Thursday, September 07, 2006

 

The Pirahã and the Bicameral Mind

Currently reading Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's a fascinating and radical book. According to Jaynes, consciousness - what he regards as an "analog space" in our minds in which we can imagine ourselves doing different things than we actually do, weigh probabilities and alternatives, etc. - is a quite recent development. Recent being as recent as 1200 BC. Before that, according to Jaynes, part of what is now our consciousness was "externalized" as hallucinated voices and apparitions (Gods) telling us what course of action to take in times of stress. Schizophrenia would be an atavism - a return to this previous stage, which Jaynes dubs "bicameral" - essentially the right hemisphere of our brain "tells" the left what to do, which is subjectively experienced as hallucinations of voices, of spirits, or gods.

Jaynes builds his case on, among others, examining epic poems such as the Iliad and the Odyssei, pinpointing the former's lack of "mental" vocabulary such as 'to think, to contemplate' and contrasting the actions of the protagonists of the Iliad with those of the much more individualized Odysseus of the latter poem. Without going into whether his case is compelling (it does seem so to me, but I lack the expertise to really evaluate it), a problem does seem to be the fact that human beings essentially spread all around the world tens of millenia before Homer. The ancestors of the Australian aboriginals entered Australia as early as 50,000 BC. Briefly, if consciousness is much the same around the world, the most parsimonious hypothesis would be that it arose while ancestral humans were still living in a restricted area in East Africa, not much later than 100.000 BC. If modern consciousness is as recent an innovation as Jaynes says it is, we would have to find remnant populations with the earlier "bicameral" consciousness somewhere on the planet.

But perhaps now there is anthropological support for something not quite Jaynes' bicameralism, then at least something broadly similar.

A year or so ago, a linguist called Daniel Everett caused an enormous stir by publishing a paper in Current Anthropology called Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the
Design Features of Human Language.
. Everett claims that, in many ways, the language of the Pirahã, a small indigenous tribe of the Amazon region, differs from anything else. Notably, Pirahã has no numbers, and no ways of denoting quantity: "one" may be the same word as "small" or "a small pile", "two" the same as "big", "big pile", and that's it. Also, the Pirahã language has one of the simplest phonemic inventories in the world - though the verb system of the language appears to be highly complex. Finally, the language appears to do without colour terms and without syntactic recursion (i.e. "I know that you know that he knows that..." constructions).

So briefly, the Pirahã language would force us to throw out a lot of things that were once thought universal to human languages. For this reason, Everett's research was met with incredulity among linguists - a sample of which may be found here.
Everett defends himself against charges of either being hoodwinked or perpetrating a linguistic hoax here.

I find it hard to believe that Everett was either conned by mischievous natives, or indeed is hoaxing. He lived among the Pirahã for all in all seven years. Quite some investment of time in a hoax. Rather, the incredulity with which his research was met reflects the radical nature of it.

Back to the point: some of the claims Everett makes about the Pirahã culture are even more amazing, in my opinion, than the linguistic claims. The one that gained most media attention was the apparent inability to count: being well aware of the possibility that they were cheated by Brazilian traders, the Pirahã asked fieldworkers to teach them to count - an effort which appears to have been totally unsuccessful. More strangely, the Pirahã have, according to Everett, a strong cultural taboo against talking about anything not within their immediate sphere of experience. No creation myths, or epic stories of any kind - or indeed no art of any kind. And finally entering bizarre territory: according to Everett in his Current Anthropology article, the Pirahã, despite any lack of actual religious belief or myth, do see forest spirits. Meaning, they see forest spirits. Everett recounts being woken from his tent one night by shouting and hollering - and found the whole tribe gathered at the river side, shouting at something on the other side. When Everett inquired what it was they seemed to upset about, the Pirahã incredulously asked whether he could not see the forest spirit that was obviously on the other side.

All of this is far from the "smoking gun" for Jaynes' hypothesis. Jaynes regarded a total lack of deceit as a hallmark for the "bicameral" mind. The Pirahã seem to be well enough aware of the possibility of being cheated in trade, and, by Everett's account, are very humorous, joke-loving people. But the apparent restriction of any communication to the immediate sphere of experience, and the actual, externalized perception of forest spirits, rather than imagining them, or divining their workings from inanimate nature, would, if indeed valid, at least bring to mind Jaynes' thesis.

The controversy that Daniel Everett caused makes it pretty sure that the Pirahã will receive visits from linguists and anthropologists trying to verify his claims. If indeed they are verified, perhaps Jaynes' thesis on the origin of consciousness, or parts of it at least, might receive new attention as well.

Merlijn de Smit

Comments:
Now that is interesting. I'm of mixed feelings about them perceiving spirits though. That could be explained by a variety of things. Still, very intriguing.
 
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I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, at the moment. Hope future research will throw more light on the "perception" of spirits thing, and others. But fascinating it is.
 
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