It seems like this sort of inquiry would connect with Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It is a fascinating thesis, one what has been somewhat beyond science to test.
As actual science, the book should set every cherrypicking alarm bell ringing. For example, he talks a lot about right vs. left positioning of religious imagery, which is a key part of his theory. The problem with that is that if you come up with any theory based on right/left, you can expect about 50% of the evidence to support you, even if you're wrong.
And the whole book is like that. Lots of enthralling examples, with speculation about how they connect to his theory, but very little systematic analysis of evidence.
https://twitter.com/divided_brain
Initially I thought the article would be about that: how our brain shaped our thinking, and then our literature, culture. I think it's a lot more interesting to ask how our brains shaped our thinking, and then everything we created from literature to culture, to society..
From history books and movies we have this idea that humans were much like us.. but I begin to think in fact, it's almost as if humanity was an entirely different species, almost alien to the way we see ourselves today. I think in many ways they must have been much more reactive and automatic in their behaviour, and if you could travel back in time you would feel like you are amongst complete lunatics and it would be very frightening.
This is exactly how I feel when I visit certain extremely religious relatives. They have a 'spiritual' explanation for almost every last tiny detail of their ongoing daily experience. Sometimes I think a few of the more fringe groups of this sort are actively enabling unmedicated schizophrenics.
Jaynes’ theory is interesting to me because it reminds me of disassociative disorders.
There are evolutionary changes in humans that are known to us. For instance, people of European descent can still digest milk into adulthood; the father you get from Europe, the greater that lactose intolerance grows. So it could also be for bicameralism.
I too, am skeptical about how this came across the world, but he does mention in passing that some of the Pre-Columbian cultures of North America could have still been bicameral as late as the early 1500s. It's really an interesting read.
[1] I found a copy in a used book store and the price was right.
And is it true that schizophrenic and autistic authors do write the same?
That seems really far fetched.
I wonder if its plausibility will become more apparent as lifespans increase, allowing the typical adult human to be able to converse with more than just the generation below and above and hence be able to get at least a local estimation of the rate of change of consciousness in real life; vs. having to rely solely on literature as evidence for the mutability of human consciousness.