Julian Jaynes Society Wiki

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==== GLOSSARY OF JAYNESIAN TERMS ====


**Aptic Structures**\\ Jaynes’s term for instincts. The evolved, innate neurological basis of aptitudes that guide responses in a general way when wedded to the results of environmental, developmental experiences. Such structures make the organism apt to behave in a certain way under certain conditions.

**Archaic Authorization**\\ An aspect of the General Bicameral Paradigm. The supernatural entity to which the trance is directed or related (sometimes a person) who is accepted by the individual and his or her cultural community as an authority, and who by the collective cognitive imperative is prescribed to be responsible for controlling behavior. 

**Authorization**\\ Being granted permission to act in a certain way (or to believe something); how our actions are legitimized or justified. Having evolved from primates, we instinctively form dominance hierarchies, with a top dog allowing—authorizing—our behavior. We have moved from god/ancestor authorization (bicameral mentality) to self-authorization. Being basically social beings, we prefer forms of authorization that are in the form of persons but in principle anything, including convoluted, abstract ideologies (any political “ism”) can operate as authorization. As a species we are still seeking some form of ultimate authorization, whether in religion, science, or politics. 

**Bicameral Hallucination**\\ Originally a side effect of the evolution of language in which an individual “heard” their own voice (or that of a parental figure) issuing commands. Typically auditory (though visual, haptic, or olfactory are not unknown), hallucinated admonishments and instructions developed in complexity during the Neolithic period, reflecting cultural advances, i.e., the voices were ideologized and attributed to ancestors or gods. By around 1200 BCE hallucinations had become obsolete, unable to keep up with civilizational disruptions and sociopolitical sophistication and were replaced by consciousness.

**Bicameral Mentality/Mind**\\ From “two-chambered,” an obsolete neurocultural arrangement in which a governing, superior supernatural being (right hemisphere) issued admonishing, advisory, or commanding hallucinatory voices and/or visions to an obedient, subordinate mortal human (left hemisphere). Ancestors or gods or were believed to be the source of the voices and visions. 

**Bicameral Vestiges/Vestigial Bicamerality**\\ Relics of an earlier, preconscious mentality. Examples include spirit possession, automatic writing, channeling, a sense of presence, imaginary childhood playmates, mediumship, glossolalia, hypnosis, and audiovisual hallucinations among schizophrenics as well as in the nonclinical population.

**Cognitive Relativism**\\ A perspective that, rather than assuming psychic unity and psychic invariance, argues for psychic variability, neurocultural plasticity, and the cognitive diversity of the human species. 

**Collective Cognitive Imperative**\\ An aspect of the General Bicameral Paradigm. A belief system or a culturally agreed-on expectancy or prescription that shapes the particular form of a behavior and the roles to be acted out within that form.

**Concentration**\\ A feature of consciousness. The consciously interiorized analog of sensory perceptual attention. Focusing one’s mental efforts is intimately related to excerption as well as to other processes in subtle and complicated ways. 

**Conciliation**\\ A feature of consciousness. Assimilating or making mental content conform to a previously learned schema. It fits together objects in our mental space the same way narratization strings together elements of a story for the sake of coherence. 

**Consciousness**\\ The most misunderstood but important concept of Jaynes’s theorizing. It does not mean perception, thinking, or reasoning. A package of culturally learned mental abilities, consciousness is an analog of the real world built up by a metaphoric vocabulary. Like mathematics it allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and make decisions more effectively and so is intimately bound up with volition. The result of cultural adaptation rather than a bio-evolutionary or genetic change, this mentality supplanted bicameral mentality in response to growing sociopolitical complexity about three millennia ago. Jaynes listed key features of consciousness: concentration, conciliation, excerption, “I”, “me”, narratization, mind–space, and suppression.

**Excerption**\\ A feature of consciousness. Editing and picking out from the parade of mental content that bubbles up from the machinery of our psyche. It greatly enhances abstraction and reasoning. Excerption is not the same thing as memory, i.e., an excerpt of a thing is in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories.    

**General Bicameral Paradigm**\\ The psychosocial structure behind a class of behaviors of diminished consciousness that are partial holdovers from an earlier mentality. See collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, archaic authorization. 

