Julian Jaynes was an American psychologist who worked at Yale and Princeton universities for almost 25 years and became known for his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. At the heart of his work was the problem of consciousness: the difference between what others see in us and our sense of an inner self and the deep feelings that underpin it. His proposed solution spans many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archaeology, history, religion and the analysis of ancient texts.
He was born in West Newton, Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, and maintained a lifelong connection with Canada through the family's summer home on Prince Edward Island. He studied psychology at McGill University, graduating in 1941, and then began graduate studies at the University of Toronto to learn more about the brain.
His studies were interrupted by the Second World War: because of his Unitarian principles, he was recognised as a conscientious objector, but refused to comply with the US law for pacifists and spent three years in Lewisburg prison in Pennsylvania, working in the prison hospital. After his release in 1946, he enrolled at Yale, received a master's degree in 1948 and subsequently refused to accept his doctorate, again on principle, over educational credentials. He later spent several years in England as an actor and playwright.
He returned to Yale in 1954 as an instructor and lecturer until 1960, making significant contributions to experimental psychology, learning and ethology, and publishing with Frank A. Beach.
In 1964 he became a research associate at Princeton University, where he became friends with Edwin G. Boring and remained until 1995. There he devoted himself to the problem of consciousness, initially seeking its roots in processes of learning and cognition shared by animals and humans, in line with the prevailing evolutionary assumptions of the mid-20th century.
In September 1969 he first presented his “new theory of consciousness” publicly at the American Psychological Association's annual convention. His radical approach explained the phenomena of introspection as dependent on culture and language, particularly metaphors, more than on brain physiology. This challenged the basic assumptions of the time, which sought the origin of consciousness in evolution, as well as the behaviourists, who had solved the problem of consciousness simply by ignoring it.
Jaynes insisted that the most common mistake is to confuse consciousness with perception, and that consciousness must be strictly distinguished from cognition. In a talk at Cornell University in 1972, he wrote that if consciousness is based on language, then only humans have consciousness, and they acquired it at some historical point after language evolved. This led him to humanity's earliest writings, where he believed he found evidence of recent voice-hearing without consciousness. In the semi-historical Greek epic the Iliad, he saw “a very different mentality from our own” and, after learning ancient Greek to identify words for the mind, found that the Iliad does not even contain a word for the mind.
His only book, published in 1976, introduces consciousness as the human capacity for introspection and examines earlier attempts to explain it, which, as one of Jaynes's early critics acknowledged, amount to a “spectacular history of failure”. Abandoning the assumption that consciousness is innate, he explains it as learned behaviour emerging from language and, more specifically, metaphor. His analysis of ancient texts and archaeological finds led him not only to place the origin of consciousness in the second millennium BC, but also to propose the existence of an earlier non-conscious mentality, the “bicameral mind”, referring to the brain's two hemispheres.
After the book's publication, Jaynes was frequently invited to conferences and lectures. In 1984 he gave the keynote address at the Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria, while delivering six major lectures in 1985 and nine in 1986. He received honorary doctorates from Rhode Island College in 1979 and Elizabethtown College in 1985.
In the extensive afterword to the 1990 edition, he clarified that his theory comprises four separate hypotheses: first, that consciousness is based on language and accessible through it; second, that the non-conscious bicameral mind is based on verbal hallucinations; third, that the breakdown of the bicameral mind precedes consciousness, but its timing varies; and fourth, that the “double brain” of bicamerality is based on a different organisation of the two hemispheres from today's functional lateralisation. He also elaborated on the effects of consciousness on imagination, memory, conceptions of the self, emotions, anxiety, guilt and sexuality.
Julian Jaynes died at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on 21 November 1997.
In 2006 his biographers Woodward and Tower reported that he felt he had not truly succeeded in his life's work, because he believed that some who disagreed with him had not actually read or understood his book. His theory nevertheless continues to be discussed: the Julian Jaynes Society was founded by Marcel Kuijsten in 1997, shortly after his death, and has published several books on the theory, as well as foreign-language editions in French, German and Spanish, while also maintaining a members' area with articles, lectures and interviews.
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