AHS18

Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" posits a provocative but well-supported thesis: inhabitants of early agricultural civilizations were not conscious as we are today. They literally heard the voices of their gods, who commanded them to sow and reap and build monuments in the most rigid, authoritarian, hierarchical societies ever to exist - “palace economies.” What if this were true? In this presentation, I unite several well-substantiated but orphaned theories and inconvenient facts from archaeology, botany, history, medicine, and psychology - including work by and about Julian Jaynes, Gobekli Tepe, Wadley and Martin, clinical schizophrenia, Richard Dawkins, and Jonathan Sauer - into a startling yet coherent narrative that explains how we literally lost our minds to wheat-based agriculture, and only regained consciousness after thousands of years.