(Man in Animal)
L.S. Vygotsky noted that none of the specifically human qualities, such as speech, logical thinking, creative imagination, volitional self-regulation, etc. cannot arise independently without special education through the ripening of certain organic inclinations. In the 16th century, Emperor Abkar of India isolated a group of children after birth to see if they could learn to speak without human interaction. It turned out that the children were developing well physically, but they did not speak. Raising a child as a human being, parents and other adults teach him to move like a human being and accustom him to articulate human speech.The little man begins to communicate just like primates, using holophrases- individual sounds that mean something. By two years of age, holophrases become more accurate and paired holophrases appear. At this age, the child speaks about 300 words, but remains an unconscious animal. Experienced psychologists manage to bring chimpanzees to this stage.
Subsequently, the child quickly moves on to constructing sentences, masters the first thousand words, and begins to use symbolic labels. His actions gradually give way to words. Unfortunately, in the psychology of child development, systematic studies of the child’s mastering of methods of speech mobility in time and space, which are an indispensable condition for the emergence of consciousness, are rarely carried out. Usually it is only fixed when he learns to distinguish between yesterday and today, here and there. L.S. Vygotsky drew attention to the fact that “no one knew a child under 3 years old who would have the desire to do something in a few days.”
For some reason, linguists are also little interested in linguistic representations of time. They are more interested in conceptual structures in the languages of different peoples. A little Filipino is forced to verbally distinguish 92 types and states of rice, an Eskimo child distinguishes between a dozen different types of snow with their different names. In the Indonesian language, the same word means brother and sister, and in the Hungarian language there are four words for younger brother, older brother, younger sister, older sister. But linguists and psychologists practically do not study the dynamics of improving children’s verbal ideas about time and space.
In the development of articulate speech, significant shortcomings in the operative memory of a person, especially a small child, manifest themselves to a large extent. Correct articulation is achieved only after the child repeats each word he masters many, many times, which is gradually pronounced more and more accurately. In order to avoid the development of dyslalia and burr in the child, educators need to constantly correct his pronunciation. In this respect, we are significantly inferior to many species of birds, the males of which are capable of perfectly imitating very complex sound sequences. A one-year-old male black wheatear absolutely accurately imitates the voice of any bird, even when hearing it for the first time. An attempt to imitate the mother's speech in a human child is observed only during the first few months of his life. Only in the second year do the baby’s brain areas directly related to the meaningful development of speech mature.
Even calling himself in the third year of life with the pronoun “I,” the child still does not distinguish himself from the world around him. L.I. Bozhovich (1979) noted that at this age the child continues to remain for himself, as it were, an external “object”. By imposing on him their ideas about space and time, educators reach a state when he begins to notice that only one object invariably remains “here” and “there” and “today” and “yesterday”. This object is himself. The rest appear and disappear, but he invariably remains in the observable world.
From this moment, a person begins to develop self-awareness. At first, through verbal communication, binary ideas about space-time relationships are instilled in him: above - below, left - right, inside - outside, earlier - later. Gradually, the child gets used to considering space and time as objectively existing in nature.
His mastery of human concepts of space and time lays the foundation for the formation of his declarative memory. Verbal communication with his parents and fellow tribesmen forces him to remember the last time he used a shovel and where he then put it. Everything that the child remembered before the emergence of this new type of memory entered the animal natural memory, from which voluntary retrieval of memories is impossible. I.M. Sechenov (1873), who visually compared the declarative memory of an adult with a well-organized library, could not find an explanation for the complete absence of early childhood memories in it. His hypothesis of childhood memory in the form of a poorly organized fragmented library was broken by the impossibility of explaining “how a child who knew his early deceased mother for two years, who saw her every day all this time, subsequently forgets her without a trace, and in adulthood remembers her for many years facial features of a stranger with whom I spent an hour." For many psychologists, this mystery has remained unclear to this day, because... they do not know that declarative memory appears in a normally raised child no earlier than the third year of his life, so everything that happened earlier could not get into it.
