Phrase guide

bicameral mind

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.

No pronunciation record was provided for this word.

1

noun

Meaning 1

The hypothetical mentality, neurology and sociology of the theory that before the historical emergence of introspective consciousness ancient humans and the earliest civilizations were governed by auditory hallucinations ‘spoken’ by the right cerebral hemisphere and ‘heard’ by the left hemisphere as the voices of gods.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Topics: human-sciences, psychology, sciences

No example sentence was provided for this meaning.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: none provided

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

Coined by Julian Jaynes as a “rather inexact metaphor to a bicameral legislature of an upper and lower house” (1989) and appearing in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Across languages

Translations

1 source translations are retained for this English entry.

  • Portuguese: mente bicameral — the hypothetical mentality of ancient humans that was governed by auditory hallucinations