Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a hypothesis in
psychology that argues that the human
brain once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys - a
bicameral mind. The term was coined by
psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human
mind as recently as 3000 years ago.
Brain hemispheres and bicamerality
It is important to note that Julian Jaynes saw bicamerality as primarily a metaphor. He used
governmental bicameralism to describe a mental state in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. The metaphor is based on the idea of
lateralization of brain function although each half of a normal human brain is constantly communicating with the other through the
corpus callosum. The metaphor is not meant to imply that the two halves of the bicameral brain were "cut off" from each other but that that the bicameral mind was experienced as a different, non-conscious mental schema wherein volition in the face of novel stimuli was mediated through a linguistic control mechanism and experienced as auditory verbal hallucinations.
The...
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