Even Aristotle, in his treatise “On the Soul,” noted the duality of man, which includes the animal and rational souls (memories), separated from each other. It is not known whether Aristotle knew that a child is not born with rational memory and consciousness based on it, that they need to be educated, including verbal education. In 1703, the French “History of the Academy of Sciences” described an incident that occurred with a young man who was deaf from birth. He suddenly regained his hearing, and after a while, when he could speak, he was asked how he had felt before. The young man defined his previous existence as plant life.
Consciousness could only arise in pack animals that constantly communicate with each other and are forced to understand their fellow tribesmen. Lonely predators, even with the highest mental abilities, can neither acquire consciousness nor pass it on to their offspring. How F. Redi’s principle was formulated long ago in biology (1661)- the living comes only from the living, and in psychology, all observations and special experiments invariably confirm that consciousness arises only under the influence of another consciousness. For this reason, the god of any monoreligion, the most intelligent and omnipotent, in principle cannot have self-awareness. N.A. Berdyaev (1931) drew attention to the fact that “theological thought has never thought about the psychology of God.” This may be why the attention of theologians has not been drawn to the question of the mechanisms of the emergence and functioning of God’s self-consciousness. Only herd animals, people and gods have an innate instinct to imitate “their own,” which is necessary for the emergence of consciousness. The Olympian gods of Ancient Greece lived interestingly in myths, communicated, loved and hated, so they turned out to be, although fictional, conscious beings.
Bonobos are considered the most humanoid chimpanzees. They have thickened red lips, in females- clearly defined mammary glands. Bonobos are characterized by a tendency to walk upright, a complex social organization and increased sexuality. They have a kind of language, consisting of hundreds of sound signals for various purposes and several dozen gestures. In terms of volume, this is not so far from the language of primitive human tribes, which still get by with a few hundred words. However, an adult representative of the most primitive tribe of people knows what “yesterday” is and therefore has declarative memory and consciousness, while bonobos use only natural memory and live “here and now.”
Leibniz wrote: “The main purpose of language is to arouse in the soul of the one who listens to me an idea similar to mine.” He did not notice that the “language” of the magpie’s chirping also falls under this formulation: a flock of magpies is experiencing “the same idea” (fear) that their prisoner was experiencing.the duty officer boomed. Human language differs from animal signals and commands in that it does not require a “here and now” reaction. People are able to tell other people what awaits them the day after tomorrow and where it can happen.
With the emergence of declarative memory among primitive people, their religious ideas are closely related. Once a person learns to remember past events, he becomeshungers with strange facts: yesterday he participated in the burial of his obviously dead mother, and tonight he communicated with her as if she were alive. At first, such phenomena frighten the savages, but then the priests inevitably come to the idea of the afterlife of the immortal soul.
The idea that a person is visited by the souls of the dead in a dream, or that his own soul leaves the body and travels in a dream, was preserved for a long time among many peoples.Sometimes a living person was held responsible for those “his” actions that were dreamed by another person. Neanderthals were, apparently, the last of the pre-humans (or a dead-end side branch of human evolution) who had no concepts of time and did not possess declarative memory. This is evidenced by the fact that in their burials no weapons or objects of labor were found that could be “useful” to the soul of the deceased. It took the collective work of the minds of many generations of thinkers so that in the 1st century BC. Titus Lucretius Carus came to a reasonable conclusion: “The spirit is incapable of being outside the body and outside of man.” Modern relapses of the primitive belief in the possibility of the soul’s life outside the body come from laziness, from people’s dislike for the process of thinking.
Language is as ancient as consciousness. Animals do not have consciousness in the human sense of the word. They do not have a language equal to human. The little that animals have to communicate to each other can be communicated without speech. Many animals have vocal organs, facial and gestural signaling methods, but all these means have a fundamental difference from human speech: they serve as an expression of a subjective state caused by hunger, thirst, fear, etc., either by simple instructions or a call for joint action or a warning about danger, etc. Animal language never achieves in its function the act of positing some abstract meaning as an object of communication. The content of animal communication is always the current situation. Human speech broke away from its situational nature, and this was a “revolution” that gave birth to human consciousness and made the content of speech ideal, indirectly reproducing objective reality.
