
I think I made reference already to household gods and
household spirits. You encounter these in a lot of different cultures.
If it's not household gods, then maybe it's a you know,
just a memorial of various members of the family, right,

(36:43):
And a lot of those traditions still carry on to
this day. But the idea here is that not everyone
can hear the voice of the ruling God, right, that
would seem to be kind of chaotic if the even
if it's just a simple model of the previous dead
king speaking to the current king. I mean, it wouldn't
make sense for everyone to hear that king's voice and
have their authority. But everyone in this scenario, in the
bicameral scenario, is hearing voices, So who are those voices? Well,

(37:06):
there's a hierarchy of God's isn't exactly like because we
there are different types of stressful situations. Imagine a scenario
where one is cooking, preparing a meal in one's hut
and um, let's say you've only got one piece of meat.
I mean, you accidentally drop it onto the ground. There
is a moment of panic. What do I do? Well,

(37:26):
the household cooking God chimes in and says take it
and wash it in the river or something to that effect,
you know, and and it's solved. So that's five second
rule us. Yeah, So this would be the case of
a of a lesser deity coming in and calling the shot. Yeah,
you know. One of the things about ancient Religionny mentions
in the book that is very interesting is his discussion

(37:48):
of the evolution of the concepts of the car and
the bar in h in Egyptian theology, where it's hard
to I guess we can't summarize it here, but if
you get a chance to read the book yourself, look
out for that section. It's really interesting. It's it's about
the way we're you know, words for theological concepts sort

(38:09):
of transition into other into having other meanings. Now, part
of the whole timeline, of course, is that as we've
already stressed, that the gods cease speaking to everyone after
a while and then cease all together for the most part.
We'll get into the details of that as we we go.
But but then when that happens, there's uh, their order collapses, uh.

(38:30):
Cultures end up retreating into the jungles, and for many
people everything has to be built up again. Basically, the
idea here is that the bicameral mind, this, this whole
system of hearing voices, this hold society together. This is
it's it's an instrument of social control. Yeah, and so
it's it's like playing jinga with gravity and then gravity

(38:52):
goes away, and then how do you hold the blocks together? Well,
then suddenly have to come with new novel ways to
do it, such as gluing them all together, I guess.
Is so the political organization equivalent of that would be
what it would be brutal dictatorship. Yeah, things like brutal
dictatorship have to step in. Uh. Suddenly, you know, you
have all these wars and just total bloodshed occurring because

(39:12):
the voices that organized society have have stopped speaking or
have certainly stopped speaking with enough regularity to hold everything together. So,
in closing on this, he argues quote that man in
his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own.
That in fact, men and women were not conscious as

(39:33):
we are. We're not responsible for their actions and therefore
cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that
was done over these vast millennia of time. That instead,
each person had a part of his nervous system which
was divine, by which he was ordered about like any
slave of voice or voices, which indeed were what we
call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related

(39:57):
to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy.
And this mindset would have again developed over the over
the ninth century BC to the second millennium BC, a
gradual procession progression. Right, So that's the hypothesized era of
the bicameral mind, which around the first millennium BC starts
to decompose and fall apart. All right, we're gonna take

(40:19):
a quick break, and when we come back, we will
look at signs of the bicameral mind in ancient literature.
Than all right, we're back, alright, So obviously it would
make sense that we'd see examples or the examples could
be made in literature, because, after all, the bicameral mind
is uh is, according to the theory, according to the the

(40:39):
hypothesis here an offshoot of the acquisition of language. Right,
Jane says, language makes it exist. So could you could
you look at ancient uses of language to find evidence
of it? Now, another thing that complicates this is that
James thinks that one of the causes of the decomposition
of the bicameral mind into the conscious mind is the
widespread introduction of language so this also writing ends up

(41:03):
undermining the bicameral mind. But can we see signs of
the bi cameral mind in ancient literature? I think he's
got some interesting stuff to talk about here. Yet again,
I want to be clear that I'm not endorsing his
theory as correct, but I do think some of his claims,
especially about what we see in Greek literature, are fascinating
and a little terrifying. I have to admit when I

(41:24):
was reading, you know, I kind of kind of gave
me the willies at various points to try to imagine
ancient people ruled by bicameral mind. But when you started
talking about the Iliad in particular, kind of gave me
chill bumps. So totally. So, the Iliot is one of
Jane's chief examples of bicameral literature. So, of course the
Iliad if you're if you never read it, It's an

(41:45):
epic war poem that tells the story of an alliance
of Greek kings and their warriors, primarily the warrior Achilles,
laying siege to the city of Troy. This is the
historical event now known as the Trojan War, and Jane's
claims that the Iliad was develo by a group of
oral storytellers or bards known as the ao E d
And that's in contrast to sort of the traditional received

(42:07):
knowledge that they were composed by an individual named Homer.
I think it's probably more widely believed now that these
are the works of many people of time. But anyway,
that that war took place about twelve thirty b C.
Or sorry, it was first composed around the time the
war took place around twelve thirty BC, and it was
first transcribed into written form around nine hundred or eight

(42:31):
hundred and fifty b C. And scholars may believe some
different dates now, but that's what James is working with.
So when we look at the thoughts and behaviors of
characters in the Iliad, it should tell us something about
the mental life of people who composed and wrote the
story about three thousand years ago. And when we examine this,
what do we find. Well, James makes a really striking

(42:52):
claim about the Iliad. It is a work of literature
in which the characters are almost entirely devoid of any
thing recognizable as consciousness. You do not really see introspection
in the Iliad. There are a few passages which serve
as exceptions to this. Generally, James thinks that they look

