Thanks! I've changed the link above to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv... from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-09-human-brain.html.

Which is a much better article

I'd imagine the science from the 80s is very dated now, no matter how good the book is.

The comments in the other post on this topic had an article which slammed Sagan's book for being outdated and espousing debunked triune Brian theory. The article was called "your brain is not an onion with a lizard inside".

I think more like file explorer!

Maybe more like the baseband modem in a phone?

That sounds about right.

I've added that link to the toptext as well. Thanks!

Ok let's give it a go!

Always be suspicious of people who don't atleast give us even a single valid sentence to construct the chain of thought that would lead to their negation or assertion.

An authority claim by virtue of itself is not worth investigating. Science doesn't work that way. Math doesn't work that way.

Don't follow. But you omitted the 'conditional on' part so I'm not sure you did either?

If you are young, this might help you https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...

If you are old, I have nothing at my disposal. You are on your own.

This is pretty basic. One learns this early on if he has actually built something.

regarding the brain, is there a reason your words should be trusted over those of a brain surgeon?

You thought I had made a claim about the brain. That's interesting.

Yes, Jaynes used a comprehensive approach, albeit one rooted in literature. I only threw in "Homer" as an example to be clear that "ancient civilizations" referred to bronze age and before, and that this was not the Joe Rogan kind of ancient civilizations.

I think the trouble is once your category is loosey-goosey enough it could be open-ended to the point that anything can fit it.

The fact that overall of recorded history you can find instances of any sort of interaction with something that's felt to be a voice that's independent from one's own subjectivity is open-ended to the point that it can fit the literary and cultural history of basically any civilization on Earth.

What would be more impressive is some additional specificity, any sort of evolutionary mechanism, and any sort of supporting biological data. Otherwise the thing that is being described here isn't a theory, it's barely even vibes. This is to vibes what vibes are to coherently formed thoughts.

Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago.

It's one of the craziest, most interesting books i've read on the mind. He makes a much stronger argument than can be summarized in a comment. He takes you on a wild journey you are surprisingly ill-equipped for.

And as this complexity develops, there is the first unsureness, the first need for personal gods to intercede with the higher gods, who seem to be receding into the heavens where in one brief millennium they will have disappeared.

This aligns with Christ’s redemptive work. Someone above even mentioned that a change had to happen to all humans about 3000 years ago, that’s about when Christ died (2000 years). It was told his spirit would enter the world when he died.

The thing you are referencing is actually describing the alleged Holy Spirit entering the world:

(With a little help from AI, don’t kill me)

In Christian pneumatology (the study of the Holy Spirit), there is a similar paradigm shift between the ancient world and the New Testament. In the Old Covenant, God's presence was primarily external (pillars of fire, the Ark of the Covenant, stone tablets). With Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, God's presence moves inside human believers ("a new heart... and a new spirit within you," Ezekiel 36:26; 1 Corinthians 6:19).

Development of Conscience: The transition from external command-driven behavior to an internal moral compass echoes the New Testament promise that God's law would be written directly onto human hearts and minds (Jeremiah 31:33).

—-

The change Julian Jaynes observes was actually divinely promised, interesting that it can be measured.

Further, the original study that sees the merging of the two parts of the brain would also fit the Holy Spirit providing reconciliation of how your brain is even wired after it was imparted onto the world. This was all promised , if you believe Christ. It’s even more reassuring that that this biological reconciliation happened around when Christ died , plus or minus a thousand years.

And Iam McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary nearly 20 years after Stephenson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary

Uh, yes. It's overzealous because personally disagreeing with something doesn't mean that it's outside the scope of the subject matter that the article is speaking to. If anything, you're reaffirming the commonalities between the theory and what's proposed in the article because what they have in common is a proposed difference in brain structures followed by a convergence.

The fact that you disagree with the truth of the theory has literally nothing to do with whether it's on point in response to an article that's about the same subject matter. I would have hoped that me saying multiple times that I disagreed with it would have made clear already that there's more going on here than just a matter of whether you do or don't disagree with it. Declaring that it's "not overzealous" mirrors my language back at me but without attaching an actual argument to it.

