We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,� Dijksterhuis says.

Such as choosing to believe Dijksterhuis' story?

Note that Dijksterhuis engaged in research (last time I looked, a conscious, waking activity) to determine the empirical support for his project, rather than sleeping on it.

I'm gonna use this when the boss objects to my after-lunch nap-time.

I do my best thinking in the shower; my ancestors must come from the rain forest.

I do mine on the john. My ancestors must have been...never mind.

I just do what the Bible tells me to.

OJ - The Bible tells you to take your kids to Disney?

I'm with both David and the author: I've always tended to make decisions (and gain insights)during my morning shower, i.e., after sleeping on them. Sleeping first ... actually, dreaming first ... reconciles the previous day's emotions with one's baseline emotions.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

More pagan mumbo-jumbo.

Sometime those subconscious impulses may, after examination in the light of conscious reason, provide us with useful insight and fresh perspective.

Othertimes they are no more than subhuman urges: manifestations of orginal sin, we used to say. Our subconscious mind may come up with all kinds of ideas; it is up to our conscious judgement to decide whether these are good and to be done.

Forget the psycho mumbo jumbo. It's just prudent. It's the same reason a bill in parliament must be read on two days. It gives a chance to reflect before committing oneself to a major decision.

ZZZZ.....

....Eureka!

I tend to agree with Gideon. I have heard so many stories about someone or other who had an insight during morning activities like showering, shaving, and such. These suggest that there might be something useful to let thoughts rattle around in the brain pan at night, to be reassembled anew come morning.

I suspect that Hollander is just carried away by his work.

Darwinism...paganism...all these superstitions just run together eventually.

Dryfoos:

Well, The Wife is more of a minor deity, but I d listen as if she were God.

Oh, now I get it. This is a brillian article.

Dvid:

No, it's "bright."

Nonsense. Every man worth his salt, knows that all great decisions/inventions are thought up while one is in his shop, leaning against the work bench, hands freshly cleaned with Gojo, clutching a beer. Why, just two days ago, while doing some serious thinking, I invented a stand to hold the flywheel on a John Deere tractor in place while I removed the two bolts holding it in place. Then within the time it takes to drink 2 more beers, I built a puller to remove the flywheel off of the crankshaft. I might have to do some more serious thinking this afternoon.

This article is unusually amusing even for the genre. The author lists purchasing shampoo as too difficult for the conscious mind. Obviously, he's never shopped at an American supermarket where we are routinely required to make conscious decisions from among tens of thousands of products.

Should we be required to sleep on these decisions, Americans would slim down considerably as we'd be sleeping a great portion of our lives and not be awake long enough to buy the junk food we buy now. Probably the economy would suffer as the broccoli business surpasses even Google in value.

AOG, I thought I was the only one on the face of the earth to have read Jaynes' book. I've been waiting for decades for the follow-up. Know anything about that?

Einstein credits bed, bath and bus for his best ideas. Just think if he drove his own car, one-third of his great thoughts would have died before they were born.

erp;

No, I haven't seen anything about a follow up.

I actually cited it heavily in my doctoral thesis. I am of mixed mind about the book's claims, but it has the best discussion of consciousness and its relationship to language I have ever read. That alone makes the book worth reading, IMHO. It has heavily influenced my thinking ever since.

Anyway, I thought of it because it claims that consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon and that it is not necessary for human society to function.

AOG - Absolutely correct. Jaynes' theories about consciousness are fascinating and had he stopped there, I think his book would have been taken more seriously.

When he gets into van Daniken territory, coincidently "Chariots of the Gods" was published at about the same time, he lost me and probably lots of others skeptical of other worldly intervention as an explanation for every unexplained phenomenon.

I read the Jaynes book as well, and it was quite good, though I remember his timeline being a bit off: he was claiming that only after a certain date (tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago) did this leap in mental ability happen, using stone tools as evidence. But there are beautifully made stone tools far older than that.

There does seem to be a lot online about him, two good ones being a Julian Jaynes Society with lots of info and this decent overview.

It does tie in well with this topic though. For those not in the know, Jaynes postulates that modern consciousness is a recent creation, no more than 3 or 4 thousand years old. Before that, problems were solved by the subcouncious and "told" to people via auditory and visual hallucinations. PapayaSF's link is indeed a good summary of this thesis.

So in cave paintings they're depicting the hallucinations that prepared them to fend off predators?

No.

From my second link:

In earlier times human mentality was characterized by auditory and sometimes visual hallucinations, in which people heard the voices of the gods speaking to them and telling them what to do. Only when this process became internalized and recognized as coming from within the percipients' own minds did truly modern consciousness begin.

The cave paintings ar older than consciousness.