or a period during the 1990s, I visited a psychoanalyst several times a week. Lying on the couch, I would find myself examining the spines of the books on his shelves for clues to the mysterious process we were engaged in. Just in line with the toe of my right shoe was a volume with a title so bizarre that I eventually felt obliged to track it down and read it. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is the sole published work by Julian Jaynes. Its striking but unverifiable argument is that our prehistoric ancestors didn’t possess managing competing desires. Instead they heard voices emanating from the different hemispheres of their brains. Out of these auditory hallucinations grew what we think of as our sense of self. The intrusive commands that invade the mind of a schizophrenic person, Jaynes suggested, are a throw-back to the divided consciousness of our ancestors.
