Your Brain Within Your Brain

 

Your Bicameral Brain
by

Don Allen

Have you ever gone to another room to get something, but when you got there you forgot what you were after? Have you ever experienced a flash of insight, but when you went to look it up online, you couldn’t even remember the keyword?

You think you forgot it completely. How can it happen so fast? You worry your memory is failing. Are you merely absent-minded? You try to be amused.

But maybe you didn’t forget.  Just maybe that flash of insight, clear and present for an instant, was never given in the verbal form, but another type of intelligence you possess, that you use, and that communicates only to you. We are trained to live in a verbal world, where words matter most. Aside from emotions, we are unable to conjure up other, nonverbal, forms of intelligence we primitively, pre-verbally, possess but don’t know how to use.

Alas, we live in a world of words, stewing in the alphabet, sleeping under pages of paragraphs, almost ignoring one of the most important thinking tools we’ve been given.

When you go to the other room and ask yourself what you wanted, the word is not there. It never was. Your mind, with its bicameral functionality, didn’t ever give you the word. I have this condition in another way. I can recognize a face distinctly, or a smell, but my brain will simply not give me the name or word. Others can smell almost anything, and then give the name immediately.

Think of two people in a room, both of which don’t know the other is there, and yet communicate.

Communication within your bicameral brain occurs but is not uniform across segments. This accounts for that flash in insight that disappears without a trace as quickly as it came. It could be where our intuition lives. As well, innovation and insight must come from somewhere, but where? We have it; it’s always at work; it appears from nowhere; it gives information if we care to listen; it leaves without a trace.

This may be how other “intelligent” animals think,  in a cloud of nonverbal thought, but most deliberatively. The wolf knows where to hunt, where to turn, what to do, with never a word. The lion pride hunts as a group with a clear strategy, again with never a word. With never a word, sentence, or paragraph, full thoughts are possible without language.

After most of this was written, it became more and more familiar until I remembered reading the book by Julian Jaines, written in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaines argues that before words there was no consciousness. Indeed, research in the 1990s using brain imaging technology, Jaines work has received renewed attention. Our small effort tries to illustrate that the unconscious brain still resides within us.