With the eyes it is slightly more complicated, since half of each eye is connected to the left brain and half to the right. But if the patient is asked to stare rigidly in one direction, an object can be shown only to the left or right visual field. If a split-brain patient is shown an orange with the right brain and an apple with the left, and is asked to write with the left hand what he has just seen, he will write: ‘Orange’. If he is asked to state what he has just written, he will reply: ‘Apple’. When one split-brain patient was shown an indecent drawing with the right half of the brain, she blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied: ‘I don’t know.’
There is therefore strong evidence that ‘you’ inhabit the left cerebral hemisphere, and that the person in the right is a stranger. And although it could be argued that this does not apply to most of us, since we are not split-brain patients, this inference would be incorrect. Otherwise, split-brain patients would know that their corpus callosum had been severed – they would be aware that they have been cut off from their ‘other half’. In fact, they notice no difference – which suggests that, for practical purposes, they were already split-brain before the operation. In fact, a little thought will show that we are all split-brain patients. When I experience an intuition, a ‘hunch’, it walks into my left brain – my conscious, wide-awake self – from the domain of that other ‘self (which appears to be the gateway to the unconscious).
Jaynes believes that auditory hallucinations originate in the right brain. And he suggests that when one of the ancient heroes of Homer heard the voice of a god advising them what to do, this voice originated in the right brain, and sounded in the left brain as if through a loudspeaker. We have already seen that the ancient kings of Egypt and Mesopotamia regarded themselves as mouthpieces of the gods, which seems to lend support to Jaynes’s theory.
Jaynes believes that man began to develop language – simple cries like ‘Danger!’ and ‘Food!’ – as recently as seventy thousand years ago. He did not learn to speak simple sentences until much more recently – between twenty-five and fifteen thousand years ago. But although he had language, he had no self-consciousness. So a man who had been ordered to go and build a dam upstream had no way of reminding himself what he was supposed to do; ‘reminding myself’ demands self-awareness. He might, of course, repeat his instructions – the simple word for ‘dam’ – non-stop all the way up the river. But then, his right brain could help him not to forget. Most people can tell themselves that they must wake up at six in the morning, and wake at precisely six o’clock. The right brain has acted as an alarm clock. So the primitive hunter’s right brain would repeat the word for ‘dam’ when he reached the correct place, and he would hear it as a voice – probably speaking from the air above the left side of his head.
Jaynes suggests that this happened some time after the advent of the earliest agriculture, about 10,000 B.C. This was the time when men began living in larger groups – no longer a small band of hunters living in a cave, but anything up to two hundred people living in a settlement of fifty or so houses. A group that large would need a leader – a king. But when the king died, his subjects would continue to hear his voice; hence they would assume that he was still alive – a god. This, says Jaynes, is how man came to believe in the gods. The gods were an inevitable consequence of the development of the ‘bicameral mind’.
So, according to Jaynes, those early civilisations were ‘bicameral’. Men were not responsible for their actions; they obeyed the voice of the gods. And then, very slowly, consciousness (i.e. self-awareness) began to develop. This was due to a number of causes, but the main one was the invention of writing, some time before 3000 B.C. Writing – whose purpose is the storage of information – drove man into a new kind of complexity. For as soon as I begin to store information, I am forced to become more complex, whether I like it or not. An obvious example of the process is a library. I may collect books because I enjoy escaping from the real world. But as my collection expands, I must keep it in some sort of order. I must make bookshelves and adopt some kind of system of classification. This may strike me as tiresome; but unless I want to keep falling over books on the floor, or unless I keep giving them away, then I must teach myself the elementary principles of librarianship. Whether I like it or not, I have to ‘get organised’.
So the development of writing created a new kind of complexity that undermined the bicameral mind. (In the first chapter of my book Starseekers I reviewed the evidence that the Great Pyramid – dating from about 2500 B.C. – and megalithic monuments like Stonehenge were built as ‘computers’ whose purpose was to enable the priests to create astronomical tables.) Moreover, the second millennium B.C. was a time of unprecedented catastrophes and stresses. ‘Civilisations perished. Half the world’s population became refugees. And wars, previously sporadic, came with hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunches itself into its dark and bloody close.’ The tremendous volcanic explosion of the island of Santorini – about 1500 B.C. – devastated the whole Mediterranean area. Then, between 1250 and 1150, the same area became a prey to hordes of invaders known as ‘the Sea Peoples’, who attacked the bleeding civilisation like sharks. Under all this stress, the old, child-like mentality could no longer cope. The men who rebuilt civilisation needed new qualities of ruthlessness and efficiency. Besides, all this violence demanded a more subtle response. ‘Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbour his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive.’
The first sign of this ‘change of mind’, says Jaynes, can be found in Mesopotamia. Around 1230 B.C. the Assyrian tyrant Tukulti-Ninurta I had a stone altar built, and it shows the king kneeling before the empty throne of the god. In earlier carvings, the king is shown standing and talking to the god. Now the king is alone; the god has vanished. A cuneiform text of the same period contains the lines:
One who has no god, as he walks along the street Headache envelops him like a garment.
Headache is the result of nervous tension, of losing contact with the intuitive self. And when man suffers from stress, he reacts to problems by losing his temper. And it is at this point, according to Jaynes, that cruelty first becomes a commonplace of history. It is in the Assyrian carvings of about this period that we first see illustrations of men and women impaled, children beheaded.
This, then, is Jaynes’s fascinating if highly controversial account of the coming of self-awareness and of crime. And it is open to one very obvious objection; that it is practically impossible to imagine complex human beings – such as Sargon of Akkad or Hammurabi -without self-awareness. Jaynes points out that consciousness is not nearly so important – or so necessary – as we seem to think; a man playing the piano performs an extremely complex set of operations while his mind is elsewhere, enjoying the music. If he becomes conscious of his fingers, he plays badly. But this example is deceptive. The man had to learn to play the piano slowly and consciously; only then could he do it ‘automatically’. If he had never possessed self-consciousness, he would have been incapable of learning to play, since playing – like any other complex operation – demands self-criticism.
There are other strong objections to this aspect of Jaynes’s theory. Professor Gordon Gallup of New York State University, has conducted a series of experiments in an attempt to determine whether animals possess self-awareness. Various animals – seventeen species in all – were placed in a cage with mirrors. Then the animal was anaesthetised and its face painted with a red, odourless dye. When the animal woke up, it was easy to see whether it recognised – through its mirror-image – that its face had been dyed. Two species – chimpanzees and orang-outangs – inspected their faces in exactly the same way that a human being would under similar circumstances; none of the others showed the least interest in their reflections. Most other species behaved in various ways that showed they regarded their mirror-images as other members of the same species – making friendly overtures or even attacking the image. Some of them continued to behave in this way even after years of acquaintance with mirrors, revealing total inability to recognise themselves.