Word: conscious
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Right now, as you read this sentence, are you conscious? Do you know how you're sitting, how you're holding this newspaper, how fast you're reading these words? No, you were not conscious just then. Not until after you read the above questions and thought about them for a second did you actually realize that you were sitting with your legs crossed, or with the paper folded in half. No, you were not conscious until that moment, and you are probably not conscious right now as you drift, back into the flow of this article...
...possible that you were not conscious while you read the above paragraph? Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist and author of The Crisis of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, would probably say you were...
Jaynes says people are only conscious a small percentage of their waking hours. Being conscious is not merely the opposite of being unconscious--as Jaynes says many people wrongly believe. Instead, he asserts that people are conscious only when they think introspectively and become aware of themselves as part of an external environment. Not only can they function successfully without being conscious, Jaynes notes, but human beings have actually lacked consciousness for most of the time they have trod upon the earth...
While most anthropologists generally agree that the brain of homo sapiens today is essentially the same as that of the primitive beings who first mastered fire around 100,000 B.C., Jaynes claims mankind did not become conscious until the second millenium B.C. If humans were not conscious until then, what were they like? How did they function...
...crudely, much like rats performing in a maze, but they lacked the ability to reflect on the past, ponder the present, or imagine the future. Language developed in the eons between 100,000 and 10,000 B.C., but Jaynes insists that this ability--while important for the development of consciousness in the future--emerged independently. Just as somnambulists and people under hypnosis can speak perfectly intelligible English without the slightest awareness of the world around them, Jaynes says primitive man communicated verbally without being conscious...