One Eighth of an Inch: Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind, and the Bandwidth of God
Start with a measurement, because the measurement is where the famous theory hides its best secret. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976, the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes had to explain how one half of the brain could hand a finished thought to the other half. He reached for anatomy and found a strip of nerve fiber connecting the two temporal lobes, the anterior commissure, which he measured at slightly more than one eighth of an inch in diameter. That tiny bridge, he proposed, carried the voices of the gods. The width of the channel is the whole argument, and almost everyone who summarizes Jaynes leaves it out.
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