Julian Jaynes Society Forum: Exploring Consciousness and Bicameral Mind Theory

Given that many diseases are known to have a psychosomatic or neurologically-based component, one may wonder whether Jaynesian consciousness (or the lack thereof) might have actually caused changes in the whole body, not just the brain.

This is a highly speculative question since we can’t just go back in time and look at bicameral people to see how they physically differed (and even if we could, it’d be hard to isolate psychosomatically-related differences from those caused by other things that have changed since then, such as diet or genetic drift). We could examine remains from that era (such as mummies), but as nerves don’t preserve well and neither do most other soft tissues, this limits how reliable our observations could be.

Nevertheless, some inquiry may be possible. Of course, such differences would have to have occurred via the action of the nervous system, and like Jaynesian consciousness itself, they would have to have had a minimal genetic (though not necessarily epigenetic) component.

This limits the kind of changes that could have occurred. For example, traits such as ear shape or eye color are almost certainly not linked to being conscious vs. being bicameral, even though it would be very Hollywood-esque to depict everyone’s eyes suddenly changing once they “attain a new level of awareness”.

On the other hand, the gut-brain axis is very strong (and is bi-directional in nature, forming a feedback loop). So, could Jaynesian consciousness have arisen at the same time as (and have been linked to) changes in the human metabolism? It seems plausible, especially since the societal upheavals of the time would likely have affected people’s diets, too.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning the role of fasting in religious mysticism. This seems to be more a feature of post-bicameral religions; if bicameral people ever fasted in a religious context, I’m not aware of it. The changes in the gut-brain axis produced by fasting could, like other post-breakdown religious rituals, have served to “repair” the link to the divine that was severed by the breakdown of bicamerality.

Likewise, other systems in the human body (such as the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system) are controlled by the brain (but, importantly, have never been under conscious control, even now). Breathing exercises, which are also commonly associated with religious mysticism, can affect the autonomic nervous system in ways that would in turn “feed back” to the brain.

Even death can, in some cases, be psychosomatic (the so-called “voodoo death”), and in many pre-literate societies, such deaths are said to be caused by ghosts or demonic entities.

One “smoking gun” that might indicate real differences in the physicality of a conscious person vs. a bicameral person, would be if there were a specific physical symptom (or constellation of symptoms) that was frequently described in writings from the bicameral era, but not from the conscious era. Or vice versa. This would indicate a psychosomatic disorder that is either a side effect of Jaynesian consciousness, or else is suppressed by it.

Anxiety manifests psychosomatically in many people, and there is reason to believe it has become progressively more common (or severe) over time, meaning it is almost certainly an example of a “conscious person’s ailment”. On the flip side, there are a lot of culture-bound syndromes that are specific to societies that aren’t fully literate (or only recently became so); these may be remnants of “bicameral diseases” (psychosomatically induced disorders that Jaynesian consciousness prevents). Many scientists speculate about a genetic origin for such diseases to explain why they are culture-bound, but another possibility is that they are psychosomatic in a way that makes them remnants of the bicameral body.

After perusing your posts, it appears we have many similar thoughts and observations. I have two massive essays where I explore the scientific evidence related to this kind of thing: The Agricultural Mind, and The Crisis of Identity.

There are psychosomatic diseases, probably to be observed in all or nearly all societies at one point or another. In the second link above, I discuss this in terms of a disease called neurasthenia, a common diagnosis earlier last century. But looking at the evidence, though the interpretive frame of diagnosis was socially constructed, the etiology and presentation of neurasthenia likely involved physical factors.

The turn of the 20th century involved mass urbanization and industrialization. There were all kinds of new chemical exposures, increased spread of infectious disease, and a massive change in diet and nutrition. Plus, that level of population concentration had never before been seen on such a wide scale, which is a stressor all on its own, particularly as often multiple families were forced to live crammed in a single apartment.