(43:12):
like late additions to the text or signed or they
could possibly be signs of early protoconscious thoughts seeping through.
But primarily, the characters of the Iliad do not introspect,
they do not narrotize, they do not seem to have
conscious consideration. Instead, when they're faced with the need for
novel behavior, what happens. They're told what to do by

(43:34):
a god. A god makes them do it. Now, it's
it's generally when we look back on pieces of literature
like this, we think, well, this is just this was
a primitive form of literature, This was a this is
a more archaic um in a form of storytelling. Yeah,
you see it as a literary device, which very well
could be. It makes me think, you know, all these
various bad films that you and I enjoy, and sometimes

(43:56):
they're enjoyably bad because the craftsmanship isn't there at various levels.
Um if bicameral, if the bicameral mind hypothesis is true,
could it be possible that that sometimes we love bad
movies because they seem to have been created by a bicameral. Mind.
I was with you every step of the way there, Robert.

(44:17):
I can believe that there are movies that feel quite bicameral. Yeah,
that feel as if they were like dictated by a
divine presence rather than consciously thought through. All right, but
but but back to the discussion here. So, yeah, we
have this this war going on. There's no introspection, there's
nothing that resembles consciousness, and at all the pivotal plot
points are punctuated by a God stepping in and saying

(44:39):
do this or do that. Yeah. So there might be
like a scene where Achilles is going to reach out
and kill his king Agamemnon, but instead it says, a
God grabs him and tell and makes him not do it. Yeah. Interesting.
I would like to see more of that in our films, though,
where you just have God's pop up and direct the
course of action. You know, even in the words of

(45:00):
the Greek, Jane says, uh, we can see something of
bicamerality here because there are Greek words that later come
to be used to refer to consciousness, and they appear
throughout the Iliad, but through contextual clues we can tell
that they mean something entirely different in the Iliad than
what they mean when they later come to mean consciousness.

(45:20):
For example, the word see he it's spelt psyche, you know,
in the English pronunciation see he. In later centuries, this
clearly comes to mean consciousness or mind or soul. That's
how it is used in Greek, but in the Iliad
phase it appears to refer to something more like physical
life substances. Jane says it means something more like blood

(45:43):
or breath, like if a soldier gets killed on the battlefield,
his see he bleeds out onto the ground, or the
word thumos. In later writings, Jane says this means something
more like emotional mind or soul. In the Iliad, once again,
it seems to have this base level animal meaning. It's
something more like animation or motion. So when a soldier

(46:05):
stops moving, the thumos goes out of his limbs, But
it also seems to mean this weird kind of organ
in the body that can be filled with the impetus
for motion or activity. Next is noose. In later Greek,
it certainly comes to mean consciousness, it's like a conscious mind,

(46:25):
but in the Iliad it appears to mean something much plainer.
It means like sight or field of vision. So when
you see something, the thing is in your noose. Now,
this next point, this is the exact place where he
really gave me the creeps, and I got actual chill bumps.
He points out that the Iliad, as well as a
Greek art of the time quote, shows man as an

(46:47):
assembly of strangely articulated limbs, the joints under drawn and
the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically
what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks
of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs
as being fleet, sinewy in speedy motion, etcetera, with no

(47:08):
mention of the body as a whole. Yeah. So it's
just this idea of of just these automatons waging war, uh,
you know, killing each other with without this concrete sense
of self guiding. It so alien to comprehend. Oh, it
really is. And so if you buy into Jane's theory,

(47:29):
or if you just want to entertain it as we
are doing, these characters simply do not seem to introspect.
They argue, they rage, they desire, they act out on desires,
but they don't seem to have access to a mind
space where they can perform introspective, metaphor based activities like
we described in the previous episode, they don't have access
either to the conscious aspect of decision making. Instead, when

(47:52):
they got to make a novel decision, the iliot is
very clear about what happens. The God tells them what
to do and they do it. Hm. Maybe this is
one of the reasons we like like a very classic
action hero, you know, because it's like they don't think,
they just do. They are a man of action. They
are a bicameral hero. I mean, you sometimes do get

(48:13):
that sense, right that there is a kind of there's
a kind of unthinking charisma to the action hero in
most action movies. Uh. I guess that is what you'd
call that, that man of action cliche. I mean, I
guess it. Technically usually is a man in these movies,
and he's got this kind of macho swagger that does

(48:34):
not seem to involve thinking, It doesn't seem to involve
self reflection. They've just got this. Uh, this like violent intuition,
can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, and absolutely
will not stop. I mean this that's the terminator. Uh.
In a nutshell, the by the terminator is is a
is a machine. Everybody was the terminator in the Iliad.

(48:55):
That's the scary part. Oh man, So what I what
I'm thirsting for now? It's almost like this theory is
too interesting and I'm too tempted to want it to
be true. So what I want now is for a
great classic scholar to say, like, no, no, no, he's
got it all wrong. Here's why, here's how. You can
definitely find lots of signs of consciousness in the Iliad.

(49:16):
And they're not later editions. They are part of the
original text. I want that, or I don't want that.
I feel like I need that. Yeah, Otherwise I feel
like I'm just buying into the idea that Stanley Kubrick
faith them in landing or something. Right. Yeah, it is
just such a radical hypothesis. Okay, Well, let's leave the
Iliad and look at some other literature from the ancient world.