Mimics are gestural and sound means of mutual communication, primarily of higher animals, and served as a biological prerequisite for the formation of human speech. The development of labor contributed to the close unity of members of society. People felt the need to say something to each other. The need created an organ - the corresponding structure of the brain and peripheral speech apparatus. The physiological mechanism of speech formation is conditioned reflex: sounds pronounced in a given situation, accompanied by gestures, were combined in the brain with corresponding objects and actions, and then with ideal phenomena of consciousness. Sound has transformed from an expression of emotions into a means of denoting images of objects, their properties and relationships.
The essence of language is revealed in its dual function: to serve as a means of communication and an instrument of thinking. Language is a system of meaningful meaningful forms. Consciousness and language form a unity: in their existence they presuppose each other as internally; logically formed ideal content presupposes its external material form. Language is the immediate reality of thought, consciousness. He participates in the process of mental activity as its sensory basis or instrument. Consciousness is not only revealed, but also formed with the help of language. The connection between consciousness and language is not mechanical, but organic. They cannot be separated from each other without destroying both.
Through language there is a transition from perceptions and ideas to concepts, and the process of operating with concepts occurs. In speech, a person records his thoughts and feelings and, thanks to this, has the opportunity to subject them to analysis as an ideal object lying outside him. By expressing his thoughts and feelings, a person understands them more clearly himself. He understands himself only by testing the clarity of his words on others. Language and consciousness are one. In this unity, the defining side is consciousness, thinking: being a reflection of reality, it “sculpts” forms and dictates the laws of its linguistic existence. Through consciousness and practice, the structure of language ultimately expresses, albeit in a modified form, the structure of being. But unity is not identity. Both sides of this unity are different from each other: consciousness reflects reality, and language designates it and expresses it in thought. Speech is not thinking, otherwise the greatest talkers would have to be the greatest thinkers.
Language and consciousness form a contradictory unity. Language influences consciousness: its historically established norms, specific to each nation, highlight different features in the same object. However, the dependence of thinking on language is not absolute. Thinking is determined mainly by its connections with reality, while language can only partially modify the form and style of thinking.
The state of the problem of the relationship between thinking and language is still far from complete; it still contains many interesting aspects for research.
The process of human formation was a process of decomposition of the instinctive basis of the animal psyche and the formation of mechanisms of conscious activity. Consciousness could only arise as a function a highly organized brain, which was formed under the influence of work and speech. The beginnings of labor are characteristic of Australopithecines, but labor became a distinctive feature of their successors - Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus - the first people on earth who laid the foundation for the manufacture of tools and the conquest of fire. Neanderthal man made significant progress in the manufacture and use of tools, increased their range and involved new applied materials in production (he learned to make stone knives, bone needles, built dwellings, etc.). Finally, a modern type of man- a reasonable man, raised the level of technology to even greater heights.
The decisive role of labor operations in the formation of man and his consciousness received its material fixed expression in the fact that the brain as an organ of consciousness developed simultaneously with the development of the hand as an organ of labor. It was the hand, as a “perceiving” (directly in contact with objects) organ, that gave instructive lessons to other sense organs, such as the eye. The actively working hand taught the head to think before it itself became an instrument for executing the will of the head, which deliberately plans practical actions. In the process of development of work activity, tactile sensations were refined and enriched. The logic of practical actions was fixed in the head and turned into the logic of thinking: a person learned to think. And before starting the task, he could already mentally imagine its result, the method of implementation, and the means of achieving this result.
Together with the emergence of labor, man and human society were formed. Collective work presupposes the cooperation of people and thereby at least an elementary division of labor actions between its participants. The division of labor efforts is possible only if the participants somehow comprehend the connection of their actions with the actions of other members of the team and thereby with the achievement of the final goal. The formation of human consciousness is associated with the emergence of social relations, which required the subordination of the individual’s life to a socially fixed system of needs, responsibilities, historically established customs and mores.
