Recent News of Interest to the Jaynes Community?

Recent news relevant to Julian Jaynes's theory of consciousness and the bicameral mind.
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selfreplicate
Posts: 20
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 5:37 pm

Recent News of Interest to the Jaynes Community?

Post by selfreplicate »

[below I am adding links to articles that might be of interest to folks on this forum]

Automated reconstruction of ancient languages using probabilistic models of sound change
published ahead of print February 15, 2013
Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, David Hall, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Dan Klein

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/ ... 0.abstract


also, check out the discussion below this article, to get a sense of what people think/know about Jaynes and his theory.
Did everyone 3,000 years ago have a voice in their head?
http://io9.com/did-everyone-3-000-years ... -510063135

and here you can read about hemi-sync music, and a strange form of grief therapy:
Induced after-death communication, or IADC, is derived from a well-respected therapy recognized by the American Psychiatric Association and the Department of Defense as an effective form of trauma treatment. In 1989 psychotherapist and researcher Francine Shapiro pioneered eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)—a new approach to treating PTSD. Rather than engaging only in standard talk therapy or medication, she offered patients an opportunity to allegedly work through emotional trauma in record time by accelerating their thought processing. Although EMDR is a multi-step procedure, it basically comes down to following a therapist’s hand back and forth, mimicking eye movements that are believed by some therapists to initiate processing similar to the REM sleep cycle (which happens when we dream), while simultaneously focusing verbally and mentally on the strongest image or negative thought associated with their traumatic event.
Discourse with the Dead
Erin Kron, Narratively Magazine, 2013 Oct 13
http://narrative.ly/pieces-of-mind/disc ... -the-dead/

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Bicameral Mind in the News

Method to reconstruct overt and covert speech
http://phys.org/news/2014-10-method-rec ... peech.html
Oct 2014, phys.org

[termed in New Scientist as a "brain decoder"]

"If you're reading text in a newspaper or a book, you hear a voice in your own head," said Brian Pasley at the University of California, Berkeley, in New Scientist. "We're trying to decode the brain activity related to that voice to create a medical prosthesis that can allow someone who is paralyzed or locked in to speak."

Decoding spectrotemporal features of overt and covert speech from the human cortex, Front. Neuroeng., 27 May 2014.
link
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/ ... 00014/full

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Make People Mute By Forcing Them To Listen to Themselves
http://io9.com/make-people-mute-by-forc ... 1629650135
Esther Inglis-Arkell, io9.com, 2014-09-02

In the 1950s Ludmilla Andreevna Chistovich, a psychologist in the USSR, [...] invented a technique called "speech shadowing," or "speech jamming."

The shadowing technique involved nothing more than asking people to speak into a microphone while wearing headphones. Chistovich broadcast their own words back to them, with about a 250 millisecond delay [roughly the delay of one syllable]. For the most part, this rendered them speechless.

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Artist's work about self-reflection uses Julian Jaynes book in her work
artist: Lee Bul, title: Via Negativa
The Creator's Project, via Vice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_x9_kYXcFg

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Bell V (2013) A Community of One: Social Cognition and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations. PLoS Biol 11(12): e1001723. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001723
link
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info ... io.1001723

Abstract

Auditory verbal hallucinations have attracted a great deal of scientific interest, but despite the fact that they are fundamentally a social experience—in essence, a form of hallucinated communication—current theories remain firmly rooted in an individualistic account and have largely avoided engagement with social cognition. Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence for the role of social cognitive and social neurocognitive processes in auditory verbal hallucinations, and, consequently, it is proposed that problems with the internalisation of social models may be key to the experience.

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BPS Research Digest: What's it like to hear voices that aren't there?
2014
http://www.bps-research-digest.blogspot ... t.html?m=1

Lucy Holt and Anna Tickle have published a "meta-ethnographic synthesis" of what we know so far about the varieties of people's voice-hearing experiences.

The first theme is that most people gave the voices they heard an identity - often they named them, or they attributed a gender to them. Some people heard voices that belonged to real people encountered in the past, other voices were seen as belonging to God or a spiritual force.

Another important theme was the amount of power that people perceived their heard voices as having, and, related to that, how much power they felt they had over them. There was a continuum such that some people felt completely powerless over their heard voices, while others felt they could take them over.

"'voice hearing' is clearly not a homogenous experience."

Unfortunately, the quality of the studies identified in this review was disappointing. Many failed to provide quotes from participants; others failed to acknowledge the influence of the researcher's own interpretative stance on the results. "It is evident that the quality of research investigating the first person perspective of hearing voices warrants improvements," Holt and Tickle said.

Holt L and Tickle A (2013). Exploring the experience of hearing voices from a first person perspective: A meta-ethnographic synthesis. Psychology and psychotherapy PMID: 24227763
link
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24227763
Last edited by selfreplicate on Thu May 28, 2015 7:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
pcg
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 2:15 pm

Re: Recent News of Interest to the Jaynes Community?

Post by pcg »

Just finished the article you link to. Seems tangentially related to Jayne's theory at best. Can you explain how you see grief theory relating to Jayne's theories of consciousness?
selfreplicate
Posts: 20
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 5:37 pm

Re: Recent News of Interest to the Jaynes Community?

Post by selfreplicate »

It would relate to the after-death communication part of Jaynes' theory. Remember the 'phenomenon' of the bicameral mind is most present in stressful situations, grief being one of them.

But Jaynes also placed much emphasis on hypnosis as a way of experimenting with his theory, pretty sure there's a whole chapter on it. And "talking to the dead", especially subjectively-important people, was, or is, by more counts than Jaynes alone, a way of facilitating decision-making in individuals. (^Broadly speaking here, the dead in this case could be religious entities too, I guess.)

Personally, I was kind of surprised that the technique was so widely recognized, because it probably does sound crazy to most people. But, just for good measure, in the Induced After Death Communication (IADC), it is not to say that the dead are "talking back", just that the process itself, the (potentially hallucinatory) simulation of a dialogue, can be somehow therapeutic. A Jaynes-inspired theorist might say it is because the burden of the decision-making has been lifted (or is at least 'thought' to have been lifted, like a placebo effect), in turn reducing the automatic stress response related to the trauma. Or perhaps the simulation of a dialog 'warms-up' one's own cognitive functions, allowing an incipient rationalization of the trauma.
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