(49:37):
How about Jewish literature. This is interesting. I'd not run
across this before either. This is a so this deals
with him. Yeah. The Elohim, one of the names of
God used in the in the Hebrew Bible, very often
just translated as God as singular, right, right, But he
argues that to translate it as merely God is to
miss the plural nature of the word in Hebrew Uh,

(50:01):
which is something I've independently read, like eloheim is essentially
a plural word, but it's rendered in the modern sense
and as a singular word. Yeah. It says that it
comes from the root of to be powerful. But better
translations of Him might be the great ones, the prominent ones,
the Majesty's, the judges, the mighty ones, etcetera. And so these,

(50:24):
he argues, are the vote could be the voice visions
of the bicameral mind. And he also argues that one
can really see the decline of the bicameral vision in
the Bible. And now this is I really love this,
because he's basically talking about all right, if you pick
up the Old Testament and you read it front to back,
you can see this transition. So in the he says, quote,

(50:44):
in the true bicameral period, there was usually a visual
component to the halluciated hallucinated voice, either it's self hallucinated
or as the statue in front of which and in
front of which one listened so even as a modern
reader of the Bible will find this. You go from
a physical God who physically does stuff like kick people
out of the garden or shut the door on the arc,

(51:06):
to a God that merely speaks to everyone, and a
purely auditory God that we account that we encounter with Moses,
you know, with additional visual flares here and there, and
crucially after that, a God of law and religion rather
than of direct experience. So you go from this robustly
imagined God who physically does stuff to a God who

(51:28):
is a voice, to a God who is not experienced
directly and rather as experience through his tradition of teachings
and law and so um so yeah. James argues that
the Hebrew Bible is essentially a long narrative of the
transition from myth to bicameral humankind, too conscious humankind, and
you can see the whole thing there. You've got the

(51:50):
older prophets like Amos, who Jans identifies as clearly bicameral,
to Ecclesiastes, who uh. James thinks the author shows all
the markers of consciousness, and he claims you can also
see this painful transition from bicameral society to conscious society
in many aspects of the canon. A couple of examples,
he says people are constantly begging for contact with a

(52:13):
god or gods that no longer speak to them in
the literature that he believes comes from the conscious period
of this history. So one quote he gives from Psalm
forty two, and this is with the name of God
rendered directly to the plural rather than the singular, as
it would usually be rendered as the stag pants after
the water brooks. So pants my mind after you, Oh Gods,

(52:35):
my mind thirsts for God's, for living gods. When shall
I come face to face with God's. Yeah, it's almost
like a like a gradual breakup story, like what he
used to He used to see God all the time.
We hung out, and now, yeah, we talk on the
phone sometime, but it's not quite the same. And now
it's like he won't even call. We just keep exchanging texts,
and suddenly, you know, that's all I have to go on.

(52:57):
It's just the not even new texts, but the old texts.
But then again, there are there are definitely in Jane's vision,
partisans of the conscious version of the religion that don't
want anything to do with the direct experience version of
the religion. Like he says that there are many signs
throughout the books of the Hebrew Bible that the Bicameral
people may have been actively persecuted by conscious people for

(53:20):
religious reasons. I'll just read one quote, he says. Quote.
A further vestige from the Bicameral era is the word obe,
often translated as a familiar spirit. A man also or
a woman that have an obe shall surely be put
to death, says Leviticus. And similarly, Saul drives out from
Israel all those that had an obe in First Samuel.

(53:44):
Even though an obe is something that one consults with,
according to Deuteronomy eighteen eleven, it probably had no physical embodiment.
It is always bracketed with wizards and witches, and thus
probably refers to some Bicameral voice that was not recognized
by the Old Testament writers as religious. Yeah. I mean,
you get into this scenario where you know, obviously the

(54:06):
individuals who don't hear the voices, they've built up all
this this law and order based on the old texts
in the old stories. It becomes dangerous if other individuals
are attempting to to add new material to it. No,
I'm hearing God's right now, and they're telling me something different. Yeah,
I mean it reminds me of the fact that the
church that I attend they have this saying God is

(54:27):
still speaking, which, as it's intended, the idea is God
is still real and a part of everyone's lives, and
you know, this is not just a story. But on
the other hand, there's it's kind of scary to think, well,
if God is still speaking, what's he going to say?
You know, Um, the conflict comes. It could provide license
for some very uh, for some very disturbing content, yea,

(54:50):
or some great stuff. Yeah indeed. Yeah, it's just sort
of like it provides you with a blanket authorization for
action that is not so there if you have a
written and codified law. So again, all of this just
ends up playing into the conflict of the downfall of
the bicameral mind. As the voices blink out and this
a new system of of order and social stability has

(55:13):
to take hold. So let's try to summarize real quick
what James is saying is the basic contours of the
transition through the bicameral period to the conscious period. Let's
see Robert tell me what you think of this. As
I've tried to summarize his view, I think James argues
that bicameral society emerged with language and the increasing size

(55:34):
of tribal groups. So when one could encode mental content
into grammatical sentences, it was possible to code action motivation
efficiently through language. So you have a big group where
your authority figure can't be around to constantly tell you
what to do because the group's too big. So a
command heard from one's parents or one's tribal chieftain is

(55:56):
hallucinated to recur over and over again provide continuous motivation
for action. And this is the non dominant hemisphere commanding
the dominant hemisphere. This is the first version of bi camerality.
So when you've got words and sentences that can be hallucinated,
then over time these admonitory voices, eventually they become not

(56:18):
just repetitive but synthetic. So they're not just telling you
what these authority figures have told you in the past,
but they're telling you what these authority figures would command
if they were present now. And of course we know,
the mind has the power to synthesize information and imagine
what somebody else would command. We do that consciously now,

(56:38):
But here it's saying, what if the right hemisphere and
in most people, or the non dominant hemisphere generally did
that automatically, nonconsciously. Uh So, over time, parents and chieftains
die and their voices are still heard instead of internal
copies of authority figures, they become imbued with disim bodied authority.