Language is as ancient as consciousness . Animals do not have consciousness in the human sense of the word. They do not have a language equal to human. The little that animals have to communicate to each other can be communicated without speech. Many animals have vocal organs, facial and gestural signaling methods, but all these means have a fundamental difference from human speech: they serve as an expression of a subjective state caused by hunger, thirst, fear, etc., either by simple instructions or a call for joint action or a warning about danger, etc.
Animal language never achieves in its function the act of positing some abstract meaning as an object of communication. The content of animal communication is always the current situation. Human speech broke away from its situational nature, and it was a “revolution” that gave birth to human consciousness and made the content of speech ideal, indirectly reproducing objective reality. Seminar classes in philosophy: Textbook. Ed. K.M. Nikonova. - M.: Higher School, 1999.
Mimic-gestural and sound means of mutual communication of higher animals and served as a biological prerequisite for the formation of human speech. The development of labor contributed to the close unity of members of society. People felt the need to say something to each other. The need created an organ - the corresponding structure of the brain and peripheral speech apparatus. The physiological mechanism of speech formation is conditioned reflex: sounds pronounced in a given situation, accompanied by gestures, were combined in the brain with corresponding objects and actions, and then with ideal phenomena of consciousness. Sound has transformed from an expression of emotions into a means of denoting images of objects, their properties and relationships.
The essence of language is revealed in its twofold function: serve as a means of communication and an instrument of thinking. Language is a system of meaningful meaningful forms. Language is the immediate reality of thought, consciousness. He participates in the process of mental activity as its sensory basis or instrument. Consciousness is not only revealed, but also formed with the help of language. The connection between consciousness and language is not mechanical, but organic. They cannot be separated from each other without destroying both.
Through language there is a transition from perceptions and ideas to concepts, and the process of operating with concepts occurs. By expressing his thoughts and feelings, a person understands them more clearly himself. Language and consciousness are one. Both sides of this unity are different from each other: consciousness reflects reality, and language designates it and expresses it in thought. Speech is not thinking, otherwise the greatest talkers would have to be the greatest thinkers.
Language and consciousness form a contradictory unity. Language influences consciousness: its historically established norms, specific to each nation, highlight different features in the same object. Thinking is determined by its connections with reality, while language can only partially modify the form and style of thinking.
Since man is a social being, the development of his consciousness is impossible without interaction and communication with other people.
Human consciousness is formed in the process of interpersonal communication and joint activities of people. The word “communication” itself, by its etymology, implies the presence of a certain general system for transmitting information from person to person. In the process of phylogenesis, such a system was formed - the human speech. It is thanks to speech that the content of one person’s consciousness becomes accessible to other people.
Psychology considers speech primarily as one of the highest mental functions of a person, in the entire range of its relationships with other mental functions - thinking, emotions, memory, etc. In the context of the activity approach, domestic psychology considers speech as speech activity. It acts as an integral act of activity if it has its own motivation, which cannot be realized by any other types of activity or in the form of separate speech acts that accompany any other human activity. An example for comparison is the speech of a person talking on the phone for the sake of actual communication and the speech of a train dispatcher in the process of coordinating the movement of many trains.
The structure of speech activity coincides with the structure of any other activity. It includes motivation, planning, implementation and control. Unlike objective activity, here these phases can be very compressed in time. Sometimes, in situations of emotional arousal, the planning phase of speech activity is practically absent. This is what they say about such cases: “First he said, and then he thought.”
Speech is directly related to tongue, which is a tool for its mediation. It is a system of signs that convey information both verbally and in writing. Language is a means of communication and abstract thinking. For oral speech, language is, first of all, words and ways of forming them. For writing - the rules for combining words into phrases and sentences, combining sentences into complex sentences, types of phrases and sentences, as well as punctuation and spelling - the systems that form spelling.
