Julian Jaynes

Julian Jaynes (1920 to 1997) was an American psychologist who spent nearly twenty-five years at Yale and Princeton and is best remembered for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Born in West Newton, Massachusetts, he studied psychology at McGill and Toronto, served a prison term as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, and later worked at Yale in experimental psychology, learning and ethology before turning to comparative psychology and the history of psychology. His central concern was the problem of consciousness, and his proposal drew on neuroscience, linguistics, archaeology, religion and the reading of ancient texts. In an afterword to the 1990 edition he set the theory out as four separate hypotheses, among them that consciousness is based on language. The Julian Jaynes Society was founded in 1997 to publish and discuss his work, which remains debated.