Bicameralism & verbal hallucinations

Bicameralism & verbal hallucinations
Bicameralism  or  the  philosophy  of  "two chamberedness" is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys— a bicameral mind.

The term was coined by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind only as recently as 3000 years ago.

Vaughan Bell, a researcher from King's College in London, recently published an insightful call to arms in PlOS Biology for psychologists and neurobiologists to create a new understanding of these phenomena.

Auditory verbal hallucinations have attracted a great deal of scientific interest, but despite the fact that they are fundamentally a social experience-in essence, a form of hallucinated communication-current theories remain firmly rooted in an individualistic account and have largely avoided engagement with social cognition.
Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence for the role of social cognitive and social neurocognitive processes in auditory verbal hallucinations, and, consequently, it is proposed that problems with the internalization of social models may be key to the experience.

Sources and further reading:
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001723

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes
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