Word.ws English Dictionary

bicameral mind

bicameral mind noun: the hypothetical mentality, neurology and sociology of the theory that before the historical emergence of introspective consciousness ancient humans and the earliest civilizations were governed by auditory hallucinations ‘spoken’ by the right cerebral hemisphere and ‘heard’ by the left hemisphere as the voices of gods.

Noun

bicameral mind (plural bicameral minds)

  1. The hypothetical mentality, neurology and sociology of the theory that before the historical emergence of introspective consciousness ancient humans and the earliest civilizations were governed by auditory hallucinations ‘spoken’ by the right cerebral hemisphere and ‘heard’ by the left hemisphere as the voices of gods.
    • In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. pg.75
    • The bicameral mind is ... that form of social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural communities… pg.126
    • The two hemispheres of the brain are not the bicameral mind… [It] is an ancient mentality demonstrated in the literature and artifacts of antiquity. pg.456
    • [At Delphi in C.E. 363] the bicameral mind had come to one of its many ends. pg.3311976, Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, published 1990
    Synonyms:
    bicamerality, bicameral mentality

Examples of bicameral mind in a sentence

  • The present paper provides a brief summary of the bicameral mind model, followed by a critical reappraisal of […] the putative cerebral basis of bicamerality.2007, A.E. Cavanna, et.al.: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis.:
  • […] one should not regard the connections discovered here as an attempt to "prove" Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind.2016, Todd Gibson, Listening for Ancient Voices: Julian Jaynes's Theory of the Bicameral Mind in Tibet, Kuijsten, published 2016, page 271:

Synonyms of bicameral mind

Forms of bicameral mind

pluralbicameral minds

Origin of bicameral mind

Coined by Julian Jaynes as a “rather inexact metaphor to a bicameral legislature of an upper and lower house” (1989) and appearing in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Questions about bicameral mind

What does bicameral mind mean?
Bicameral mind means the hypothetical mentality, neurology and sociology of the theory that before the historical emergence of introspective consciousness ancient humans and the earliest civilizations were governed by auditory hallucinations ‘spoken’ by the right cerebral hemisphere and ‘heard’ by the left hemisphere as the voices of gods.
How do you use bicameral mind in a sentence?
The present paper provides a brief summary of the bicameral mind model, followed by a critical reappraisal of […] the putative cerebral basis of bicamerality.
What part of speech is bicameral mind?
Bicameral mind is a noun.
What is the plural of bicameral mind?
The plural of bicameral mind is bicameral minds.

Words near bicameral mind in the dictionary

  1. bicalutamide
  2. bicam
  3. bicameral
  4. bicameral legislature
  5. bicameral legislatures
  6. bicameral mind
  7. bicameral minds
  8. bicameralism
  9. bicameralisms
  10. bicameralist
  11. bicameralists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bicameral mind (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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