It’s wild that some people don’t have a little David Attenborough in their head that narrates what they do like an anthropologist angel on their shoulder. Like their lives aren’t an extended nature documentary where they live at the mercy of the narrative’s critique and plotline. They don’t even mentally see things from interesting camera angles that advance mental cinematography, it’s just flat and their own thoughts.
One of my favorite weird scientific theories says that prior to a few thousand years ago, this internal narrative voice was mistaken for the voice of the gods, and explains why so many old texts are full of gods saying and doing things with people. The theory says that as we became fully conscious in the way that modern humans are, this narrator–which is actually the linguistic centers in the left hemisphere–finished integrating into the rest of the brain, and we started recognizing that it was actually just our internal monologue, not the gods; this was supposed to be the catalyst for modern human mentality.
It’s almost certainly false and pretty fringe, but I’ve always really loved it as a theory. It’s called “the bicameral mind.”
It’s almost certainly false and pretty fringe, but I’ve always really loved it as a theory. It’s called “the bicameral mind.”
Doesn’t look like anything to me.
This is somewhat the premise of an old nutty book book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. The book has a section towards the end called The Auguries of Science that is very dear to me.
