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.
"In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes tells us something interesting about these governing gods: 'Throughout Mesopotamia, from the earliest times of Sumer and Akkad, all lands were owned by gods and men were their slaves.'"
"A provocative treatise on this is Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Though hotly debated, it was internationally acclaimed and called "As startling ... as Darwin's dissolution of species, as Enstein's reigning of light,' by Richard Rhodes."
"... A somewhat similar conclusion was reached by Julian Jaynes in his rendition of the 'bicameral mind' with the 'voices of gods' emanating from the right hemisphere to guide our ancestors as they navigated novel situations three millennia ago."
"In his remarkable cultural-neuropsychological essay, Julian Jaynes advances the idea that internally generated executive commands were mistaken by primitive humans for externally originated voices of gods."
"As Julian Jaynes forcefully observed: 'Culture ... is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is a fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded ina different direction.'"
"Julian Jaynes, in his seminal book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, indicates to us that consciousness is based on language, rather than having existed before language."
Mormonism and the American Experience
Klaus J. Hansen
"In addition to the similarities between Hegel and the patristic tradition (represented by Augustine in our discussion), Hegel and late classical Idealism (exemplified by Plotinus), etc. we might mention here the evolutionary psychology of Julian Jaynes, who saw the emergence of consciousness as, essentially, something that happened with the Greeks."
"Julian Jaynes speaks of such voices in his controversial book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes says that what we call thoughts today were once heard as actual voices by early peoples."
"What emerged, psychologist Julian Jaynes says, was the greatest of all cultural steps, the transformation of wandering tribes of twenty people to the settling of several hundred in the first town."
"Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes once wrote of scientisms or clusters of scientific ideas that 'almost surprise themsevles into creeds of belief.'"
"In short, the gods play the role of consciousness. This is the finding of Julian Jaynes, the Princeton psychologist who has made what is thus far the boldest proposal for explaining the slow emergence of the 'I' that is at the center of ... modern consciousness."
"Certainly the boldest claim and most ingeniously argued case for such a development is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which he argues that consciousness of the familiar, typically human sort is a very recent phenomenon, whose onset is datable in historical times, not biological eons."
"In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a curious and ingenious study of this phenomenon, Julian Jaynes offers the hypothesis that in the time before a traumatic series of events in the fifteenth-century BC, the human mind operated very differently from its workings today."
"Professor Jaynes at Princeton, who exhaustively analyed the language of the Iliad that refers to mental and emotional functions, summed up his findings as follows..."
