I think that animal intelligence is a quite interesting subject.

Chimps have previously been described as trimming twigs so that they could dip them into ant holes and eat the ants that cling to it: tool making. Recently, they have been observed to fashion "spears" (in a similar way) that they can ...

Helmut wrote: Deadline stress doesn't kill this ability, it rather enhances it, at least in the area of technology.

My friends and I have refered to this, in conversation, as "the inspiration of desperation."

The following anecdote is from Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind , 1998, by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, p. 7:



For example, one patient I saw--a neurologist from New York--suddenly at the age of sixty started experiencing epileptic seizures arising from ...

It was many years ago, but I do recall I felt that his discussion of Ecclesiastes overlooked the fact that many people feel it was written by Solomon.


If you still think that the Solomon authorship P.O.V. is significant you might want to check the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org ...

Moderator wrote:The important question to me being: "Are all modern manifestations of hallucinations vestiges of the bicameral mind?"

What sort of approach do you think would be capable of providing an answer to that question?

I have a question about the following passage written by Jaynes (pp. 86-87), in particular the part that I have rendered in bold print:

"Another was a deeply religious man who one summer, following an interest in spiritualism, heard at least 20 divine voices extremely similar to the voices heard by ...

Jaynes writes of Blake's capacity for hallucination that "he taught it to his wife so that she too could see the visions." It might be thought that this is an argument that Blake's hallucinations were simply a result of a mental technique that he utilized. It merits consideration. I wish that Jaynes ...

This chapter was quite interesting, but I found myself feeling troubled by the concluding points that Jaynes makes.

Jaynes says "Blake was not insane" and then goes on to describe the features of "schizophrenic insanity" that Blake was "the opposite of." But is Jaynes saying Blake was not ...

I don't know much about William Blake. I suppose I've avoided reading about him before because I've had some antipathy towards him due to his poem "The Tyger." I repeatedly had this poem as assigned reading in school--I've read somewhere that it is the most anthologized poem in the English language ...

My copy of the book just came in today. :D
I've only skimmed it, and mainly have skimmed this chapter.

My impression is that this chapter is very uneven in quality. Sometimes Stove makes some perceptive comments, but sometimes he blows his credibility in a big way.

About the Stove's perceptive ...

In regard to the model of consciousness (see the first link) offered for consideration by diogenes, I see a problem:

If it were true that consciousness was a function of each hemisphere of the brain monitoring the other hemisphere through the corpus callosum, it follows that patients who have had ...

This is a very speculative line of questioning I'm about to put forward, but I have wondered about it for decades--ever since I first read Jaynes's book.

At the beginning of chapter 4 (p.84), Jaynes writes:

"...at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a ...

And for anyone interested in the often overlooked connection between ancient Greek religious/philosophical thought and ancient Indian religious/philosophical thought, I recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies , by Thomas McEvilley. (Published in ...

Dr. Michael A. Persinger,who wrote the foreward to Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited , has reported doing experiments in which he has elicited in people, by use of magnetic fields stimulating the brain, hallucinations of a "presence."

This ...

Thanks for the recommendations.

Long ago I read a few portions of Dodd's book, and I was recently thinking that I should add it to my reading list.

Have you read The Origins of European Thought by R. B. Onians? It has been a long time since I have done so, but I recall it as having been a goldmine ...