Below is a sampling of the hundreds of books that cite or refer to Julian Jaynes, showing the wide-ranging, ongoing influence of his theory — some of them may surprise you. Inclusion in this list does not constitute an endorsement by the Julian Jaynes Society.
"Throughout early human history, Jaynes posits, people uniformly believed that the gods controlled the chamber of the mind in which new thoughts occur."
"When Julian Jaynes presents his engaging thesis about the evolution of consciousness, he is referring to consciousness post-language, not to core consciousness as I described it."
"According to Jaynes, in prehistoric times the brain was bicameral, not bilateral. The LH was not the so-called dominant one that it is in the modern brain."
"In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes suggests a theory for the source of poetry as an outgrowth of man's 'nostalgia for the absolute' in a world from which the divine (and the oracles which are thought to issue messages from the divine, from God) has withdrawn."
"Jaynes notes that many people perceive their own thought processes as a kind of dialogue beween the 'self' and another internal protagonist inside the head. Nowadays we understand that both 'voices' are our own — or if we don't we are treated as mentally ill."
"The accomplishment of that task, warned psychologists Julian Jaynes and Mavin Bressler as long ago as 1971, will not be easy, however desirable it undoubtedly is."
"As Julian Jaynes argues in his classic The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, even consciousness itself may be a relatively recent, culturally inspired phenomenon."
"Julian Jaynes has suggested that at one time a much freer communication existed between the hemispheres in human beings, with the right brain being experienced as a hallucinated voice, ascribed to a god."
"Dreams in which the dreamer reports that a being comes to the place where the dreamer is sleeping and delivers a message (i.e., the dreams of Gudea, Thutmose IV, Jacob, and Solomon, to name a few) lend themselves to an interesting discussion of Jaynes's conception of the bicameral mind."
"One of the more plausible arguments made by Julian Jaynes ... was that this riotous explosion of different ways of passing the buck to an external deciding-gadget was a manifestation of human beings' growing difficultties with self-control, as human groups became larger and more complicated."
"The psychologist Julian Jaynes has argued persuasively that its capacities for self-exhortation and self-reminding are a prerequisite for the sorts of elaborated and long-term bouts of self-control without which agriculture, building projects, and other civilized and civilizing activities could not be organized."
"Darwin was convinced that language was the prerequisite for 'long trains of thought,' and this claim has been differently supported by several recent theorists, especially Julian Jaynes and Howard Margolis."
"The discussion of making things to think with in chapters 5 and 6 was inspired not just by Richard Gregory's Mind in Science and Andy Clark and Annette Karmiloff-Smith's 1993 paper, but also by Karmiloff-Smith's book Beyond Modularity, and by several earlier books that have been fruitfully rattling around in my brain for years: Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind... "
"According to Julian Jaynes, thymos, or thumos, as it is sometimes spelled, together with six other terms variously translated as mind, spirit, or soul, was a key ingredient in the evolution of Homeric consciousenss."
"The bold and extraordinary theory of Julian Jaynes traces the origin as well as the present-day problems of consciousness to a breakdown in the double structure of our minds."
"Think of a familiar story and try to retell it by singing it. Julian Jaynes suggests this exercise in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."
"A well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Kohler, 'We often talk about the three B's, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.' — Julian Jaynes"
"The historic meeting of Cortez and Montezuma ... illustrates an improbable encounter of two disparate personalities and civilizations, one literate, controlled by rigid left hemispheric programming and ideologies, the other by what Julian Jaynes called the bicameral mind, presided over by the right hemisphere, the sounding board of the hallucinatory voices of dead kings and immortal gods."
"In his fine book ... Julian Jaynes has informed us that our most meaningful experience of life is not derived from our analytical and logical consciousness. That is important left-brain work. However, the meaningfulness of our lives derives mostly from our right brain, in which we experience our emotional, aesthetic, and intuitive meanings."
"In 1976 Julian Jaynes, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, published a wonderfully intriguing and evocative book with a long and complicated title, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."
"These women were operating and communicating through a spiritual 'ground of being' well described by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."
"The scholar Julian Jaynes postulated that in biblical times, the human brain itself was in the process of evolving, so that what people now know as intuitive insights might have been experienced as an outer 'voice of God.'"
"Julian Jaynes provided perhaps the best analogy when, describing consciousness, he suggested that what we are aware of is like a flashlight in a dark room. We can only see what is illuminated at any given instant; nothing else exists."
"My approach to self-consciousness here can be fruitfully compared with Julian Jaynes' theory of the origin of (what he refers to simply as) consciousness — a theory he presents in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes ... recognizes the importance of langauge (and even of metaphor) in the advent of consciousness in human history and in each child's ability to become self-conscious."
"As Julian Jaynes points out, our way of thinking would be occurring after the sea change in the structure of consciousness and its analytic capabilities that has occurred over millennia."
"On this view, proposed by Julian Jaynes, Michael Persinger, and others, the experience of receiving instruction from the muse lies somewhere on the spectrum ranging from the normal inner voice to the completely ego-alien voices in auditory hallucinations and, perhaps, religious experience."
"Experiences in infancy and early childhood, before the emergence of what Julian Jaynes calls the 'narratizing consciousness' makes conscious memory possible, give powerful form to our knowing of self, others and our forming of 'the world.'"
"As described by Julian Jaynes in his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the subjects were asked to lift two (small) weights in front of them an decide which one was heavier."