**Hypnosis**\\ A vestige of bicameral mentality. A sociopsychological behavior characterized by: (1) heightened concentration and focused attention; (2) an enhanced capacity to respond to verbal commands ; and (3) the temporary suspension of the functions of consciousness, especially the belief in the analog “I." These aspects are interrelated, i.e., the weakening of consciousness (or its loss) leads to increased perceptual focus, facilitating an openness to external suggestions. That consciousness can be readily arrested indicates that subjectivity is culturally learned and historically recent, i.e., it is not biologically innate. It also evidences our predisposition to fit into superior-subordinate relations (see Authorization).  

**"I"**\\ A feature of consciousness. The observing self or self-as-subject; the active aspect of selfhood that “does things” in one’s quasi-perceptual introcosm. 

**Induction**\\ An aspect of the General Bicameral Paradigm. A ritualized, formal procedure that narrows consciousness by focusing attention on a small range of preoccupations. 

**Jaynes, Julian (1927‒97)**\\ A psychologist trained at Harvard, McGill, and Yale Universities and a popular lecturer at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990. Known for his //The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind// (1976), he was also an accomplished researcher in ethology, animal behavior, and comparative psychology. He also was a playwright who composed plays and poetry and performed in England.

**“me”**\\ A feature of consciousness. The observed self or self-as-object or object of awareness. While the mind only generates one “I” (a sort of stage director for mental content), it produces multiple “me’s” or roles in response to sociopolitical complexity and diversity, thereby increasing an individual’s capability to adapt. 

**Mind–space**\\ A feature of consciousness. The spatialization of psyche or the belief that, within the individual, an imaginary space or introcosmos exists within which an “I” moves about and observes mental content which can be edited, arranged, and re-arranged. Linguistic metaphors cavitate the body, hollowing out a space or a psychoscape “visible” only to the individual’s mind’s eye.

**Monumental Mortuary Architecture**\\ Pyramids, tumuli, and other massive structures intended to be visible from great distances. These concretely symbolized the hierarchical relation between gods, their representatives on earth, and mortals. Such death-centered architecture functioned as gigantic aides-mémoire of the theopolitical hierarchy. 

**Narratization**\\ A feature of consciousness. Imaginary spatialization allows the imagining of a linear temporality upon which one’s own self as protagonist moves. One is able to “see” one’s own personal trajectory in a well-defined storyline, affording a sense of destiny and fate. 

**//Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, The//** (1976)\\ Nominated for the National Book Award in 1978, this controversial book by Julian Jaynes argued that until about three thousand years ago humankind lacked conscious interiority as we presently experience it and were governed by audiovisual hallucinatory voices attributed to supernatural beings. 

**Paralogic**\\ Putting aside an external standard of truth (the rules of logic) and overlooking contradictions, especially when assertions about reality are verbalized by powerful authority figures. Paralogic cognition was particularly pronounced during the preconscious bicameral period. A specific instance is paralogic identification or imbuing a representation and the thing it symbolizes with the same reality or essential nature (name = person/thing, statue = god). Paralogic thinking is still evident in hypnosis and hypnoidal mental states such as being in the “flow,” dreaming, guided imagery, and autosuggestion. 

**Preconscious Hypostases**\\ Words that later come to mean something like conscious functioning. They were the assumed causes of action when other causes were no longer apparent. In a novel situation, when there are no gods, it is not a person who acts, but a hypostasis that triggers behavior. They are seats of reaction and responsibility that emerged during the transition from bicamerality to full-blown subjective consciousness.

**Struction**\\ Used by Jaynes to highlight how thinking is nonconscious. We give ourselves an “instruction” which sets in motion an automatic train of thinking; such cognition then utilizes materials—i.e., “construction”—to find a solution or complete a behavioral sequence. Jaynes distinguished set, determining tendency, and struction. A set is inclusive, being an engaged aptic structure which "in mammals can be ordered from a general limbic component of readiness to a specific cortical component of a determining tendency,” while for cognitively more complex humans the final product is often a struction. 

**Suppression**\\ A feature of consciousness. The opposite of concentration or the behavioral analog of repugnance, disgust, or turning away from what we find annoying. Suppression means to consciously force unwanted information out of our awareness, to intentionally choose to not indulge in what is ordinarily accessible even though we can be aware of it—a thought, feeling, or action. 

**Trance**\\ An aspect of the General Bicameral Paradigm. Characterized by a diminishing of consciousness or its complete loss and the erosion of the analog “I” or its disappearance, resulting in a role that is prescribed and encouraged by the spiritual community. 

**Transitional Mentalities**\\ Intermediate types of mentalities that historically developed between the periods of bicameral mentality and full-blown subjective introspectable conscious mentality that exhibited characteristics of both these mentalities.