The word as a sign that determines human communication and thinking has such an objective property as meaning, that is, a relationship to an object designated in reality, regardless of how it is represented in the mind of the subject. In addition to its objective meaning, the word has a personal meaning. It is determined by the place a given object or phenomenon occupies in a person’s life and consciousness, as well as by the person’s attitude towards this object. Thus, words are a fusion of sensory and semantic (semantic) content.
A special branch of psychology, psychosemantics, studies the process of functioning of an individual system of meanings.
Based on the above, we can summarize that language has three main functions. Firstly, it is a means of communication, secondly, a means of accumulating, transmitting and assimilating socio-historical experience, thirdly, language is a tool of intellectual activity and, in general, the functioning of basic mental processes: perception, memory, thinking, imagination.
Performing the first function, language allows the subject of communication to have a direct or indirect impact on the behavior and activities of the interlocutor. Direct influence is carried out when the interlocutor is directly told what he must do, indirect - when he is given the information necessary for his activities. The second function is due to the fact that language serves as a means of encoding information about the studied properties of objects and phenomena. Through language, information about the world around us and man himself, obtained by previous generations, becomes the property of subsequent generations. The third function is due to the fact that it is through language that a person carries out any conscious mental activity.
Speech and language are interpenetrating systems. They are both one and different at the same time. They are two aspects of a single process. Speech is, first of all, the activity of communication - the transmission of objective or subjective information. Thus, speech is language in action. Languages that are not used in spoken language are called dead (for example, Latin).
It should be noted an interesting feature of the anatomical and physiological basis of language and speech. Speech has central and peripheral apparatuses. Peripheral apparatuses – larynx, tongue (in the anatomical sense), vocal cords. In humans, they are developed so much that they can not only pronounce words, but also give them different intonation, different expressions, etc. For example, students of theater universities are well aware that the same phrase, like “Your tea, madam” can be pronounced with a dozen different intonations, which will give these words completely different shades of meaning.
Well, the central organs, or “speech centers,” are an even more mysterious thing. Among peoples who build their speech on the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic and similar writing systems, the sections of the left, “rational” hemisphere of the brain are responsible for speech. And among peoples whose written language is hieroglyphs, the language is “managed” by the right, “figurative” hemisphere. This phenomenon is remarkable and has not yet been fully studied by psychologists.
1. Significative (or nominative). This is the function of “naming”; its essence is to give names, to designate objects of both the surrounding reality and internal processes inherent in a person. Thus, mutual understanding in the process of human communication is based on the unity of designation of objects and phenomena by both the speaker and the recipient of speech. In this way, human communication differs from the communication of animals, which do not have a notation system, as well as abstract thinking. Their communication occurs at the level of sound or other signals that directly affect reflexes.
One more feature of the significative function should also be noted. It is this that determines the fact that people understand each other, despite the diversity of languages, because the essence of signification (designation) is the same for all people.
2. Generalization function. It consists in isolating the essential characteristics of objects and combining them into groups, since a word denotes not only a single, given object, but a whole group of similar objects and is always the bearer of their essential characteristics. This function is directly related to thinking.
3. Communication function ensures the transfer of knowledge, relationships, feelings and is accordingly divided into informational, volitional and expressive. This function acts primarily as external speech behavior aimed at contacts with other people, or written speech (books, letters, etc.). This distinguishes it from the first two functions, which are related to internal mental processes.
The information aspect of the communicative function is closely related to the first two functions - it manifests itself in the exchange of information between the subjects of communication.
The expressive aspect of speech helps convey the speaker's feelings and attitudes both towards the message being conveyed and towards the interlocutor or audience.
The volitional aspect of the communicative function is the ability, with the help of speech activity, to influence the interlocutor or audience, as a result of which the latter perceive the opinion, attitude of the speaker, and to a certain extent obey his will. It is about people endowed with strong volitional ability that they are usually said to be endowed with charisma.
Next we will consider types of speech and their distinctive features. There are different types of speech: speech of gestures and sound speech, written and oral, external and internal. The main division is internal and external speech. External speech is divided into written and oral. Oral speech, in turn, includes monologue and dialogic speech.