(57:01):
The voice itself provides inherent authorization, magical authority, as from
a God. Then for a long time, bicameral society grows
and develops, and bicameral people build technologies and kingdoms and
begin to write works of ancient literature. But what happens
to make it all disappear? Essentially, his answer is a

(57:21):
combination of catastrophe and literature. Would you agree with that, Robert, Yeah,
that seems to be the basic idea catastrophe and literature. Yeah,
the story of the story of our lives. Yeah, that
that that is the roof collapsing on the bicameral mind.
So the catastrophe he singles out is the widespread failure
of civilization throughout the Eastern Mediterranean close to the end

(57:44):
of the second millennium BC. This is a period that's
coming off of what's now referred to as the Late
Bronze Age collapse, where ancient empires fell apart and dispersed
and people were displaced, and there was a lot of
war and raiding and collapse of infrastructure. Trade was interrupted,
education stifled, and it led to what some would consider

(58:05):
a dark Age of the ancient world. And he also
argues that a certain a small amount of natural selection
may have come into play as well, because as all
this is going on, in the enormous, enormous bloodshed that's
playing out here at the end of the second century BC,
those who had the best chance to survive were those
who could resist the commandments of the gods and the

(58:27):
literal you know, the voice of compulsion, right, who were
more adaptable and could narrotize out solutions to problems, and
who had the ability to practice prolonged deception and treachery. Yes,
that's another huge idea here. So yeah, So he's got
a summary of of the several factors he thinks led
to in this period around the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.

(58:47):
The collapse of the bicameral mind and the beginnings of
widespread consciousness in culture. So what are these main things
he offers? He's talking about, first of all, one, the
weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing. Okay,
A good example would be the invention of written law,
right clearly distinguishing acceptable from non acceptable behavior in a

(59:08):
way that does not require the intervention of an internal God. Yeah,
we've got these tablets here. He didn't have to speak
to you all the time. Just refer to the tablets. Yeah,
this is how I feel about any kind of power
point presentation. Just give me the power point. I don't
need the voice of God telling me the things. Just
give me a list. Yeah, okay, okay, what's the next thing?
Number two? The inherent fragility of hallucinatory control. Okay, Yeah,

(59:30):
we can see that there's some instability in the system there.
Number three, the unworkable nous of God's in the chaos
of historical upheaval. Okay, So the God's prevented problem that
they caused problems when when society and hierarchy was falling apart. Yeah,
and again, the voice of the gods was just there
was not actually the voice of a divine being with

(59:50):
superior knowledge. It was still originating from within the individual, right, Okay.
The fourth one, the fourth one is the depositing of
internal cause and the observation of difference in others. Okay,
So you see other people are behaving differently, and you
begin to wonder if maybe they're just behaving on their
own and not being commanded by God's maybe undermining your

(01:00:12):
own authorization of god belief. Yeah, I can see where
it would be. Um, I mean it would it would
It would be contagious in that in that respect. Yeah. Uh.
Number five the acquisition of anatization from epics, the introduction
of stories. Number six the survival value of deceit, which
we already touched on, and number seven a modicum of

(01:00:33):
natural selection, which we also discussed here. But to be clear,
I think James is primarily thinking about these transitions in mindset,
not as changes in the physical brain brought about by
you know, mutation and natural selection, though there might be
a little bit of selection towards levels of predisposition for it.
But he's primarily thinking about this as cultural change. Right

(01:00:54):
that there there are cultures of bi camerality and cultures
of consciousness. Yes, all right, we're gonna take one more break,
and when we come back, we're going to jump into
modern traces of the bicameral mind. Thank you, thank alright,
we're back. So we've examined the evidence that James claims
to offer for the existence of a bicameral mind and

(01:01:14):
history and his conception of how the bicameral mind arose
and then collapsed into society's based on conscious mentality. So,
if there truly was a bicamerality in the past, if
our brains are still so wired as to be perhaps
capable of bi cameral culture in the present, if we
just practiced it, what would the evidence of that be. Well,

(01:01:35):
you would think there'll be some practices in human behavior
that would give you evidence that we used to be
b cameral and that we could still be bicameral if
we tried. That's right. And he first of all, he
makes uh, he makes some examples out of religion. So
at this point I think everyone can pretty well imagine
the sorts of religious examples that James is going to make.

(01:01:56):
After all, we've been discussing the trans like nature of
biocameral existence. Uh. In the Commanding words of corpses and statues,
you know, all you know, very magical and scenarios that
we can imagine lining up with both religious stories and
religious right. So expectantly he points to spirit possession. There's
a topic we come back to on a few different

(01:02:17):
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and it ranges
from demonic possession across various cultures to you know, tribal
African beats that threatened Carl Young's sanity, and more positive
forms of spirit possessions such as oracles, which which Jane
spends a lot of time with. Um. We have a
recent episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind that covers
the the Thaie tattoo festival in which uh, the animal

(01:02:41):
tattoo ends up overtaking the individual individual. So we have
examples of this this throughout different cultures. The speaking of
tongues uh and similar religious experiences may also play into this,
and of course we have examples of this in ancient
writings as well. So as early as a fourth century BC,
Socrates wrote of odd possessed men, so and clearly like

(01:03:02):
that's not the kind of thing you would uh necessarily
speak about if if you were immerged within a bicameral
uh world anyway, right, Um, Yeah, these might be more
vestiges of the bicameral culture. Right. And James points to
a number of different examples, mainly those dealing with Greek oracles, uh,

(01:03:24):
with the idea being that the oracle the individual here
would have would have ramped themselves up, but they basically
ramped up right hemisphere activity in relation to the left
as a result, as a response to complex ritual stimuli,
you know, the use of all these various and we've
talked about statues and language and and all of all
of these aspects playing into passed bicameral experiences. And therefore