"too hot" and "way too overzealous" is ad hominem, and talking about comment section policing is remarkably hypocritical -- you're actually telling someone not to make certain sorts of comments, which pointing out that something is not relevant to the article doesn't do. Your "not even mentionable" is a complete fabrication -- the comment from dinobones said nothing of the sort. Your whole shtick about "getting way too overzealous with comment section policing" is a complete fabrication -- a projection of what you are doing onto a simple factual statement. And your "Uh, yes" comment below is more obnoxious trolling and attacking strawmen.

My immediate reaction to the comment about Jaynes's book and the split brain was that it's not relevant to the article, and it conflates three very different things. The comment omits the crucial fact that the split brain research was on people whose corpus collosum had been cut -- no surprise that "these two parts of the brain function independently" since they were no longer attached to each other (which is the complete opposite of what TFA is about). Jaynes's hypothesis was not related in any way to that research, and neither are related in any way to TFA. As someone else noted: "Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago." -- the clear implication being that Jaynes and split brains aren't relevant. But if anyone actually dares say so, here comes the too hot overzealous comment section policeman to project his own attributes onto them.

And this is completely aside from whether Jaynes's argument is valid ... you saying multiple times that you disagree with it is also utterly irrelevant and reflects one of several fundamental errors in logic in your comments. But criticisms of your comments is not "comment section policing" -- how absurd ... and dinobones didn't even do that in simply saying that a comment wasn't relevant to the article ... only in your head was "and therefore you are not allowed to post it here". Presumably the comment was made in good faith. I can even grant the same about yours, with a bit of straining and extraordinary charity.

I won't respond further.

Obviously? That's why we all grow up addicted to tiktok now, when we didn't 30 years ago.

Writing and reading existed before the Ancient Greeks, including China and Mesoamerica.

It’s an interesting book for sure, but I had (minor, but still) issues even with the introductory premises. Just a few notes I made from the very first chapter:

- Jaynes used the term “reminiscence” in a way very different from Ballard and claimed no animal is capable of reminiscence. That was a very odd claim overall.

- Then he claimed that if we ever create a language that can express everything, metaphors won’t be possible. Which is, I think, almost obviously false, because many metaphors are constructed artistically, despite having exact terms.

- And he talks about spatialization as a primitive aspect of consciousness, but he seems to talk about relations/connectedness at best.

And so on - I misplaced my notes somewhere and only recovered a few random bits. Still, interesting reading, fun (albeit really questionable) core idea, but those papercuts were kinda off-putting for me.

His theory was that the two brain halves communicated through inner voices. Wernickes Area, on the left side, communicated with the similar area on the right side. WA is where we comprehend speech, so Jaynes theorized that was why bicameral people experienced the communication as inner voices.

The research in the new research paper is about a split between front and back of the brain. So something entirely different. That split is an old idea. Jaynes would most likely have known about it. But it wasnt part of his theory.

While worth understanding, it's a completely different topic from the article.

Thank you for the link to Watts’ talk. It is a great watch and is certainly a great jumping off point for anyone writing fiction in the field.

It also could be one of the most terrifying talks I’ve ever heard, but since it is eight years old, I am going to just pretend all of the research he mentions fell through and I have nothing worry about.

Clearly.. this is not some new revelation, it has been the default assumption for a very long time, probably over a hundred years.

Damage to the hind brain results in behavioural changes that are blatantly different compared to when the "newer" parts of the brain is damaged. The cerebellum literally even has a different color.

Its a joke. You know they say ADHD types made great hunters thousands of years ago, because they can hyperfocus on that gazelle while constantly keeping their head on a swivel.

A little misleading when they mention 'our' brains, yet the study outlines that even acorn worms have the same structure.

Does this help explain why the circuits that control emotional crying, which rely on connections that span the anterior, posterior and midbrain, develop?

While many comments are about brain lateralization, which this research does not address, an interesting aspect is how much it would lend credence to the "Triune Model" of the brain [0], which is generally described as discredited.

The authors limit their claims to "the longstanding question in developmental biology of how and when different regions of the central nervous system diversify from one another." So folks wanting to see a "lizard brain" in there will have to keep searching.

Edit/Append: Something I will keep an eye out for is how this knowledge changes the understanding of cephalopod brain dev/func. If hemichordates were evolutionarily later than protostomes like an octopus, what will that mean for the types of neural cells available for them? If octopus neurology is more like "forebrain and midbrain—which are both aNE-derived lineages," then does that mean that the "posterior neural ectoderm (pNE)" is evolutionarily later?

0. https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-lizard-brain...