4 Guillaume, p. 245.
5 A possessed woman in China at the beginning of this century, for example, would extemporize verses by the hour. "Everything she said was in measure verse, and was chanted to an unvarying tune . . . the rapid, perfectly uniform, and long continued utterances seemed to us such as could not possibly be counterfeited or premeditated."
J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes, p. 3 7f.
364 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World we have seen in III.2, wherever it is practiced, tends to fall into metrical patterns, particularly dactyls.
Poetry then was the language of gods.
Poetry and Song
All the above discussion is mere literary tradition and sounds more plea than proof. We should, therefore, ask if there is another way of approaching the matter to show the relationship of poetry to the bicameral mind more scientifically. There is, I think, if we look at the relation of poetry to music.
First of all, early poetry was song. The difference between song and speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch. In ordinary speech, we are constantly changing pitch, even in the pronunciation of a single syllable. But in song, the change of pitch is discrete and discontinuous. Speech reels around all over a certain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a fifth). Song steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more extended range.
Modern poetry is a hybrid. It has the metrical feet of song with the pitch glissandos of speech. But ancient poetry is much closer to song. Accents were not by intensity stress as in our ordinary speech, but by pitch.6 In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to have been precisely the interval of a fifth above the ground note of the poem, so that on the notes of our scale, dactyls would go GCC, GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G. Moreover, the three extra accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their notations
´,ˆ,ìmply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and falling on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively. The result was a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory ornamentation that gave it beautiful variety.
6 It was Thomas Day, whose new and syntactically vigorous translation of the Iliad is eagerly awaited, who first recited or rather sang epic Greek to me as it should be done. For the theory here, see W. B. Stanford, The Sound of Greek (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), and play the record inserted in the back cover.
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Now how does all this relate to the bicameral mind? Speech, as has long been known, is a function primarily of the left cerebral hemisphere. But song, as we are presently discovering, is primarily a function of the right cerebral hemisphere. The evidence is various but consistent:
• It is common medical knowledge that many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak can still sing.
• The so-called Wada Test is sometimes performed in hospitals to find out a person’s cerebral dominance. Sodium amytal is injected into the carotid artery on one side, putting the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation but leaving the other awake and alert. When the injection is made on the left side so that the left hemisphere is sedated and only the right hemisphere is active, the person is unable to speak, but can still sing. When the injection is on the right so that only the left hemisphere is active, the person can speak but cannot sing.7
• Patients in whom the entire left hemisphere has been removed because of glioma can only manage a few words, if any, postoperatively. But at least some can sing.8 One such patient with only a speechless right hemisphere to his name “was able to sing ‘America’ and ‘Home on the Range,’ rarely missing a word and with nearly perfect enunciation.”9
• Electrical stimulation on the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to the posterior temporal lobe, particularly the anterior temporal lobe, often produces hallucinations of singing and music.
I have already described some of these patients in 1.5. And this in general is the area, corresponding to Wernicke’s area on the 7 H. W. Gordon and J. E. Bogen, “Hemispheric Lateralization of Singing after Intracarotid Sodium Ammo-barbitol,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 1974, 37: 727-739.
8 H. W. Gordon, “Auditory Specialization of Right and Left Hemispheres,” in M. Kinsbourne and W. Lynn Smith, eds. Hemispheric Disconnections and Cerebral Function (Springfield: Thomas, 1974), pp. 126-136.
9 Charles W. Burklund, “Cerebral Hemisphere Function in the Human,” in W. L. Smith ed., Drug, Development and Cerebral Function (Springfield: Thomas, 1972), p. 22.
366 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World left hemisphere, which I have hypothesized was where the auditory hallucinations of the bicameral mind were organized.
Singing and melody then are primarily right hemisphere activities. And since poetry in antiquity was sung rather than spoken, it was perhaps largely a right hemisphere function, as the theory of the bicameral mind in I.5 would predict. More specifically, ancient poetry involved the posterior part of the right temporal lobe, which I have suggested was responsible for organizing divine hallucinations, together with adjacent areas which even today are involved in music.
For those who are still skeptical, I have devised an experiment where they may even feel for themselves right now the truth of these matters. First, think of two topics, anything, personal or general, on which you would like to talk for a couple of paragraphs. Now, imagining you are with a friend, speak out loud on one of the topics. Next, imagining you are with a friend, sing out loud on the other topic. Do each for one full minute, demanding of yourself that you keep going. Compare introspectively. Why is the second so much more difficult? Why does the singing crumble into cliches? Or the melody erode into recitative? Why does the topic desert you in midmelody? What is the nature of your efforts to get your song back on the topic? Or rather — and I think this is more the feeling — to get your topic back to the song?
The answer is that your topic is ‘in’ Wernicke’s area on your left hemisphere, while your song is ‘in’ what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on your right hemisphere. Let me hasten to add that such a statement is an approximation neurologically. And by
‘topic’ and ‘song’ I am meaning their neural substrates. But such an approximation is true enough to make my point. It is as if volitional speech is jealous of the right hemisphere and wants you to itself, just as your song is jealous of the left hemisphere and wants you to leave your left hemisphere topic behind. To
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accomplish the improvised singing of a pre-decided topic feels as if we were jumping back and forth between hemispheres. And so in a sense 'we' are, deciding on the words in the left and then trying to get back to song with them on the right before some other words have got there first. And usually the latter happens, the words are not on the topic, careering off on their own, or not consecutively coherent or not there at all, and so we stop singing.
Of course we can learn to sing our verbal thoughts to a certain extent and musicians often do. And women, since they are less lateralized, may find it easier. If you practice it as an exercise twice a day for a month or a year or a lifetime, sincerely avoiding cliche and memorized material on the lyric side, and mere recitative on the melody side, I expect you will be more proficient at it.