Plus, there was the stress of a new lifestyle and work habits: artificial lighting, loss of nature exposure, disruption of circadian rhythm, ungrounded from natural EMFs, sedentary office work, repetitive factory work, etc. It was a totalizing transformation of environmental conditions that would've been dramatic, as most people had a short time before been rural farmers and European peasants.

Neurasthenia was particularly seen as a disease of the affluent, artists, intellectuals, and other 'brain workers". These were the first people to be the fully urbanized and industrialized, along with the first to experience higher levels of education, literacy, and literary culture. It's similar to how the same class of people began to suffer 'melancholia' in the late Middle Ages. Both melancholia and neurasthenia are essential different terms for mood disorders and nervous disorders. From the enclosure movement to modernization, the upper classes were the canaries in the coal mine.

They also were the first to experience changes in diet and psychoactive substances. The goods first sold in colonial trade, from the 1500s to 1700s, were largely limited to the wealthier. Sugar, tea, coffee, opium, cocaine, etc wouldn't have been available to a larger percentage of the population until the 1800s and 1900s. Even wheat, though grown for millennia in Europe, was so difficult to farm that for most of history it was only affordable to the wealthy. But in the early 1800s, agricultural reforms created the first dependable surplus yields of wheat.

That is when our mass wheat-based diet began. Research shows that populations that eat more wheat also have higher rates of certain psychiatric disorders and neurocognitive conditions: schizophrenia, mood disorders, autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), etc. So, what we eat apparently can have a direct and profound effect on our thought, perception, identity, and behavior.

As a test case, we can find one example of a wheat-based society in the ancient world. Egypt was the only place that had soil so fertile that they could produce surplus yields with enough to store for years. This is why during famines other people would travel to Egypt to obtain grains, as described in the Jewish Bible. Interestingly, Egyptians developed all the major diseases of civilization that are so common today: obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. It's equally interesting that this was the society that built the Great Pyramids, whatever significance that has.

Anyway, we know that diet, involving microbiome and gut-brain axis, powerfully affects neurocognition and mental health. We have a massive amount of research on it, from the past century. Most importantly, we are beginning to understand the exact factors and causal mechanisms involved (Dr. Chris Palmer, Brain Energy; & Dr. Georgia Ede, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind). The keto diet is a great example of that, in it's positive influence on epileptic seizures, mood disorders, Alzheimer's, etc.

Traditional people ate a far different diet than we do today. Just earlier last century, Dr. Weston A. Price studied the diets of healthy populations, African hunter-gatherers, Polynesian fishers, and the last isolated European peasant villages. They surely did eat vastly less carbs than we do today, but maybe more significantly they got tremendous nutrient-density from dairy, eggs, meat, and fish. But many of them would eat far less often than we do, sometimes with only one meal per day and sometimes regular fasting, not always associated with religion. Like the keto diet, fasting puts one into ketosis.

Whatever the exact causes, Dr. Price observed that these physically healthy people exhibited what he called 'moral health' (mental health plus pro-social behavior): happy, easygoing, peaceful, friendly, welcoming, kind, helpful, forgiving, etc. This is still observed among the last isolated hunter-gatherers by others, from the linguist Daniel Everett's account of the Piraha to the nutritionist Mary Ruddick commentary on the Hadza. These people are also observed to have less parasites and infectious diseases, which is to say less of the regality-like response of the behavioral immune system, parasite-stress, and such that elicits collectivism, right-wing authoritarianism, and sociopolitical conservatism.

I don't exactly know how all of this fits into bicameral mentality and Jaynesian consciousness. But I have my own speculations. My guess is it was simultaneously an increase of various stressors and an increase of means of containment for those stressors. That created an ever more contained social order, identity, and mentality. The bicameral societies were more contained than the animistic societies, and the J-consciousness societies were more contained than both. Now our modern world of hyper-individualism (with our high-carb, wheat-based diet; ongoing disease epidemic & multiple mass pandemics in recent centuries; etc) has pushed it to the furthest extreme of containment.