If you are ten years old, such learning will probably be much easier and might even make a poet out of you. And if you should be unlucky enough to have some left hemisphere accident at some future time, your thought-singing might come in handy.
What is learned here is very probably a new relationship between the hemispheres, not entirely different from some of the learned phenomena in the previous chapter.
The Nature of Music
I wish to expand a little upon the role of instrumental music in all this. For we also hear and appreciate music with our right hemispheres.
Such lateralization of music can be seen even in very young infants. Six-month-old babies can be given EEG's while being held in the laps of their mothers. If the recording electrodes are placed directly over Wernicke's area on the left hemisphere and over what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right, then when tape recordings of speech are played, the left hemisphere will show the greatest activity. But when a tape of a music box is played or of someone singing, the activity will be greater over the
368 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World right hemisphere. In the experiment I am describing, not only did the children who were fidgeting or crying stop doing so at the sound of music, but also they smiled and looked straight ahead, turning away from the mother’s gaze,10 even acting as we do when we are trying to avoid distraction. This finding has an immense significance for the possibility that the brain is organized at birth to ‘obey’ stimulation in what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere, namely the music, and not be distracted from it, even as earlier I have said that bicameral men neurologically had to obey hallucinations from the same area. It also points to the great significance of lullabies in development, perhaps influencing a child's later creativity.
Or you can prove this laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will perceive and remember the music on the left earphone better.11 This is because the left ear has greater neural representation on the right hemisphere. The specific location here is probably the right anterior temporal lobe, for patients in which it has been removed from the right hemisphere find it very difficult to distinguish one melody from another. And, conversely, with left temporal lobectomies, patients postoperatively have no trouble with such tests.12
10 This is the interesting recent work of Martin Gardiner of the Boston Children's Hospital, personal communication. It is to be published as "EEG Indicators of Lateralization in Human Infants" in S. Hamad, R. Doty, L. Goldstein, J. Jaynes, and G. Krauthammer, eds., Lateralization in the Nervous System (New York: Academic Press, 1976).
11 The experiment was done with Vivaldi concertos by Doreen Kimura, “Functional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening,” Cortex, 1967, 3: 163—178.
But there is evidence that this is not true of musicians whose training has resulted in music’s being represented on both hemispheres. This was first discovered by R. C.
Oldfield, “Handedness and the Nature of Dominance,” Talk at Educational Testing Service, Princeton, September 1969. See also Thomas G. Bever and R. J. Chiarello,
"Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Non-Musicians," Science (1974), Vol. 185, pp. 137-139.
12 D. Shankweiler, “Effects of Temporal-Lobe Damage on Perception of Dichoti-cally Presented Melodies,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1966, 62 : 115—119.
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Now we know neurologically that there can be a spread of excitation from one point of the cortex to adjacent points. Thus it becomes likely that a buildup of excitation in those areas on the right hemisphere serving instrumental music should spread to those adjacent serving divine auditory hallucinations — or vice versa. And hence this close relationship between instrumental music and poetry, and both with the voices of gods. I am suggesting here that the invention of music may have been as a neural excitant to the hallucinations of gods for decision-making in the absence of consciousness.
It is thus no idle happenstance of history that the very name of music comes from the sacred goddesses called Muses. For music too begins in the bicameral mind.
We thus have some ground for saying that the use of the lyre among early poets was to spread excitation to the divine speech area, the posterior part of the right temporal lobe, from immediately adjacent areas. So also the function of flutes that accompanied the lyric and elegiac poets of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. And when such musical accompaniment is no longer used, as it is not in later Greek poetry, it is, I suggest, because the poem is no longer being sung from the right hemisphere where such spreading excitation would help. It is instead being recited from left hemispheric memory alone, rather than being recreated in the true prophetic trance.
This change in musical accompaniment is also reflected in the way poetry is referred to, although a large amount of historical overlap makes the case not quite so clear. But more early poetry is referred to as song (as in the Iliad and the Theogony, for example), while later poetry is often referred to as spoken or told. This change perhaps corresponds roughly to the change from the aoidoi with their lyres to the rhapsodes with their rhapdoi (light sticks, perhaps to beat the meter) that took place perhaps in the eighth or seventh centuries B.C. And behind these
370 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World particulars is the more profound psychological change from bicameral composition to conscious recitation, and from oral to written remembering. In much later poetry, however, the poet as singer and his poem as song are brought back metaphorically as a conscious archaism, yielding its own authorization to the now conscious poet.13
Poesy and Possession
A third way to examine this transformation of poetry during the rise and spread of consciousness is to look at the poet himself and his mentality. Specifically, were the relations of poets to the Muses the same as the relationship of the oracles to the greater gods?
For Plato at least, the matter was quite clear. Poetry was a divine madness. It was katokoche or possession by the Muses;
. . . all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed . . . there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in him.14
Poets then, around 400 B.C., were comparable in mentality to the oracles of the same period, and went through similar psychological transformation when they performed.
Now we might be tempted to think with Plato that such possession characterized poetry all the way back into the epic tradition.
But the evidence does not warrant such a generalization. In the Iliad itself, so many centuries before the existence of katokoche is ever mentioned or observed, a good argument could be made that the primitive aoidos was not "out of his senses and the mind no 13 On this matter see T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 271f.
14 Plato, Io. 534.
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longer in him.” For in several places, the poem breaks off as the poet gets stuck and has to beg the Muses to go on (2:483, 11:218,14:508,16:112).
Let it be stressed parenthetically here that the Muses were not figments of anyone’s imagination. I would ask the reader to peruse the first pages of Hesiod’s Theogony and realize that all of it was probably seen and heard in hallucination, just as can happen today in schizophrenia or under certain drugs. Bicameral men did not imagine; they experienced. The beautiful Muses with their unison “lily-like” voice, dancing out of the thick mists of evening, thumping on soft and vigorous feet about the lonely enraptured shepherd, these arrogances of delicacy were the hallucinatory sources of memory in late bicameral men, men who did not live in a frame of past happenings, who did not have