But the main results, even conservatively treated, are generally in agreement with what we might expect to find in the right hemisphere on the basis of the bicameral hypothesis. The most significant such finding is that the right hemisphere is the hemisphere which processes information in a synthetic manner. It is now well known from even more studies that the right hemisphere is far superior to the left in fitting together block designs (Kohs Block Design Test), parts of faces, or musical chords,11 and such synthetic functions were indeed those of the admonitory gods in fitting together civilizations.
The reader has by now guessed that a somewhat crucial experiment is possible. Since I have supposed that the verbal hallucinations heard by schizophrenics and others are similar to those once heard by bicameral people, could we not test out this cerebral location in the right temporal lobe of the voices by one of the new brain imaging techniques, using patients as they are hallucinating?
This has recently been tried using cerebral glucography with posi-tron tomography, a very difficult procedure. Indeed, the results demonstrated that there was more glucose uptake (showing more 9 Anne Harrington, “Nineteenth Century Ideas on Hemisphere Differences and
‘Duality of Mind,’ ” Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1985, 8:5 17—659, or her excellent enlarged study, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
10 S. J. Segalowitz, Two Sides of the Brain (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983).
11 M. P. Bryden, Laterality: Functional Asymmetry in the Intact Brain (New York: Academic Press, 1982).
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activity) in the right temporal lobe when the patient was hearing voices.12
I wish to emphasize that these four hypotheses are separable.
The last, for example, could be mistaken (at least in the simplified version I have presented) and the others true. The two hemispheres of the brain are not the bicameral mind but its present neurological model. The bicameral mind is an ancient mentality demonstrated in the literature and artifacts of antiquity.
The last line of Book III sounds indeed like a ponderous finality of judgment. It is. But it is also the beginning, the opening up of human nature as we know it and feel it profoundly because consciously in ourselves, with all its vicissitudes, clarities, and obscurities. Because of the documentation, we can see this most clearly in Greece in the first half of the first millennium B.C., where the change can truly be called
The Cognitive Explosion.
With consciousness comes an increased importance of the spatialization of time and new words for that spatialization, like chronos. But that is to put it too mildly. It is a cognitive explosion with the interaction of consciousness and the rest of cognition producing new abilities. Whereas bicameral beings knew what followed what and where they were, and had behavioral expectancies and sensory recognitions just as all mammals do, now conscious, humans can ‘look’ into an imagined future with all its potential of terror, joy, hope, or ambition, just as if it were already real, and into a past moody with what might have been, or savoring what did, the past emerging through the metaphier of a space through 12 M. S. Buchsbaum, D. H. Ingvar, R. Kessler, R. N. Waters, J. Cappelletti, D. P.
van Kammen, A. C. King, J. L. Johnson, R. G. Manning, R. W. Flynn, L. S. Mann, W. E. Bunney, and L. Sokoloff, “Cerebral Glucography with Positron Tomography: Use in Normal Subjects and in Patients with Schizophrenia,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 1982, 39:251-259.
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whose long shadows we may move in a new and magical process called remembrance or reminiscence.
Reminiscent memory (or episodic memory, as it is sometimes called),13 in sharp contrast to habit retention (or semantic memory), is new to the world with consciousness. And because a physical space in the world can always be returned to, so we feel irrationally, somehow certain, impossibly certain, that we should be able to return again to some often unfinished relationship, some childhood scene or situation or regretted outburst of love or temper or to undo some tragic chance action back in the imagined inexistent space of the past.
We thus have conscious lives and lifetimes and can peer through the murk of tomorrow toward our own dying. With the prodding of Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.,14 we invent new words or really modifications of old words to name processes or symbolize actions over time by adding the suffix sis and so be conscious of them, words in Greek like gnosis, a knowing; genesis, a beginning; emphasis, a showing in; analysis, a loosening up; or particularly phronesis, which is variously translated as intellection, thinking, understanding, or consciousness. These words and the processes they refer to are new in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C.15
The Self
Along this new lifetime, putting together similar occurrences or excerpts of them — inferences from what others tell us we are and from what we can tell ourselves on the basis of our own conscious-13 Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
14 Howard Jones, “-Sis Nouns in Heraclitus,” Museum Africum, 1974, 3:1-13. I am grateful to Professor Jones for discussion on this point.
15 This has been noted and emphasized by several classical scholars including Bruno Snell, speaking of “a new ‘mental’ concord that apparently was not possible before the seventh century when a new dimension of the intellect is opened.” Cited by Joseph Russo in “The Inner Man in Archilochus and the Odyssey,” Greek, Roman, and Byzan-tine Studies, 1974, 25:139, n. 1, who prefers an earlier date for this transformation, as his title indicates.
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ness of what we have done — we come to construct or invent, on a continuing basis, in ourselves and in others, a self. The advantage of an idea of your self is to help you know what you can or can’t do or should or should not do. Bicameral individuals had stable identities, names to which they or others could attach epithets, but such verbal identity is a far shallower form of behavior than the consciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self that shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously.
Particularly with regard to the self, but also in all of the treacherous terminology of mind, we must beware of the perils of poly-semy or homonymic or multireferential confusion, as I have called it elsewhere. This results from the historical growth and inner alterations of most mental terms; the referrent of a term changes usually with the addition of new conscious referrents until the term is really multireferential. “Self“ is a good example. Originally, the word (or corresponding word in whatever language) probably was simply used as an identity marker as in all its many compounds: self-employed, self-discipline, etc. Or as when we say a fly washes itself. But with the fractal-like proliferation and inten-sification of consciousness through history, particularly since the twelfth century A.D., a very different referrent of “self“ came into existence. It is the answer to the question “Who am I ? ” Most social psychologists accept that denotation of self.