Let's look at each type in more detail.
Internal speech is not aimed at direct communication between a person and other people. This is silent speech, proceeding more like a thought process. There are two varieties of it: inner speech itself and internal pronunciation. Pronunciation is a fully developed speech. This is simply a mental repetition of some texts (for example, the text of an upcoming report, a speech, a poem memorized by heart, etc., in conditions where such repetition out loud is inconvenient).
Inner speech itself is curtailed. It is more like a summary containing the main, meaningful parts of a sentence (sometimes it is only one predicate or subject). Inner speech is the basis for planning both practical and theoretical activities. Therefore, despite its fragmentation and fragmentation, it excludes inaccuracies in the perception of the situation. Ontogenetically, inner speech is the internalization of external speech and serves as the basis for the development of verbal-logical thinking.
External speech can be oral and written. Oral speech is primarily auditory. But the meaning of gestures cannot be excluded. They can accompany sound speech and act as independent signs. In this case, we do not mean sign language as a separate independent language and a full-fledged communication system. We're talking about gesturing in the everyday sense. Individual gestures can be the equivalent of words and sometimes even convey quite complex meanings in conditions where auditory speech cannot be used. Communication using gestures and facial expressions refers to a non-verbal type of communication, in contrast to verbal (verbal). Sign language is varied. In different countries, the same gesture can have different meanings, such as, for example, the well-known nod or shake of the head among Russians and Bulgarians - in our country, a nod means agreement, and in Bulgaria - denial, and vice versa - our negative wave of the head in them means "yes". In any of its manifestations, oral speech is, as a rule, a speech-conversation, direct contact with an interlocutor or audience.
Written speech has a different function. It is often designed to convey more abstract content that is not related to a specific situation and a specific interlocutor (with the possible exception of personal letters that are addressed to a specific person, but even here there is a delay in time and, consequently, a change in the situation). Although it should be noted that time makes its own adjustments - the epistolary genre is dying out, but network communication is developing powerfully.
As already mentioned, spoken language has two forms. The dialogical form is more common. Dialogue by definition is direct communication between two or more people, the exchange of meaningful remarks and information of a cognitive or emotional nature between its participants. Dialogical speech is different in that it is speech supported by interlocutors; it can include questions, answers, and can respond to changes in the situation. For example, you and your classmates are talking about your recent trip to the sea. The interlocutors silently listen to you, as if you were reading a report to them: they ask about your impressions, express their opinions. During this conversation, you reach the library - the speech changes depending on the situation: a more restrained tone, the speech becomes quieter, and then the topic changes completely - the conversation is already about which textbooks you need to take notes on.
Monologue speech is a completely different manifestation of oral speech. Here there is a relatively long sequential presentation of a certain system of thoughts and knowledge by one person. Giving a lecture to a large audience (when there is no direct contact between the lecturer and the audience) is a typical example. Or an actor’s monologue, which is not interrupted by either the partners’ remarks or, of course, questions from the audience. Monologue speech also implies communication, but this communication is of a completely different nature. For example, incorrect construction of phrases is unacceptable for a monologue. In addition, special requirements arise for the tempo of speech, the volume of its sound, and intelligibility. The meaningful aspect of a monologue must be combined with its expressiveness, which is achieved by linguistic means, facial expressions, gestures, and voice intonations.
Returning to the characteristics of written speech, it should be noted that it is based on monologue speech, since it lacks direct feedback from the interlocutor. But unlike monologue oral speech, written speech is very limited in the means of expression, so the main aspects in it are the content side and literacy of presentation.
In addition to the listed types of speech, some psychologists also distinguish active and passive speech. They can exist in both oral and written form. Active speech is a process of transmitting information. The activity itself lies in the need for speech production. Passive speech is the process of perceiving information contained in someone’s active speech. This can be listening, adequate understanding, and in the case of perception of written speech, reading, repeating to oneself.
Development of speech in ontogenesis has two main stages. The first is the learning stage, when the child masters speech in the process of communication. After all, knowledge of one’s native language at the initial stage is not the result of special educational activities. Adults, of course, organize the learning process in a certain way - they explain to the child the meaning of words, their correct pronunciation, the correct combination. This is how oral speech is acquired. The second stage is learning to write. Educational activities are already involved here. The child masters the syntactic norms of the language, spelling rules, and punctuation. But all this happens on the basis of his practical mastery of oral speech. Thus, at the second stage of speech development, educational work on speech refines what arose independently of it and before it.
It should be noted that for true mastery of a word, it is necessary that it not only be memorized, but enter into the child’s life and be actively used by him in the process of activity. Therefore, before the first stage, there is still a preparatory, passive stage of speech development. The baby listens to the speech of adults, begins to compare words with objects and people, and at the same time masters his vocal apparatus. Those words that he already understands at this preparatory stage cannot be considered truly mastered. The actual development of speech begins from the moment the child uses the vocabulary accumulated at the passive stage to designate objects that he manipulates, to address close people, etc.
There are different views on the formation of the process of speech understanding. For example, representatives of associative psychology believe that understanding the meaning of words is based on associative connections. Reflexologists spoke about the conditioned-reflex nature of such understanding. Both are right to a certain extent - if we consider the early, initial moments of a child’s understanding of words, moments related to the preparatory stage. But it should be taken into account that the described mechanisms of understanding words do not yet constitute mastery of speech in the full sense. Real speech arises only when the connection between a word and its meaning ceases to be associative or conditioned reflex, but becomes semantic.
The role of language in the origin of consciousness
According to Julian Jaynes (1976), the unity of personality that Gazzaniga wrote about is a surprisingly recent development in the history of the human race. Jaynes believes that consciousness appeared in humans only about three thousand years ago, when writing appeared and culture became more complex. Until that time, man had what Jaynes calls a “bicameral mind.” This means that the two hemispheres of the brain acted to some extent independently of each other. Indeed, he says, speech may be to some extent generated by the right hemisphere and perceived by the left. People could interpret this speech as the voice of God. Jaynes finds indications of the bicameral nature of the mind even in the Iliad, an ancient Greek epic that was passed down orally for hundreds of years before it was finally written down. Jaynes writes:
The characters in the Iliad do not sit down to think about what to do. They do not have conscious thought... and, of course, lack self-awareness. It's hard for us to even understand what it was like. When Agamemnon, the king of men, stole his beloved from Achilles, one of the gods grabbed Achilles by his blond hair and advised him not to fight Agamemnon... One god made Achilles promise that he would not enter into battle, and another god encouraged him to do so to this... In fact, the gods performed the function of consciousness.
These signals, transmitted from the right hemisphere to the left, served for a kind of social regulation. Although they were associated with the moral precepts of a given culture (the words of kings, priests, parents), the signals coming from the depths of the brain were perceived as the voices of the gods, since there was no other explanation for them. And because people did not have self-analysis, awareness of their “I” as the source of all these words, they obeyed them. Jaynes believes that we can get an idea of the power of these inner voices by observing the behavior of schizophrenics who have auditory hallucinations and believe that they are being guided by the voices they hear.
Bicameral thinking came to an end as a result of certain changes in language and culture that occurred sometime around the 7th century BC. For example, in Greek the word psyche meant “life”, “living state”, and soma- “corpse” or “lifeless state.” But thanks to the writings of Pythagoras and other thinkers psyche came to mean “soul”, and soma- "body". Janes says:
You shouldn't think that this is only word changes. A change in words is a change in concepts, and a change in concepts is a change in behavior. The entire history of religion, politics, and even science convincingly testifies to this. Without words such as “soul”, “freedom”, “truth”, the drama of human history would have different roles, different culminations.
The brain is more plastic, more capable of adapting to the environment than we previously assumed... We can assume that the neural substrate of consciousness is plastic enough so that, on the basis of learning and culture, a transition from bicameral thinking to self-awareness can occur. (Janes, 1977)
