![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Like Jaynes, McGilchrist interprets human history as an unresolved quarrel between the left and right hemispheres. That primordial conflict surfaces anew in The Master and His Emissary, a hugely ambitious work by Iain McGilchrist, a former fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, who studied literature before becoming a medical doctor. Thinkers in the field readily took up his central vision of human nature as a pitched battle between the two halves of the brain, each operating with a distinct set of desires and talents. While Jaynes’s speculative theory remains just that-an intriguing idea with little supporting evidence-it left a lasting mark on psychology. This led, in Jaynes’s view, to the invention of a pantheon of bickering gods, which eventually morphed into an acute consciousness of the self. When the articulate left hemisphere first gains access to the dreamlike impressions of the right, a flood of new thoughts needs to be explained. Jaynes argued that these voices were emanations from inside the mind, triggered by the “breakdown” of the wall between the brain hemispheres. His evidence consisted mainly of the Iliad, which describes its heroes as listening to the voices of the gods as they come down from Mount Olympus. In 1976, the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes published the provocative Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which argued that human self-awareness was invented in ancient Greece. ![]()
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