(01:03:48):
the idea here is that even as we're shifting out
of the bicameral age, even as the bicameral ages behind us,
you have conscious individuals who are able to sort of
resurrect the bicameral experiences. Yes, he enter into trance like states, etcetera,
by engaging in these rituals. Yeah. And these would be
rituals where they channel the output of what Jans identifies

(01:04:10):
as in most people the right hemisphere speech associated sections
of course, right a speech usually coming from the left hemisphere,
So it would be like the voices of the gods
that spoke in the bicameral minds of the ancients, but
speaking out through the mouths of these oracles and prophets.
And you know what, those oracles and prophets, they didn't

(01:04:31):
necessarily speak in even in a commanding tone. In many
cases they may have they may have sung yes. And
so this is a really interesting section James gets into
in the in the third book of his book where
he talks about the evidence of pasted bicamerality in poetry
and music. So remember that Jane's neurological hypothesis, uh is

(01:04:54):
that the bicameral mind consisted of the non dominant hemisphere,
which is the right brain in most people, speaking directly
as an auditory hallucination to the dominant hemisphere, which is
the left brain in most people. Keep that in mind here,
that's right now. His his his thesis here is quote,
the first poets were God's poetry began with the bicameral mind.
The God's side of our ancient mentality, at least in

(01:05:16):
a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke
in verse. This means that most men, at one time
throughout the day, we're hearing poetry of a sort composed
and spoken within their own minds. That's terrifying and beautiful. Yeah,
that that kind of sums up a lot of the
bicameral hypothesis in general. So evidence is scanned for this,

(01:05:37):
but he argues that quote individuals who remained by cameral
into the conscious age, that these individuals continue to express
the voice of God or God's and poetry um the
so you know, the Indian Veda dictated by the gods,
the oracle at Delphi, early Arabic poets, etcetera. And this
concerns music too, because early poetry was musical in nature.

(01:06:01):
Janes says absolutely. I mean, you could still say that
poetry is musical and nature, especially insofar as it invokes
any kind of scanning or rhythm. That's right. And speech
is a function again primarily of the left cerebral hemisphere,
but song is primarily a function of the right hemisphere.
Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind.

(01:06:21):
That's an interesting hypothesis in itself. Now there's a he
presents a fair amount of of evidence for this, which
I'm gonna I'm gonna roll through here. Joe jump in
as we go. Hit me man, all right. So, first
of all, many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral hemorrhages
on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak, they

(01:06:43):
can still sing. We also have the Wada test to
determine a person's cerebral dominance. This is when sodium amatal
is injected into the carotid artery on one side, putting
the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation, and the other side
remains awake. So when this case case, if the left
hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't speak, but they can sing.

(01:07:05):
If the right hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't sing,
but they can speak. So like, the centers for speech
and singing are lateralized and the situation is more pronounced
in cases where there's actual physical damage to one hemisphere
or the other, or you know, it's it's completely removed. Also,
electrical stimulation of the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to

(01:07:26):
the posterior temporal lobe often produces hallucinations of singing and music.
Oh and he also he presents an experiment that you
can try. He says says that you can prove the
latter though the laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different
musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will
perceive and remember the music on the left ear phone better.

(01:07:50):
This is because the left ear has greater neuro representation
on the right hemisphere. Now, he points out that Plato
spoke of poetry as possession. Yeah, said, poets then around
four b C. Were comparable in mentality to the oracles
of the same period and went through similar um psychological
transformation when they performed. And then there's this idea. We've

(01:08:13):
all heard talk of the muses, right right. I mean,
so ancient epics might start saying like sing muse blah
blah blah. So the authors telling their personal composition God
to start going Yeah, Now, when we talk about the muses,
where you know, we're just talking about inspiration or you know,
or attention even or just you know, the will to

(01:08:34):
get a project done. It's a literary device we think of. Yeah.
But but back back then, the argument is is that
the bicameral human would literally need to hear the voice
of the muse. Yeah, the muse was literally real, and
so it wasn't just something they imagine, it was something
they experienced though it all was in the brain. Now,

(01:08:54):
he points out that by the sixth century BC, the
poet is no longer just naturally imbued with their long
They have to learn the gift of the muse in
order to hear it. So societea that the voice is
becoming harder and harder for everyone to hear. So this
might be kind of like how the oracles of these
later periods, living in conscious societies have to go through
elaborate rituals to get into the altered state of consciousness

(01:09:17):
where they channel their non dominant hemisphere and let the
voice of God speak. That's right, And he says that
in the fifth century b C, we hear the very
first hints of poets being peculiar with poetic ecstasy. That's
that's his quote there. So I want to use that
from now on. If I'm like trying to get some
writing done and somebody interrupts me, I'm like, hang on,

(01:09:39):
I'm being peculiar. Yeah, So it basically just gets harder
and harder to hear the voices of the gods until
you're having to essentially make up the words yourself. It
reminds me a lot of of how magic works in
dungeons and dragons, because dungeons and Dragons you basically have
three different types of magic users. You have the warlock
who works their magic the enslavement to a god or

(01:10:01):
god like being, So that's a bicamera being. Yeah, yeah,
that would be the bicameral experience. A sorcerer learns to
better channel magic that naturally emerges from their being. So
this is like a transitional being. This is like one
of the oracles in the late antiquity. Yeah, like it
still flows through them, it still can flow through them,
but they have to manage it. And then finally you

