Serial Number Peachtree 2013. 'Bicameral mind' redirects here. For the Westworld episode, see. For other uses, see. Bicameralism (the philosophy of 'two-chamberedness') is a hypothesis in that argues that the human once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be 'speaking', and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind.

The term was coined by, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3000 years ago. The hypothesis is generally not accepted by mainstream psychologists. Contents • • • • • • • • The Origin of Consciousness [ ] Jaynes uses as a metaphor to describe a mental state in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. The metaphor is based on the idea of although each half of a normal human brain is constantly communicating with the other through the. The metaphor is not meant to imply that the two halves of the bicameral brain were 'cut off' from each other but that the bicameral mind was experienced as a different, non-conscious mental schema wherein volition in the face of novel stimuli was mediated through a linguistic control mechanism and experienced as auditory verbal hallucination. The bicameral mentality would be non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so.