Page "Julian Jaynes" Paragraph 2

Jaynes wrote that ancient humans before roughly 1200 BC were not reflectively meta-conscious and operated by means of automatic, nonconscious habit-schemas.

Instead of having meta-consciousness, these humans were constituted by what Jaynes calls the " bicameral mind ".

For bicameral humans, when habit did not suffice to handle novel stimuli and stress rose at the moment of decision, neural activity in the " dominant " ( left ) hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called " silent " ( right ) hemisphere ( particularly the right temporal cortex ), which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.