(01:10:24):
have the arcane wizard, who has to master the workings
of magic through study and academic effort alone. So these
are the pathetic poets of the modern era who have
to consciously compose their works exactly. Yeah, and uh, you know,
in the same way that within Dungeons and Dragons you
can you can have that, you can have sort of
the attitudes of what the wizard is. And this is

(01:10:45):
also kind of based on attitudes involving witches and wizards
and in the real world in earlier periods. But there's
the idea that the arcane wizard is a master of
of these forces where lesser models are um you know,
the magic is a master of them, which is, you
know not unlike the comparison between the bicamera and the

(01:11:06):
conscious human right. And of course the idea is as uh,
conscious society exists for longer and longer, and the bicameral
society goes farther and farther into the past. Our ability
to access these states of consciousness, to be an oracle,
or to be a muse possessed poet gets further and
further from our grasp. Exactly he writes, And then the

(01:11:27):
muses hush and freeze into myths, nymphs, and shepherds dance
no more. Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure
inspiration gasps and dies into invention. The oral becomes written
by the poet himself, and written it should be added
by his right hand, worked by his left hemisphere. The
muses have become imaginary and invoked in their silence as

(01:11:49):
a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind. That
is gorgeous. Yeah, and the whole book is filled with
passages like that that are just beautifully written and uh
in and just really drive home often emotionally the subject matter.
That's another reason I guess I got to be skeptical
and suspicious of this hypothesis is that it's so well written.

(01:12:10):
I feel like I need to be especially cautious about it.
Like he he communicates it so well and it's so
beautiful in the book that that it's like getting an
unfair advantage as a scientific hypothesis. Yeah, yeah, I can
definitely get that argument. Maybe that's why most scientific papers
are so horrible to read, Like why you know, it's
really rare you come across the one that's really well

(01:12:31):
well written, and it's because, well, maybe maybe you shouldn't
let your writing skills make it stand out more than
the theory itself deserves in terms of content. All right, Well,
what's another lingering example of of the bicameral mind. Hey,
can you think of a state in which people have
altered consciousness or reduced consciousness and a tendency to obey

(01:12:54):
verbal commands? Who sounds a lot like hypnosis to me,
ding ding ding. There you go. Now, we've talked hypnosis
on the podcast before, but just to reiterate, what's going
on with hypnosis is people seem to have wildly differing
levels of susceptibility to hypnosis. Some people just can't be hypnotized,
but for those that can, hypnosis does seem to be
a genuine altered state of consciousness at some level in

(01:13:17):
which the body is relaxed, focus is narrowed, inhibition is lowered,
consciousness is reduced, and verbal obedience is increased. Sounds kind
of like the model of bicamerality, with a lot of
these public demonstrations of hypnosis that you see you know,
or that you're on a cruise ship and somebody's doing
a show. I think people following the hypnotist commands is
not necessarily always a highly altered state of consciousness. It

(01:13:40):
could be partially just a performance brought on by social pressure.
But this is actually part of Jane's theory. He talks
about the idea of collective cognitive imperative. Group pressure enables
different states of mind and this is why you can
have uh basically a culture dictating which mindset you adopt,

(01:14:00):
the bicameral mindset or the conscious mindset. And it's also
the reason that you can, through these elaborate rituals, say
like the Oracle at Delphi, produce these these amazing. Uh,
you know, metered prophecies out of your right brain because
group cognitive pressure is putting you into that mindset. And
so he's saying hypnosis maybe maybe in fact a modern

(01:14:22):
reapproximation of the left brain operation of a bicameral person.
But instead of having the right brain talk, you're having
the hypnotists talk. And again this makes me think of
yoga classes where I just let the individual tell me
what to do for an hour and a half and
it it feels so liberate. Now, another big area that

(01:14:43):
the James spends a lot of time with is the
condition of schizophrenia. Now, this is obviously going to be
very relevant because it's one of the features of schizophrenia
is hallucinations, especially auditory hallucinations. Yeah, it is a condition
defined by voices, by auditory hallucination voices, the crew, the size,
voices that tell us what to do it with. Under

(01:15:04):
the tent of the bicameral mind hypothesis, it would seem
to line up pretty well. And uh, and so James
argues that schizophrenia is essentially a relapse into the bicameral mind. Now,
he argues that in the sculptures literature, murals and other
artifacts of the great biicare bicameral civilizations. We do not
see instances of individuals who suffer madness in a way

(01:15:27):
that differentiates them from their fellow humans. There's idiocy, but
but he says, there's no madness. Uh there, like there's
no insanity in the Iliad, for instance. Yeah. Now, by
the time we get to Plato, Plato speaks of madness,
but in these ancient civilizations, Jane says, you don't see it. Yeah.
He says that the first instance of insanity discussed in
the conscious period, uh is in Phaedrus or Plato calls

(01:15:51):
insanity quote a divine gift and the source of the
chiefest blessings granted two men. And then he goes on
to a Plato ends up identifying four types of madness.
And you'll and just again think of the bicameral mind
and reference to all of these prophetic madness, ritual madness,
poetic madness, and of course the erotic madness. Huh okay,

(01:16:12):
So these kind of line up with some of the
categories we've just been talking about. The Greeks wrote on paranoia,
he argues, which is literally having of two minds, Over time, however,
madness is no longer and no longer has these sort
of divine categories that Plato identified, But it becomes a
part of an ill, a part of a disease. There's something,

(01:16:33):
there's an ailment at work with the human being. Now
this maybe James thinks, as there is more conscious takeover
of society by the conscious culture, that it becomes untenable
for for bicameral society to exist and work within itself.
So people who experienced the bicameral mindset within a conscious
culture have they essentially have no cover. They have no

(01:16:56):
nobody to like be part of their culture right now.
He also points out that the voices of schizophrenia these
tend to be When I say the voices of schizophrenia,
the voice is heard by individuals with schizophrenia. They tend
to be authority figures created out of cultural expectation. And
the hallucinations also seem to have access to more memories
in the patient. There in many cases and in many

(01:17:19):
cases they replace thought. The they frequently take on religious
overtones because he says, the condition emerges from the neurological
structures bound to the birth of religious thought. To begin
with and he says that the there's also a frequency
of religious experience overall in the waking state for human consciousness,

(01:17:39):
the the hypnopompic state that is often accompanied by vivid,
lingering imagery. We've discussed this in terms of sleep paralysis
and supernatural experience before. James writes that these parts of
the brain are quote released from their normal inhibition by
abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia, and particularized into experience.

