Born in West Newton, Massachusetts in 1927, Julian Jaynes did his undergraduate work at Harvard and McGill Universities and received both his master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from Yale University. He was an accomplished researcher and made important contributions to ethology, animal behavior, and comparative psychology. He is best known for his ground-breaking The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).

From 1966 to 1995 Jaynes taught at Princeton University where he was a popular lecturer, especially well-known for his class on consciousness. In addition, he lectured widely and held numerous positions as Visiting Lecturer and Scholar in Residence in departments of philosophy, English, and archaeology and in numerous medical schools. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Rhode Island College in 1979 and another from Elizabethtown College in 1985. Jaynes was an associate editor of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and on the editorial board of the Journal of Mind and Behavior.

Besides devoting himself to science, Jaynes possessed a great interest in art and on two occasions spent a number of years as an actor and playwright in England, composing plays and poetry and performing in England during the 1950s. His artistic side no doubt allowed him to bridge the chasm that separates the “hard” natural sciences from the so-called “soft” social sciences and humanities. Such a divide prevents researchers from appreciating how a comprehensive, accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness can be found outside the laboratory in the historical record. This insight allowed him to realize that subjective introspectable self-awareness is as much a recent historical-cultural development as it is an evolutionary, neurological phenomenon.

Jaynes passed away in 1997.

See also: About Julian Jaynes