Exteriorized and Interiorized Hallucinability: Their Relation to Bicameral and Postbicameral Mentalities

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Evolution has scaffolded more sophisticated mentation (conceptual processes) on top of more primitive mentation (perceptual processes). This has occurred over millions of years. For humans, probably sometime in the late paleolithic (40,000 to 10,000 BCE), what can be called “superceptual processes,” were built upon conceptual mentation. These processes afforded individuals an even more adaptive ability to “super-perceive” and transcend environmental constraints, thereby surpassing conceptual processes.

Another term for superception is hallucinablity. This trait is grounded in a set of aptic structures constituting bicameral mentality, in which a “pilot” governs an “executor” when the individual is required to make a decision. In practical terms, this enabled individuals to fit more effectively into dominance hierarchies since subordinates could “externalize” and “project” (hallucinate) authoritative but absent superiors. Such hallucinations were extraceptions (audiovisual imagery superimposed over exteroceptions), a specific type of superception.

By the early neolithic period extraceptions were ideologized into a beliefs systems about supernatural entities, such as ancestors, gods, or divinized rulers, who were believed to govern humans through “voices” and “visions.” And then about three millennia ago, due to historicalnot genetic changesa culturally-constructed type of superceptual cognition, i.e., introception, developed. This subjective introspectable self-awareness (Jaynesian consciousness), that emerged in response to social complexity, was generated by metaphors. Rather than projected against the backdrop of the exterior environment, audiovisual imagery has for most of us become quasi-hallucinations experienced as mentally interiorized events. Jaynesian consciousness overrides the default mentality of exteriorized hallucinability, making divine commands obsolete (though vestigial extraceptions continue to linger as disordered hallucinations) and putting an “I” in charge.

The perceptionconceptionsuperception framework can be conceptualized as occurring in two scales of temporality: (1) evolutionarily (phylogenetically as a species) as well as developmentally (ontogenically as individuals).