(01:18:01):
This is also telling. He points to the relative inability
of schizophrenics to draw a person. Think again to our
discussions of I and me. There's this draw a person
test or adapt test, and it's used to help identify
schizophrenia and other conditions by asking the individual to draw
a person. Now, if you have trouble drawing a whole person,

(01:18:22):
that kind of makes me think about those disembodied body
parts you talked about with reference to the iliad. And
and I have to point out this is another thing
I see my son having to do on kindergarten tests
and uh, in evaluations draw a person and and see,
I mean they're also looking to see with what degree
of accuracy you can pull them together. But uh, but Yeah,

(01:18:43):
in this case, are you able to draw a complete
person at all? Now, not all people who have schizophrenia
are going to have trouble drawing a person, right, but
when they do, it is uh, it is extremely diagnostic.
Also with schizophrenia, neurotization can also become impossible. You see
these like fractured self stories, right hues. And then there's

(01:19:05):
also body image boundary disturbance or boundary loss and this
again this ties into this uh, this lost sense of
eye or me. And remember too that schizophrenia has a
genetic inherited basis to the underlying biochemistry. Natural selection, James
argue would have favored it for a while. There's a

(01:19:26):
certain tirelessness in schizophrenic individuals. They seem to have a
lot of energy, and in the bicameral individual this would
have become this would have become very important if you were, say,
building pyramids or are there great works? Yeah, I mean
we were talking about. One of the advantages, or one
of the possible advantages of a bicameral mind would be
mental endurance, much more so than a conscious person could muster.

(01:19:46):
So James basically says that the modern schizophrenic is an
individual that's essentially in search of a bicameral culture. Quote,
but he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness
that struggles against this more emitive mental organization, that tries
to establish some kind of control in the middle of
a mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do

(01:20:08):
the controlling. In effect, he is a mind barred to
his environment, waiting on God's in a godless world. Okay,
so you convinced yet, Joe. I mean, it's tough because
I do find his argument very compelling, but it just
may be the case that he was wrong about how
about some of the evidence that he claims, or about

(01:20:29):
how he interprets some of that evidence. So I don't know.
I find the bi cameral mind thesis very interesting and
very compelling, but I do not consider myself convinced that
it is correct true. And with like with the schizophrenia evidence,
for instance, is this is this truly more evidence in
support of bicameral mind theory or is this schizophrenia as

(01:20:52):
explained with bicameral mind. Yeah. I mean, one way you
could look at the bi cameral mind is you could
say it's a theory that explains a lot or you
could say that it is a very interesting, carefully conducted
story that's overlaid on lots of evidence that we already
knew about. So what would be really interesting about it
would be can it predict new discoveries like, based on

(01:21:16):
the assumption of the bicameral mind hypothesis, would you be
able to predict will find X, Y, and z about
the ancient world and about neuroscientific discoveries in the future,
say with you know, uh a neuroimaging, and that would
be a real good way of testing whether it has
any predictive power and thus whether we can have any
confidence that it will continue to have predictive power in

(01:21:36):
the future, which is pretty much synonymous with saying there's
something to it, that it might be true. Uh So
I tried to look up you know what if people
said about it and the theory. It's had lots of critics,
It has lots of people, you know, it's always been
controversial ever since it was first introduced. It's had supporters.
Some people think that it's it's really interesting, there's something

(01:21:57):
to it. Some people think it might shed some light
on some issues, even if it's wrong. Overall, it's had
a lot of people who think it's just bunk. So
you know, there's opinions all over the place. One paper
I found that I thought summarized well some of the
neuro scientific evidence and implications is a paper by Leo
Share published in the Journal of Psychology or Psychiatry and

(01:22:18):
Neuroscience in two thousand. Leo Share is a professor of
psychiatry at Mount Sinai and New York, and in the
short piece he collects some relevant reactions to Jane's hypothesis
and argument. Uh Some reactions to Jane's include He finds
that in seven Assade and Shapiro published a criticism of
Jane's work in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and they write, quote,

(01:22:40):
the difficulty which we find with Jane's hypothesis is that
the conclusions he draws have a questionable basis in neuropsychiatric
fact and quote. If Jane's hypothesis were to coincide more
accurately with anatomic fact facts about what we find in
the body, the right temporal area in question would more
likely coincide with Broca's expressive area, a notion that does

(01:23:01):
not conveniently fit Jane's theoretical constructs. Assad and Shapiro. Shapiro
also claim, according to Share that quote lesions of the
right sided areas corresponding to Broca's and Wernicke's areas seem
more related to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia like restricted
affect than to the positive hallucinatory symptoms unquote, and they

(01:23:22):
also claim that Jane's oversimplified the phenomenology of hallucinatory experience
to make them fit his hypothesis better. Um. Also in nine,
the International Journal of Psychophysiology published a letter that wrote, quote,
after many years of psychophysiological studies mainly carried out in
the field, if evoked to neurocognitive bioelectrical events, I feel

