Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

Discussion of Julian Jaynes's second hypothesis - that before the development of consciousness, humans operated under a previous mentality called the bicameral mind.
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Memento Mori
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Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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Re: Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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Interesting ideas. Your post also brings to mind comments by Walter Ong on the transition of cultures from oral to literate (Orality and Literacy) as well as the possible effects of writing on the brain (one book I've been meaning to read is The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading by David Olson).

Also be sure to check out the posts under The Mentality of Pre-Literate and Pre-Modern Peoples.
Memento Mori
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Re: Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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Re: Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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Perhaps this is somewhat off-topic, but the Garden of Eden could be a metaphor for the change from the bicameral mind to full Jaynesian Consciousness - the Garden of Eden could be Earth before agricultural-based civilizations.
Yes, however this may be a case of one of Jaynes's ideas bubbling up from your subconscious mind and then thinking it is new. It happens to me all the time... half the time I can't remember what I've read somewhere years ago and what ideas are my own.

See Jaynes p. 444:

"It is, I think, yet another characteristic of the religious form which such movements have taken over in the emptiness caused by the retreat of ecclesiastical certainty - that of a supposed fall of man.

"This strange and, I think, spurious idea of a lost innocence takes its mark precisely in the breakdown of the bicameral mind as the first great conscious narratization of mankind. It is the song of the Assyrian psalms, the wail of the Hebrew hymns, the myth of Eden, the fundamental fall from divine favor that is the source and first premise of the world's great religions. I interpret this hypothetical fall of man to be the groping of newly conscious men to narratize what has happened to them, the loss of divine voices and assurances in a chaos of human directive and selfish privacies...."

Also on p. 299:

"The serpent promises that 'you shall be like the [gods] themselves, knowing good and evil' (Genesis 3:5), qualities that only subjective conscious man is capable of."
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Re: Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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Re: Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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I've heard of the idea of wheat being associated with auditory hallucinations before but it's been several years and at the moment I don't remember where.

I've heard of treatments involving high doses of vitamin B -- have you been able to find studies of a non-wheat diet as a possible treatment for schizophrenia? I would imagine if it has been done at all it would be in the content of "alternative therapy," as most doctors, heavily influenced by drug company reps, tend to favor expensive pharmaceuticals.

Interesting related article:

Gluten 'link' with schizophrenia
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Re: Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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Re: Did Smaller Groups of Hunter-Gatherers Remain Bicameral?

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