Rating: 
Summary: Radical, Historical Eye-Opener & World View
Review: This book contains more than just another view on history. It's definately altered my world historical view. If the thesis is accurate, then it changes scores of current teachings, trashing many erroneous religious and cultural beliefs. I found Jaynes hypothesis very convincing and am almost speechless. The last time I read a book of this sort, which I recommend reading, is Mircea Eliade's, The Myth of The Eternal Return, Cosmos and History. These two books together are amazing pieces of the historical puzzle in the development of human existence. Eliade's, Sacred and Profane is yet another.
Jayne explains this phenomenon briefly describing the human brain's layout, in it's right organizational skills and it's left motor skills (varying in individuals) and in various scans and tests on patients in hallucinatory states, in Schizophrenics and in Tourette's syndrome brain functions and then uses his theory on history with what I found as a credible analogy, detailed and extensive to back up this view. And this review, like the rest, consists only of short comments on a 469-page book that I devoured. Read this book!
This answers the long sought questions of why the Iliad so differs from the Odyssey, why the Old Testament differs in its older writings from its newer and from the New Testament. Why civilizations had the religious foundations, rites and political structures as they did. The answer Jayne produces is the two chambered or bicameral mind of our evolutionary human ancestors, where the right hemisphere lobe produced hallucinatory visual and auditory images and voices, in the human mind that lacked a self-conscious as we know it. In this he or she strictly obeyed their inner voice or multiple voices. You can see this in various accounts of the ancient bicameral minds of ancient Egypt, Assyria and the later self-conscious mind accounts of Assyria and Babylon and so forth. In this, various statues-idols, dead bodies of kings, family members and so forth were used as living images to the inner voices that were so clearly heard. And such inner voices could have been the temporary right hemisphere similiar to the ancient bicameral mind in the more recent historical visions in Faust's vision of Mestophecles, Dante's vision of Virgil, in the writings of Milton and William Blake.
For instance, the ancient Hebrew prophet Amos followed his bicameral inner voice, while the book of Ecclesiastes was clearly the work of the self-conscious "I" in human self-reflections. The scores of references Jayne's supplies are more than slight. To possibly understand the "ka" of ancient Egypt is for me truly priceless in defining their world view. To perhaps understand the visions of Moses, the invention of the soul, the reasons for divination and games of chance, the bicameral voices of Samuel in the Old Testament, the use of personal terrapins and idols; these all are consistent with Jayne's bicameral thesis and seriously profound in viewing world history.
To see the comparisons of the bicameral mind to the gradual shift of the self-conscious "I" is an amazing find in literature, which struck me as awesome. The longing for such voices in various cultures can be seen over and over again. The god's truly ceased speaking, their internal voices silenced, and were frantically attempted to revive by kings and priests creating laws and written codes to supplement this crucial loss in human evolutionary existence. The Hebrew prophets for instance, may have retained the bicameral mind, hearing what they perceived as the voice of God. While such prophets existed in small groups, their genocide was the natural selection of the stronger, which resulted in destroying their genetic pools to reproduce in favor of the self-conscious humans, which perhaps would have been the result anyway
It's also very intriguing of the idea of so-called religious and spirit possessions being that of another sort of bicameral function in the occurrence of right brain function overtaking the left conscious completely in awareness, facial contortions and motor skills, primarily in language. Not only that, but it answers the questions to the possessions of the Oracle in Delphi's trancelike state of the priestess, the Sibyls who retained respect as valid in ancient circles including the early Christian church. I'm utterly amazed at the very idea of valid Sibyls, outside of the many fantasy stories of the magical past.
What is not specifically mentioned in this book, but raised in this whole thesis, is the question of psychedelics. Are psychedelics perhaps a doorway to another dimension of life, life after death, or simply the bicameral mind? And, were the early mystical religious writings influenced from psychedelics or simply the bicameral mind? Or both? Perhaps like music, it builds up excitation on the right hemisphere of the brain, spreading to areas adjacent serving divine auditory hallucinations.
I also raise another outside question, that of what the Bon and Tibetan Buddhists call the thoughtless state of "Rigpa," or the natural state of mind and the hallucinations of the bardo of dharmata, displayed in colors, sounds and lights, and thought realms in the bardo of the becoming, the Nirmanakay. Could these states of consciousness also be some type of function of the bicameral mind?
However, what strikes me as erroneous is the idea that animals and those without language do have conceptual minds more advanced than mere perception and in this, they do not appear to have bicameral hallucinatory voices that they "must" obey.
So as another reviewer asked, can we reduce history to this possibility of bicameral mind function in the gradual breakdown from stress to the self-conscious "I," or should we view history as God's voice and actions truly involved with human affairs?
Rating: 
Summary: Critical Thinkers, BEWARE!
Review: This book is disturbingly ill-reasoned tripe. Do NOT listen to the positive reviews that have been granted this work, as they ignore the fundamental problems that are endemic in this work. Jaynes bases his thesis on some of the poorest and most circumstantial evidence I have ever come across in my years as a psychological researcher. He succumbs to many pitfalls in his search for the root of human consciousness, including the subtle adherence to Cartesian Dualism. In other words, he is basing his book on the idea that there is a homunculus in our brains that guides our actions (or in this case, guided the 'hallucinations'). This idea is as reasonable as their being a little man in our television sets that orders the programming. I believe that many of the positive reviews are a product of Jaynes' alluring writing style. He is quite capable with his word usage, but part of the trick he employs is miring his concepts in jargon in order to pull a fast one over discerning readers. The words sure are pretty, but they signify nothing. This is the kind of book that can successfully implant literally hundreds of false notions and poor scientific concepts in your mind without your recognition, on account of the level of his prose. For a radically different and faaaaaaar more reasonable view of human consciousness, read Dennett's Consciousness Explained. While I have yet to discover the PERFECT book on consciousness, Consciousness Explained is a great start in the right direction towards a valid way to look at the issues.
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