(01:23:44):
I can safely state that the concepts of the mind
slash brain and the brain slash behavior dualisms, with their ancient,
widespread and persistent philosophy, are now all outdated, as are
those of the bicameral mind or the double brain. Then again, however,
Shares says in nine paper published in The Lancet by
Olan claimed that research in neuroimaging has quote illuminated and

(01:24:06):
confirmed the importance of Jane's hypothesis. And this research includes
a paper in the Lancet nine by Lennox at All,
in which a right handed person with schizophrenia underwent neuroimaging
during hallucinations, and the authors found that the auditory hallucinations
occurred in the right hemisphere but not the left hemisphere,
which would match up with Jane's predictions, the predictions made

(01:24:29):
by the bicameral mind hypothesis. So I'd say it's still
in the realm of something that is interesting but definitely
not proven. But just imagine how fascinating it would be
if more and more studies start lining up with stuff
that could be predicted directly by the bicameral mind hypothesis. Indeed, yeah,
I mean that's that's the great thing about the about

(01:24:50):
this particular hypothesis is that we can continue to study it.
We can continue to see how how it potentially lines
up with their modern scientific understanding of consciousness and the brain.
So yeah, I guess we can start wrapping up here.
But I want to say, in the end, though I'm
not convinced by I'm not advocating it as true, it's fascinating,
very well argued, I would say, arguably quite brilliant in

(01:25:14):
the way it pulls from so many disciplines into a
coherent picture of a cross disciplinary hypothesis, but can't yet
endorse it. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would agree, But
it is it is fascinating to use it as a
thought exercise for looking back on past cultures. And uh,
you know, after I was reading it, I kept I
was wondering, well, why don't we see this reference to

(01:25:34):
more works of fiction. Well, it turns out it was
apparently one of the key influences on Neil Stephens snow Crash,
which we mentioned in our Tower of Babble episode. It's
a cyberpunk classic then involves a linguistic momentic weapons um
which you know, go back and listen to that episode
of certainly read snow Crash if you want more than that.

(01:25:54):
But I was not familiar with this book. There is
a two thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The
Rage of Achilles and get this. It's a novel of
the Trojan War told within the confines of the bicameral
mind hypothesis. So Odysseus is a conscious modern man in

(01:26:14):
this and Achilles is a bicameral killing machine. That is
a brilliant concept for a novel, and if there's any
truth to Jane's vision, this might have actually been possible.
Like during the long slow breakdown to the bicameral mind,
conscious people and bicameral people would have had to encounter
and deal with one another. And can you just imagine
all the difficulty that would create. Yeah, but for both sides,

(01:26:37):
because on one hand, the conscious human is capable of
deception that the bicameral human has no ability to. Like
basically comes down to that that duel in a game
of Thrones between the Mountain and uh, what's his name?
The over and Martel. Yeah, yeah, where one is one
is crafty and deceptive and the other one is just

(01:26:57):
pure brute strength and NonStop killing action. Yeah. So you're
saying the Mountain is bicameral and the Red Viper of
Dorn is conscious. I think so. And really, I mean
he only becomes more bicameral story progresses, all right, So
there you have it. Do you have an anything else, Joe? No,
I guess that's it for now. I I found this

(01:27:18):
a really fascinating topic to explore. It's one of those
that I've said this a few times now, but I
just want to stress again it's like I feel this
conflict within me about the ideas that are so cool.
I feel like I have to be especially suspicious of them,
Like the more interesting they are, the more I feel
like I have to really check my desire for it

(01:27:39):
to be true. Yeah, especially an idea that's this expansive
that concerns the history of our species and our civilizations
and the very nature of consciousness. So it's not like
buying into a single idea like, oh well, actually I
think the Chinese discovered North America, you know, before the
Vikings something like that, which I'm not saying that doesn't

(01:27:59):
have large historical ramifications, but it's not something that just
affects the absolute understanding of our species in our way
of thinking. All right, well, of course we'd love to
hear from all of you out there. What are your
thoughts on the bicameral mind. Do you buy into it?
Do you do you think it's complete bunk? Do you

(01:28:20):
have some sort of middle ground there? And what are
some really cool examples of its utilization in various sorts
of fiction that you've encountered. Here's something I would like
to employ your imagination on, if this could happen, If
you could go from a bi cameral mind to a
conscious mind. How much more could human mentality change? Like
if you go three thousand years into the future from now,

(01:28:42):
could our mindsets be as different from from hours now
as the conscious mind is from the hypothetical bi cameral mind? Yeah,
I mean, am I engaging in a bicameral experience when
I let my GPS device tell me where to drive?
I don't know, do you totally relinquish conscious control? Yeah?
I almost, It's almost to that level. Uh that I

(01:29:03):
was hanging out with my family over the weekend and
my sisters were like asking me, like, why did you
make this turn in that it's said of this turn?
And I'm like, I just do what the machine tells
me to told me to drive into the ocean. Yeah,
I put my trust in the machine. It's by and large,
there's a less uh, there's less of a chance that
it will drive me in the ocean that I will
drive me into the ocean. So uh, that's how it

(01:29:25):
shakes out, all right. Well, you can find is It's
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll
find all the episodes that you will find, blog post videos,
you will find links out to our verious social media
accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and more. Hey,
Facebook has that great UH Discussion module group where you
can join up and you can interact with us, but

(01:29:45):
also other listeners to the show and you can discuss
episodes such as these with those individuals. And if you
want to get in touch with us directly, as always,
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands

(01:30:10):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
The

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff To Blow Your Mind News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Robert Lamb

Joe McCormick

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

The Bobby Bones Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From the Vault: Bicameralism, Part 2