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(More customer reviews)I have long been intrigued by the ideas put forth in the late Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Jaynes's theorized that humans did not achieve actual consciousness until comparatively recent times (it varied from culture to culture but in the Near- and Middle-East, according to Jaynes it would have been several centuries or a millennium or so BC). And he believed that the pre-conscious state was characterized by auditory hallucinations that were generally interpreted as the voices of the gods.
Jaynes's central theory about the origin of consciousness is probably beyond proof (exactly what is consciousness is a slippery concept, but Jaynes does NOT equate it self-awareness), but he does supply a great deal of evidence about how ancient humans did believe they regularly "heard" the voices of gods, and that at some point (again, it was not the same for all cultures), that ability went away, often with devastating consequences for a culture suddenly left without seeming divine guidance.
Daniel B. Smith's "Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination" addresses the survival of the phenomenon of "hearing voices" generated unconsciously by one's own mind. Popularly, hearing such voices is viewed as evidence of mental illness (indeed, schizophrenia has become in recent decades almost defined by the phenomenon), but Smith's book demonstrates that auditory hallucination is fairly common in people who are otherwise viewed as mentally normal. Surveys have supplied varying figures for the phenomenon (understandably, many people are reluctant to admit to a circumstance which might earn them a careless label of "crazy"; I suspect that the frequency of positive responses to the survey questions depend a great deal upon just how the questions were phrased), but it appears that at least a few percent up to maybe the majority of people at some time in their lives experience auditory hallucination, perhaps only a single time, although in some cases the phenomenon can be almost continual (Smith's own father and grandfather "heard voices" much of their lives). The condition is sometimes connected with stress (participants in combat and victims of rape appear to especially prone to it) and it sometimes is associated with bursts of great creativity. Smith discusses quite a number of famous people who regularly experienced what in today's rational world would be termed auditory hallucination: Socrates, Joan of Arc, and William Blake included.
Smith's book is not a dense, statistic-laden study, but rather a fast-flowing, somewhat ancecdotal introduction to a fascinating phenomenon which at one time may have played a decisive role in human culture and continues even today to shape some people's lives.
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