Try looking out the window and pretending to be red-green color-blind to such an extent that those colors really do look like shades of gray.27 It can be done to a certain extent, but it is much easier under hypnosis. Or get up now from where you are sitting and act like a bird, flapping your arms and emitting strange calls for for the next fifteen minutes, something easy to do under hypnosis. But there is not one reader of that last sentence who can do it — if he is alone. Whatever those sweaty feelings of foolish-ness or silliness are, the why-should-I5s and the this-is-absurd's, they crowd in like careful tyrants jealous as a god of such a performance; you need the permission of a group, the authoriza-26 J. P. Brady and E. Levitt, "Nystagmus as a Criterion of Hypnotically Induced Visual Hallucinations," Science, 1964, 146: 85-86. But I do not agree with the authors that this proves the existence of true hallucinations.
27 Normal subjects asked to respond to the Ishihara color-blindness test by trying not to see the color red and then by trying not to see green read some of the Ishihara cards in the manner expected from individuals with red or green color-blindness. This was shown by Theoder X. Barber and D. C. Deeley, "Experimental Evidence for a Theory of Hypnotic Behavior: I. 'Hypnotic Color-Blindness' without 'Hypnosis',"
International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1961, 9: 79-86. But under hypnosis this pseudo-color-blindness is easier to obtain, as in Milton Erickson's
"The Induction of Color-Blindness by a Technique of Hypnotic Suggestion," Journal of General Psychology, 1939, 20: 61-89.
402 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World tion of a collective imperative as well as the command of an operator — or a god — to achieve such obedience. Or put your hands on the table in front of you and make one of them distinctly redder; possible for you to do now, but much easier under hypnosis. Or raise both your hands for fifteen minutes without feeling any discomfort, a simple task under hypnosis but onerous without it.
What is it then that hypnosis supplies that does this extraordinary enabling, that allows us to do things we cannot ordinarily do except with great difficulty? Or is it ‘we’ that do them? Indeed, in hypnosis it is as if someone else were doing things through us.
And why is this so? And why is this easier? Is it that we have to lose our conscious selves to gain such control, which cannot then be by us?
On another level, why is it that in our daily lives we cannot get up above ourselves to authorize ourselves into being what we really wish to be? If under hypnosis we can be changed in identity and action, why not in and by ourselves so that behavior flows from decision with as absolute a connection, so that whatever in us it is that we refer to as will stands master and captain over action with as sovereign a hand as the operator over a subject?
The answer here is partly in the limitations of our learned consciousness in this present millennium. We need some vestige of the bicameral mind, our former method of control, to help us.
With consciousness we have given up those simpler more absolute methods of control of behavior which characterized the bicameral mind. We live in a buzzing cloud of whys and wherefores, the purposes and reasonings of our narratizations, the many-routed adventures of our analog ‘ I’s. And this constant spinning out of possibilities is precisely what is necessary to save us from behavior of too impulsive a sort. The analog ‘ I’ and the metaphor ‘me’ are always resting at the confluence of many collective cognitive imperatives. We know too much to command ourselves very far.
H Y P N O S I S
4 0 3
Those who through what theologians call the "gift of faith" can center and surround their lives in religious belief do indeed have different collective cognitive imperatives. They can indeed change themselves through prayer and its expectancies much as in post-hypnotic suggestion. It is a fact that belief, political or religious, or simply belief in oneself through some earlier cognitive imperative, works in wondrous ways. Anyone who has experienced the sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows that both mental and physical survival is often held carefully in such untouchable hands.
But for the rest of us, who must scuttle along on conscious models and skeptical ethics, we have to accept our lessened control. We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us.
And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization that ‘we’ do not have.
Hypnosis does not work for everyone. There are many reasons why. But in one particular group who find hypnosis difficult, the reason is neurological and partly genetic. In such people, I think that the inherited neurological basis of the general bicameral paradigm is organized slightly differently. It is as if they cannot readily accept the external authorization of an operator because that part of the bicameral paradigm is already occupied. Indeed, they often seem to the rest of us as if they were already hypnotized, particularly when confined in hospitals as they commonly are from time to time. Some theorists have even speculated that that is precisely their condition — a continuous state of self hypnosis. But I think such a position is a dreadful misuse of the term hypnosis, and that the behavior of schizophrenics, as we call them, should be looked at in another way — which is what we shall do in the next chapter.
C H A P T E R 5
Schizophrenia
MOST OF US spontaneously slip back into something approaching the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much more harrowing experience — if it can be called an experience at all. We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us. It is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that nowhere, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia. In reality, we have relapsed into the bicameral mind.
At least that is a provocative if oversimplified and exaggerated way of introducing an hypothesis that has been obvious in earlier parts of this essay. For it has been quite apparent that the views presented here suggest a new conception for that most common and resistant of mental illnesses, schizophrenia. This suggestion is that, like the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapters,