Selects: Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know

Episode: Selects: Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

iHeartPodcasts | Aired: May 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant dive deep into the fascinating and provocative Bicameral Mind Hypothesis, introduced by psychologist Julian Jaynes in the 1970s. They discuss its implications on human consciousness, its strengths and criticisms, how language and metaphor may have transformed our minds, and its resonances in modern psychology, neurology, and even childhood development. True to form, the conversation blends accessible explanations, pop culture references, skepticism, and playful banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is the Bicameral Mind Hypothesis?

(05:07–08:16)

• Jaynes’ controversial theory posits that human consciousness as we know it only emerged a few thousand years ago.
• In Jaynes' view, early humans were not conscious in the modern sense: people functioned automatically, following routines, and when faced with novel situations, they experienced auditory hallucinations they attributed to gods or rulers.
• These hallucinated commands guided their actions, serving the role of what we know now as internal dialogue.

Notable quote:

"If we went back in time... and we met somebody who lived 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, they would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans."
— Josh Clark (07:23)

2. From Automatons to Introspection

(09:51–14:06, 20:23–21:55)

• Jaynes saw earlier humans as automatons: acting without what we would call self-reflection or volition.
• The transition to consciousness involved the development of subjective introspection and the realization that one can think about their own thoughts and others’ perspectives (theory of mind).
• This wasn’t a matter of intelligence or feeling, but rather an emergent ability to reflect on inner experiences.

Notable moment:
Chuck summarizes his skeptical “macro” view, questioning if Jaynes was simply defining consciousness narrowly:

"If the idea is that before this there was no consciousness, but what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness—they just didn’t recognize it as such... Is the whole point that if you do not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious?"
— Chuck Bryant (11:56)

3. Literalism, Metaphor, and Language: The Consciousness Shift

(18:06–18:50, 23:46–25:52, 27:49–34:31)

• Jaynes believed the emergence of modern consciousness was tied to language—specifically, the ability to use and understand metaphor.
• Early humans took things very literally; the development of metaphor represented a profound leap: the brain could now make analogies, enabling introspection and complex problem solving.
• Examples from ancient literature (like Homer’s Iliad) suggest a mind more focused on physical sensations and literal commands from gods, lacking language for internal mind-states.

Notable quote:

"Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. It’s like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it."
— Quoting Julian Jaynes, read by Chuck Bryant (23:45)

On metaphor:

"We think in metaphors so frequently, we don't even recognize it anymore. And that was Jaynes' point: when we gained the ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious."
— Josh Clark (33:14)

4. Societal Changes: From Gods’ Voices to Written Law

(27:49–30:55, 41:08–43:53)

• Agricultural societies, larger populations, and the invention of writing reduced direct communication from rulers and, by Jaynes’s hypothesis, diminished the dominance of auditory hallucinations as control mechanisms.
• The shift from gods' voices to authoritative written texts marked the decline of the bicameral mind and was mirrored by religious transformations—organized religions emerged as people mourned the loss of their internal guiding “gods.”
• The Late Bronze Age collapse is proposed as a critical moment, coinciding with this psychological and societal transformation.

Notable quote:

"All of a sudden, these auditory hallucinations... there was now stuff down on paper that you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around..."
— Chuck Bryant (30:07)

“...they started to lose... the gods were silent to them. They weren’t speaking to them in their mind because they were gaining consciousness. And... today’s organized religions were born out of a kind of nostalgia, basically for these gods that left them.”
— Chuck Bryant (42:37)

5. Evidence from Literature and Ancient Texts

(44:32–46:50)

• Jaynes uses The Iliad and Mesopotamian poetry as evidence; early texts describe gods directly instructing individuals, lacking terms for a reflective inner mind.
• Over time, translations and reinterpretations made these literal descriptions metaphorical—supporting the transition from bicameral to conscious mind.

Notable quote:

“...when they say the gods were guiding them along, they meant it literally. And he [Jaynes] was saying that the Iliad in particular... was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness. So he sees it as basically a document that traces that transition.”
— Josh Clark (45:27)

6. Neurology: Split-Brain Research and the Interpreter Theory

(46:54–50:01)

• Modern neuroscience, such as studies on split-brain patients (with severed corpus callosum), offers intriguing analogues: their hemispheres operate independently and the language-dominant hemisphere invents explanations for physical actions it didn’t initiate.
• The left-brain interpreter theory posits our conscious mind often constructs narratives after the fact, echoing Jaynes’ view that consciousness is a “story-teller” overlay.

Notable quote:

"Consciousness isn't in the Oval Office like it thinks it is. It's more in the press office... it's the one that's public-facing, explaining what you're doing, but it might not have all the information. So sometimes it's just BSing."
— Josh Clark on the interpreter theory (49:08)

7. Child Development and Residual Bicameralism

(35:10–37:27; 51:52–52:13)

• Young children function in a way reminiscent of the bicameral mind: they take things literally, don’t understand metaphor or sarcasm, and lack “theory of mind” until about age five.
• The widespread phenomena of imaginary friends and auditory hallucinations in otherwise healthy individuals are seen by some as vestiges of the bicameral state.

Notable quote:

"Julian Jaynes believed that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state, as evidenced by that development of theory of mind or as evidenced by imaginary friends, and that they're kind of recreating what society or the human species went through thousands of years ago."
— Josh Clark (51:52)

8. Criticisms and Enduring Popularity

(12:36, 52:27–53:28)

• Jaynes himself was an outsider in his field; the theory lacks direct empirical testability and has been called unscientific by some.
• However, the hypothesis remains perennially fascinating and influential, inspiring books, societies, and discussion—David Bowie called Jaynes’ book “one of the top hundred books to read.”
• The hosts agree that part of the appeal is simply how compelling and mind-expanding the idea feels.

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Metaphor as a marker for consciousness:
  “[Metaphors are] literally not literal. And if that was not a thing yet, then... everything they were doing was literal up until that point. That would have been a pretty seismic shift...” — Chuck Bryant (34:07)

• The “flashlight” metaphor for consciousness:
  “...wherever the flashlight looks, there's light. And his point is, wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness, but that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place.” — Josh Clark (24:25)

• On civilizations under bicameralism:
  “That's not to say they weren't successful... it was a hive mind all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished and not the conscious mind.” — Chuck Bryant (21:22)

• Children as a microcosm of human consciousness evolution:
  “Kids up until the age of five basically don't really have much of a human consciousness. ...They don't realize there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking.” — Chuck Bryant (35:10)

• Why the bicameral mind “died”:
  "The power that we gave to the gods’ commands were kind of transferred to the written word." — Josh Clark (30:55)

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Timeline of Notable Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |------------|---------------------------------------------------| | 05:07 | Introduction to Julian Jaynes and the hypothesis | | 08:16 | Bicameral mind as a learned state | | 14:06 | Clarifying consciousness vs. behavior | | 18:50 | Metaphor, language, and the emergence of consciousness | | 23:45 | The flashlight metaphor of consciousness | | 27:49 | Agricultural revolution, writing, and the decline of bicameralism | | 34:31 | Children as literal thinkers, child development | | 41:08 | The Late Bronze Age collapse and societal shifts | | 44:32 | Evidence from the Iliad and ancient texts | | 46:54 | Split-brain research and the interpreter theory | | 51:52 | Imaginary friends, hallucinations, and remnant bicameralism | | 52:27 | Limitations and criticisms of the hypothesis |

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Tone and Style

The episode is marked by curiosity, skepticism, and humor. Josh is especially enthusiastic (“Maybe the best episode we'll ever make”), while Chuck remains the more concrete and literal "concretist," gently challenging the wilder implications. Both cite pop culture and everyday life to keep the material approachable (“it's not Friday night in college at like 2 in the morning kind of discussion”—Chuck, 17:20).

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a rich, accessible introduction to the Bicameral Mind Hypothesis—covering its philosophical roots, neuroscientific echoes, difficulties, and persistent allure. By the end, listeners will have a strong grasp of Jaynes’ theory, the debates around it, and why it continues to spark the collective imagination.

Recommended for anyone interested in the history of consciousness, the evolution of mind, and the quirky, human journey from obedient “automatons” to introspective, metaphor-making beings.

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If you have not listened, this summary provides the key ideas, critical arguments, illustrative metaphors, and the lively, quotable exchanges that make this episode a “mind-blowing, mind-expanding, mind-flabbergasting” journey.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Hey there guys, it's Josh. And for this week's select, I'm going with our August 2022 episode on the Bicameral Mind Theory. It is mind blowing, mind expanding, mind flabbergasting. It's just a really good episode. It's just really me and Chuck sitting around having a really interesting conversation about some really interesting stuff. So if you feel like expanding your mind right now, I would say this is a great episode to listen to. Enjoy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know, the ongoing, amazing, mind blowing edition you've

[Chuck Bryant]

Been into this stuff lately. What's going on with you?

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. I don't know, man. But yes, I'm definitely into it lately. It's weird.

[Chuck Bryant]

Approaching 50. Existential crisis.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know about crisis. Maybe more like pondering. Existential pondering. I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got five years till 50, so give me time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Are you 45? I thought you were like, 47.

[Josh Clark]

I'm 45. And eight. Nine.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You got time?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Great. Thank you for that. But no, there's no, like, one thing that's making me say, like, hey, when did humans become conscious? Or when did humans become intelligent? Or, what do we do if aliens come down? Like, for some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing to me than it has been in the past lately. I don't know. But, yes, I'm definitely into this kind of thing right now. And this stuff, what we're going to talk about today, it's based on a How Stuff Works article that Robert Lamb wrote. And I'm not at all surprised that Robert Lamb is into this, but I just want to note that I've heard about this years and years and years ago and have been meaning to do an article or an episode on it. So I don't want you to think this is something I just stumbled across. This is actually the fruition of years of planning and hope and dreams coming to pass in maybe the best episode we'll ever make.

[Chuck Bryant]

And of course, Robert. And not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of the band Chicago, just to make

[Josh Clark]

sure there's another Robert Lamb, and he was in Chicago.

[Chuck Bryant]

Still is in Chicago.

[Josh Clark]

Is that Peter Cetera's stage name? No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cetera was the bass player and part lead singer along with Robert Lamb, who played keyboards and also sang lead on some. And before Terry Kath died, he played guitar and also sang. So they had three singers in the early days of Chicago.

[Josh Clark]

That's just confusing.

[Chuck Bryant]

But none of them are our colleague Robert Lamb, who, along with our colleague Joe had been doing stuff to blow your mind for many, many years. Another great show.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And I didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that they have their own episode on this. Julian Jane's By Camera Mind.

[Chuck Bryant]

I bet they have. And we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology Today and Frontiers in Psychology. And I'm going to make one up. Psychology Fu Young.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, I've got two more that aren't made up. Slate Star Codex and A poster named Hazard on the site. Less wrong.

[Chuck Bryant]

That sounds like a great source.

[Josh Clark]

It is. Hazard knows what he's talking about. Oh, and one more. I'm sorry, a guy named Joff Ward or Jeff Ward, but you know, when they spell it Joff. Yeah. On medium. So all of those combined with Robert Lamb's article that coalesce into, again, probably the greatest episode we'll ever do.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I sort of get some of this. I think you're going to help me out some, because I do have some questions that I'll just throw out here and there because at times I found myself reading this stuff and going, yeah, but isn't that just blank?

[Josh Clark]

Okay, great. I'll do my best to answer. And you're probably right when you're thinking that the answer's probably like, yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. Well, I mean, I guess we should say then that the whole hypothesis that we're gonna be kind of breaking down today is controversial and it's not provable necessarily, scientifically speaking. So it's sort of one of those. I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure, definitely into true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Jaynes in the mid-1970s, of course.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, the year I was born.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. 76, baby.

[Josh Clark]

So what he proposed was an answer to a long standing question, and that was, when did humans become conscious? Like, when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came along, like, in the earliest archaic humans? Is it something that came along much later than that? And how could we ever possibly answer that? Like, what relics have been left in history in prehistory that would say, like, hey, this is evidence of consciousness. And Julian James took that up and he did it as an outsider, which was a huge strike against him, because automatically legitimate scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory. Possibly this man is actually in my field of consciousness studies. But the thing is, this hypothesis is so well liked. It's just roundly liked. People just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And in fact, there's like a Julian Jaynes Institute. There's like groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And what he says in a very small nutshell, is that sometimes about 1,000, 2,000 years ago, humans became conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today. They developed the ability to think about thinking. They developed the ability to think about that other people are thinking. They developed basically what's called Subjective introspection. And then as a result of that, they almost automatically gained free will in volition. So what he's saying is that if we went back in time in the Wayback Machine, Chuck, and we met somebody who lived 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, they would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans.

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[Chuck Bryant]

And he thinks it was a learned thing. And the idea that he throws down is that our mind, our brain is. Or was rather, very important, was. Cause it no longer is bicameral, which means split into two parts. And we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres of the brain later on. But in this case, he means split into two parts, where you have a part that makes decisions and a part that follows. And that neither one of them were conscious. And here's where I get a little tripped up right out of the gate is basically, he says that instead of an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates a consciousness like us talking to ourselves, us saying things like everything from like, hey, get up and go do this, to just internally thinking about things like humans do that instead of that, we were sort of like human zombies in that we were creatures of habit. We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a T. And whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when, like a conscious mind, you would think would speak up. That instead of that, an external agent, in this case, they thought they were gods, would enter their brain and create an auditory hallucination.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that they unquestioningly obeyed that auditory hallucination. And that that's what helped them get through novel situations that they didn't have, like a. Basically a prescribed script for, you know, a mindless automatic thing. Something new came along that got in their way. This God would speak to them and say, go around that rock. It wasn't there yesterday. Don't worry about it. Just go around it. And it could be one of their gods. It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think 1. 1. I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to angels walking beside them. Or. And this is really important later on. It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis. It could be your local ruler, the divine king, who's in charge of you and everybody else that you know and love and have ever lived among. It could be that person guiding you in your life, too. And the idea is these people heard this in the same way, like you said, that we hear our own internal dialogue. But they never chalked it up to themselves. It was always Coming from the outside.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, here's. I guess, where I have my first issue kind of grasping this is there were no gods speaking to them and guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just didn't know it yet.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, yes, yes. There was no gods. But to them, and this is a really important point to them, it definitely was a God talking to them or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same way that if an actual God got into your brain and, like, was speaking to you and you responded to it, if you could have looked at their brains lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine, it would. It would respond the same way. So it was entirely real to them. In the same way that a placebo effect has real effects on your body, this would have been the same thing. And then in addition to that, it was culturally supported. Everyone that they knew believed the same thing, that the gods were talking to them. And so like, that just lent support to this idea so that no one questioned it. It was just. That's the way it was.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, so this I guess brings me to. Let me macro this out a little bit in my own dumb brain. And it may just be 21st century person thinking that I'm engaging in. But if the idea is that before this there was no consciousness, but what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness, they just didn't recognize it as such. Is that the whole point was that if you do not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. Because you're not experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just kind of Julian Jaynes referred to.

[Chuck Bryant]

I see what this guy's doing now.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so, so, but the thing is, is there's like a lot of scholarly discussion on, like, okay, what did James mean? Exactly? How literal was he? Because he used words like automaton. He never called them zombies. Other people call them like zombies.

[Chuck Bryant]

But no one talked about zombies back then.

[Josh Clark]

Hardly. No, that's true. But. Well, evil deadhead or not evil dead, living dead, Neither. The living dead had come out by then.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but it wasn't like today. You know what I'm saying?

[Josh Clark]

No, no, I know. They're definitely over automatons. So he called them automatons. And it's essentially the same thing that they were. They just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about how they felt. And this is really important too, Chuck. Of course they still had feelings. They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group. They had feelings about their local Ruler. They had feelings about, you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't. They didn't reflect on their inner life. They didn't think about thinking. They didn't. They didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness. And in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on top of that, he also goes to great lengths to say, hey, I understand that you're going to get all up in a tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious. I'm not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that you over overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, how about we take a break?

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[Chuck Bryant]

I'm gonna go rip a bong. Kidding. We'll take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk. About what? Lots of other stuff right after this.

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[Josh Clark]

Huh.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

It feels good when the story ends with savings.

[Chuck Bryant]

It feels good to Geico learning things with John. Get Josh. Stop. You should know. All right, so I've kind of wrapped my head around what this guy's saying now. It's. I will admit it's a little navel gazy for me on when it comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses. I get a little bit like, what's the word? Maybe I can be a little too concrete. Or as the French might say, concrete and literal in my thinking. Because it's not Friday night in college at like 2 in the morning kind of discussion.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So I think that's where I am now. But I do think it's very interesting in that he. I mean I think a lot of this is very interesting, but I think it's interesting that he thought around the first or second millennium BC is when things to him changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of, well, eventually language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that all of a sudden we could make analogies in our brain. We could link things together. We saw ourselves as almost as if they were characters. Ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make as characters.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that as these things like connected in the brain, then it created just an effect, like a domino effect basically where all of a sudden we could work out our own solutions, or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions. But it wasn't a God saying, walk around the rock. They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. And.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, but it's. But in part of that, that also required them to be able to reflect on the idea, like you said, that they were able to now make their own decisions. Right. And you said something earlier where you like, you know, you were talking about your own internal dialogue where you think, hey, I should get up and go outside for a second. Like, that's different, right? You're thinking about you, yourself, and you realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time would have thought is get up and go outside. And they would stand up and go outside without questioning, because God had just instructed them to do that, so it must be important. And they didn't think about where it came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves. And they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it. That's Jane's position. And that if you compare those two things, you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life. And it's so different. He said that this is. That what we understand is consciousness just wasn't around until a couple thousand years ago.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in this pool.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, good, good.

[Chuck Bryant]

30 minutes.

[Josh Clark]

Here's the thing. It's really important to realize, like you said something that you're a literalist, Right. That's actually really appropriate to approach this, because Julian James, one of the very radical things that he did was he took the ancients literally. Because when he started looking around, and we'll talk more about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it at least. And he was an expert in ancient languages, Right. So he was. It was really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian, and he took what they were saying when they said things like, you know, the gods told us to do this, that they thought that the gods told them to do this, not that they were using metaphor. So he took them literally on their word. And that is a real departure from anybody else who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think it's also something we should point out now, even though it comes up later in our research, is that when you think of an, I guess an automatic society or a society of automatons. That's not to say that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful, you know, ancient civilizations that existed. But I think his contention is that it was a hive mind all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished and not the conscious mind.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And he didn't. I don't think he ever used it as, like. I don't think he ever explicitly said that it was an emergent property of a hive mind. But that's kind of what he was describing. Kind of like if you take one stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by 500 and give it a year, you have a ziggurat built. That. That's just. That's just all those people knew what to do. They knew their position and their place, and they just did it. And so, yeah, you could totally do that with people who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious. You could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this. This work is not suited for me. I should be doing something else. Or, why is the foreman being so mean to me today? Like, they didn't think like that under Jane's hypothesis. So they would probably get the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly, I would guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh. I mean, consciousness proposed her. Brought along a whole host of problems.

[Josh Clark]

It's true.

[Chuck Bryant]

I imagine, if you're the ruling class. I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned about what is it Jane's not giants. Jane's. Yeah, Jane's thought about. I love Robert Lamb's Jane's Addiction joke in here, by the way.

[Josh Clark]

That was mine.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, that was yours. Oh, well, way to go.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks.

[Chuck Bryant]

You said Jane's says. And then in parentheses you put. Ha. It's a very good joke. But what Jane said was that. And it's something you mentioned earlier, was that consciousness. I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that is. Can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And this is from the actual book in 1976. And it's a little mind blowy. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. It's like asking a flat. And this is where it kind of comes home to me. It's like asking a flashlight in A dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. So that's where it comes home to me, is when you. And hey, it's metaphor. So how about that? He lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because, you know, wherever the flashlight looks, there's light. And his point. Yeah, and his point is, wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness, but that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place. And yeah, Robert Lamb uses a really good example of unloading a dishwasher. Right. Like when you're unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people who put, like, all of your knives in one place, all of your forks in one part of the basket, all your spoons and so on. Right. A maniac. In other words, sensible, human. If you do it like that, it's. You can. You can just be on autopilot because you've done it so many times. But when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm. That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And so in. In the bicameral mind, God would have said, I command thee to pick up thine fork, butter fingers. And you would lean over and pick up the fork, and that was that. Instead, you might not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically. But it's still out of the norm. It's still different. You have to kind of think about it a little more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take that dishwasher metaphor, Chuck, and you realize that 3, 5, 9,000 years ago, there were no dishwashers. There was no ice cream scoop, there was no cookie scoop, There was no avocado splitter. There was nothing like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wait, what's that? Is that a thing now?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. You don't know? You don't have one of those?

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I'll send you one. You're missing out. It's a multi tool for cutting avocados, getting the pit out and then slicing them as you scoop them out. They're essential, as a matter of fact.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. I'm going to get you one for Christmas.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. So the point is that, like, there wasn't a big variety of stuff, so there wasn't that many novel situations. Like, we encounter novel situations, like, almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the Basis of James hypothesis that the reason that consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis. So maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every 30 seconds, or maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind of evolved out of that. But the point is, life was much less complex back then. So you could have something like a bicameral mind. You could have somebody who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't been introduced to enough experience in life.

[Chuck Bryant]

And with that experience came the. The. The fork falling on the floor, in other words.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Or, you know, there's a lot more dishes to put away and much more different dishes to put away, rather than just forks, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, sure.

[Josh Clark]

You know what I'm saying?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Or you have one fork and you just carry it with you everywhere, you know, like, you don't have to think about that. There was just less stuff to think about, is what I'm saying.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, now you're speaking my language. Because if I had it my way, every member of my family would have one fork, one spoon, one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away.

[Josh Clark]

Man, every time I hear one cup, I'm like, there's a joke in there somewhere. But even if I could come up with it, I wouldn't be able to say it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, that's true. All right. So now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit more about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing about this change. And so what James was throwing down in 1976, besides apparently a bunch of roach clips, was the emergence of agricultural societies, kind of changing everything in that all of a sudden we are not living in groups of 10 or 12 people that are hunting and gathering, where even if there was sort of a leader within that group, it was very easy to disseminate information and follow that. Once we started settling down, planting and growing things, engaging in trade with other peoples, that did a lot of things that complicated every process. And it meant that societies were much, much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily speak directly to people anymore.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So another part, not to specific people,

[Chuck Bryant]

like, they could lay down an edict and that would get disseminated, in other words.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So like I've read before, back when I was an anthropology student, that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no more than 30 people. Like that was the absolute max. And once you reached that you'd split off into two different bands. So, yeah, like, the person in charge was like part of your moment to moment life. And if you're. If you have. If you're suddenly in a civilization and you're building a ziggurat for somebody, he's probably not deigning to talk to you. And part of Jane's hypothesis is that this. This bicameralism emerged from, you know, all those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk to other people, that we started to, like, need direction from the gods more and more. And it started to kind of get faster and faster. But in the meantime, it was a form of social control because one of the people you could think was talking to you was that local ruler who you were building the ziggurat for. So that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population in check.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And as they got bigger and bigger and they started, you know, trading with people, like we were saying that, you know, that was sort of the beginning of the end for his. Not his bicameral mind, but the bicameral mind. And one of the biggest problems with all of that was when we started writing stuff down, because all of a sudden, these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on what to do. There was now stuff down on paper that you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around and post on the, you know, on tablets at the walls of the city or whatever. And that was. All of a sudden, you weren't waiting around for a God to tell you what to do. You could just go read that tablet.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So the power that we gave to the God's commands were kind of transferred to the written word. And. Yeah, that seems to have been like the death knell for the bicameral mind. Right. And there's something really interesting that's worth pointing out. James apparently didn't have any hypothesis on what came before the bicameral mind because he said it started as a result of the increasing organization that agriculture brought along and that there wasn't bicameral minds before then. But he doesn't say what was before then. And people even asked him, like, okay, what about, you know, hunter gatherer societies that are still around today? You know, where would they have gotten consciousness? And he never really answered that, but it's definitely worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he basically says bicameral or the bicameral mind. I Should say bicameralism is the Senate in the House, but the bicameral mind lasted from the advent of agriculture about 11,000 years ago till about 2000ish, maybe 1500 or no, 3000ish years ago. So it was about a 7,000 year span of bicameral mind to them. As life got more and more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he says is that language, and in particular the written word, but also language got more and more sophisticated. And as it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential for us to start thinking in metaphors. And metaphors, as you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way we think in Julian Jane's mind. And there's actually a lot of support for that. Charles, May I?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh please.

[Josh Clark]

So that post by Hazard on less wrong.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh yeah. Let's hear what Hazard has to say.

[Josh Clark]

It's called consciousness as metaphor. What Janes has to offer and what Hazard says is that Hazard just puts out a paragraph from an economic report and it's about recessions in Europe and it talks about Germany plunging into recession or the UK falling deeper into a recession, or France emerging from a recession. And what Hazard points out is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as a three dimensional physical thing that we can, entire nations can move into and out of. That's not true. Recessions aren't three dimensional, they aren't physical things. You can't emerge from them, you can't fall into them. But we just think about it like that. And that's metaphor. So we think in metaphors so frequently we don't even recognize it anymore. And that was Jane's point, that when we gain the ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious, we started thinking for ourselves, we became capable of introspection. And it was the evolution of language that led us to that point. Like basically it just, we just hit a threshold where suddenly language is sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts in our brains and in turn unlock consciousness.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, that makes sense because you know, a metaphor is literally not literal. And if you were, if you did, if that was not a thing yet, then it jives with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up until that point. Yes, and that would have been a pretty seismic shift if you can compare like with like, you know, all of a sudden.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And you even see this in like, like movies that are trying to emphasize how backwards or back in time, you know, some group is, and they emphasize it by having that group take everything literally, usually to comic effect. Like in Kingpin, when Randy Quaid was an Amish person. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

He took everything literally, and it was hilarious. Hilarity ensued. But it was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was. He couldn't. He couldn't engage in metaphors. He didn't think like that. That's actually based on. I don't know whether on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian Jane's hypothesis.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know what? That's a nice segue to children because when you have a human child, it's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years and that they don't understand metaphor. They don't understand. Certainly don't understand things like sarcasm. And you have to change the way you talk to little kids because they do take everything so literally and think so literally. And children are referenced with Jane's. The idea that, I think, what age. Like kids up until the age of five basically don't really have much of a human consciousness. And it's in, you know, the idea that children are just little narcissists walking around is a fun joke, but it's true because they don't know that other people think differently than they think. Up until about the age of five, they don't realize there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking and ways of feeling about things.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

That other people have.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. That's what's called theory of mind. Right. And on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to great lengths to basically say that Julian Jaynes, using the term consciousness, just really muddied the waters unnecessarily. And if he had just used theory of mind, it would have made a lot more sense. And Scott Alexander, I think I said, Anderson, Scott Alexander makes some real. A really good case for it. And that's kind of what he's pointing out is, you know, like it's. It's possible that because you learn, it's not. You're not born with it. You. You learn it through experience. It just kind of evolves in you as you grow as a person and experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more. Almost like a microcosm of what happened in civilization a few thousand years ago.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You gain theory of mind. So the fact that you can learn and that you do learn something that integral to consciousness, really supports the idea that maybe consciousness, as we understand it, was learned, it did evolve. It was an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated language.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a fascinating thing to see happen in a child's life to see these little light bulbs come on seemingly out of nowhere. But you realize it is, you know, very much a learned thing. Man.

[Josh Clark]

I'll bet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Very fascinating. All right, I say we take a break and we'll talk a little bit about just some other fascinating stuff when we get back right after this.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Huh.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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Hey there. Before this podcast continues, I need you to fill out 37 forms about your listening history.

[Josh Clark]

I'll wait.

[Chuck Bryant]

Just kidding.

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[Chuck Bryant]

learning things when sh st. Now, I was going to summarize what we were going to talk about, but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden before the break.

[Josh Clark]

I think it's nice. It's loosey goosey.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think that's the way it should be. Can I talk about one of my favorite parts of this? This hypothesis definitely is we were. We're kind of jumping around now, but jumping back to where we talked about writing things down. All of a sudden it was around here in human history that there was a collapse of societies in the Mediterranean, around the Middle East. It was called the late Bronze Age collapse. And it didn't take that long. And it met like these very advanced sort of societies in a matter of decades. A number of them, a lot of their culture was lost. That was it sort of. They called it, in fact, the Greek Dark Ages. And it lasted for hundreds of years. And jiving with this was when humans started to lose. And it kind of all makes sense that they were losing with the written word, with metaphor and language coming along. They were losing this voice as a God. They felt like they were losing their gods because all of a sudden the gods were silent to them. They weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. James has a hypothesis that says it's about here where the organized religions that we know today were born out of a kind of nostalgia, basically for these gods that left them.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think that idea is really interesting.

[Josh Clark]

It is. And I mean, the timetable really jibes. And it is really interesting that that late Bronze Age collapse happened when it did. But the idea is not just nostalgia, but also desperation because these people had guidance, they didn't have to think. And this poor set of generations over a few hundred years are maybe some of the most pitiful humans that ever lived because they went from just knowing what to do because the gods told them what to do to having no idea what to do because their gods had abandoned them. And as a result of that, they started forming religions. They started beseeching the gods to give them a sign. This is when oracles started to become a thing, prophets started to become a thing. Superstitions like omens grew. Like there was a Sumerian omen, if a horse comes into your house and bites you, you will soon die and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that. Right. So this didn't exist before because the gods were in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone. And I just think it must be. Must have been really pitiful and dark to live through that time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, they were lost, I guess, as a people.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that was figuratively. They were lost, but literally, too, because that late Bronze Age collapse, they think, was brought on at least in part, by climate change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the Sea Peoples that seem to have overrun different cultures. And so, like, culture after culture would fall, those people would become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that to the breaking point that culture would fall. It was just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once. So they really felt like the gods had abandoned them, like they'd angered them or something like that. They were genuinely lost.

[Chuck Bryant]

So what James did to help support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back and look at literature of the time and see if it sort of supported this. I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in 1976, was that it was Homer's Iliad, because he's kind of like, here's proof right here. I mean, if you look at the Iliad, they were basically automatons. They just listened to the gods and did what the gods said. And they substituted, like, the words that we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to indicate consciousness just weren't there.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So they were more like physical descriptors. Like, my belly was quivering or my heart was fluttering or something like that. Not. I think the example that's used is fear filled Agamemnon's mind.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Well, there wasn't a mind. So they would describe fear in other physical terms. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like a stomach ache. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And that it wasn't until later on, when new translations were coming along, that people who are now conscious turned the stuff into metaphor. And James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before, they meant it as literally, and they didn't have descriptors for minds. And when they say the gods were guiding them Along. They meant it literally. And he was saying that the Iliad in particular started to be written about 1100 BCE and then around 700 BCE it was like in its form that we see it today, but along the way it was kind of added to. And it was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness. So he sees it as basically a document that traces that transition.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, very interesting. There was some other stuff too, right? Literature wise.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So that wasn't the only one. He also found in some of the religious texts, like, evidence that people felt like God had abandoned them. There's something, a Mesopotamian poem called the Ludlow Bel Nameki, and it says, my God has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed. And again, most other scholars would say there's something happened. This guy was blue, he was in a funk. Who knows? But it's all metaphorical. And James is saying, no, this guy had God talking to him. Now he doesn't anymore.

[Chuck Bryant]

So should we talk a little bit about actual science here with the brain?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think so.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because this is something we've covered before in the past when we talked about alien hand syndrome.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, is that where it came up from?

[Chuck Bryant]

A gazillion years ago, there was evidence that when the. There were certain epilepsy patients where it was so severe that they would sever the corpus callosum, undergo a corpus callostomy. And the corpus callosum is basically the thing that makes the two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And with alien hand syndrome, I think they found that it could be brought on by this surgery where all of a sudden the left arm was doing something and without being told to do it by the right brain. And they have Janes, I think, are people. Since Jane's. Was it Jane's or was it just people trying to sort of prove his theory?

[Josh Clark]

I think that people saw these experiments as support for James's theory.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. So they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and they're called split brain patients, basically, where they, you know, after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out of whack. They felt like a regular, you know, whole human being. But they learned that there were these little things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take an action based on this information that it didn't have access to. And the example they gave was if they instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen and they would get up and walk to the kitchen. But they would say, hey, why did you get up and walk to the kitchen? The language, the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere is the only part that can respond to that. But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up. And the really fascinating part is that instead of. They wouldn't say, well, I don't know, I'm not sure why I just did that. I just did it. They would make something up on the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting up and going to make a bowl of cereal. Right. And it's almost like we had this natural instinct to BS somebody when faced with a question that we can't answer about why we did something.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because the left hemisphere wants to explain things. It wants to tell the story using metaphors usually. And this is, this became the left brain interpreter theory. And it kind of supports Jane's idea that the, the consciousness is a flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and it just can't find it. And the idea is that the, the left hemisphere creates the explanation, the stories for our behavior, even if it doesn't know why we did something. But that's just what it does. And there's a saying in consciousness research among people who subscribe to the left brain interpreter theory is that consciousness isn't in the Oval Office like it thinks it is. It's more in the press office like it's the one that's public facing, explaining what you're doing, but it might not have all the information. So sometimes it's just BSing.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's very interesting stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And sort of tying in with the kid thing. Who is this? How do you pronounce the name of that one researcher? Kushkin.

[Josh Clark]

Kastian. Kucher.

[Chuck Bryant]

K, U, I, J, S, T, E, N. Oh, yeah, I'm just gonna say Kustian.

[Josh Clark]

I think that's pretty, pretty dead on. That's the person who runs the Julian

[Chuck Bryant]

Janes Society today because Jaynes died in 1997. I don't think we ever pointed that out. Yeah, but this person basically says, hey, if you look at people who hear voices, and that's not necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia, because that is 1% of the population, apparently as high as 10% of the population can, you know, does hear things basically. So it's the idea of the command voice basically, is to do something. And if you're hearing a voice that says, move to the window and look out on the street. That's one thing. If you hear a voice that Says take the knife from the drawer and, you know, put it in someone's head, then that's another thing altogether. And we were talking about kids earlier. You know, the idea of the imaginary friend kind of jives with this lack of consciousness. 65% of kids have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friend. My daughter had for years what she called her ghost friends, which is a lot creepier way to put it. But I think that's all just sort of to say that, like, that 9% of people who are hearing voices who are not suffering from schizophrenia, that's proof of that initial bicameral mind at work, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And, I mean, Julian Jaynes believed that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state, as evidenced by that development of theory of mind or as evidenced by imaginary friends, and that they're kind of recreating what society or the human species went through thousands of years ago as they age and develop.

[Chuck Bryant]

Very interesting.

[Josh Clark]

So you might be out there, especially if you're a concretist like Chuck, thinking, like, you might be rocking in your seat right now, face flushed, about to faint out of rage.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, wait, is my camera on?

[Josh Clark]

Because, like, this is, by definition unscientific. It's not provable in the form that Jaynes put it forth. It's more of a concept, an idea. And apparently he was well aware of that. He didn't tout it as anything more than that. But Kustian, the director of the Julian Jane Society, likes to point out that he was basically laying the groundwork for an entirely new way of looking at things so that other people could come along and, you know, take it up and figure out how he was wrong, how he was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense in that form. And people have been doing that. Again, this is like a crackpot theory that has never gone away, because the more people pay attention to it and the more we start to understand about the brain, the more sense it kind of makes. And it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it over the, like, 50 years that it's been around.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not rocking in my chair.

[Josh Clark]

David Bowie loved it. He said that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind. I think that was it.

[Chuck Bryant]

The book song.

[Josh Clark]

No, he said it was one of the top hundred books to read.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, all right. I believe that totally. It's a very Bowie thing, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

And other people, too. And then one other thing, another way to put all this, to kind of sum it up that I saw it put is that we developed at some point back in the in history, a left brain bias. That's it. You know, which kind of ties into your original view of the whole thing, which was, you know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious.

[Sponsor Voice]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I like that.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

I might, but I might just not be aware of it. Man.

[Josh Clark]

As I said, this is the best episode we've ever done since Chuck giggled, which everybody loves, I think. Then it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is about the freedom of the press episode and this was a Josh request. Hey, guys. How freedom of the press works struck a particular chord with me. I used to work as a science teacher, but was finding more and more students were being duped by pseudoscience on the Internet and weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I did a master's in library and information science and now a school librarian on a mission to vanquish disinformation.

[Josh Clark]

Awesome.

[Chuck Bryant]

While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of approaching news critically, as with any online source of information information, your recent podcast on how freedom of the press works really inspired me to put forward more information and content about media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden, it's very easy to take freedom of the press for granted. Last year, in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put up a display of banned books tracked by the ala and each book had a tag listing the years and ranking. A book was challenged and I encourage the students to guess what for. It led to a lot of really good. That's it. I love. This experiment with students led to a lot of really good discussions. Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books had been banned or challenged, were horrified to see their own favorite books on display, and were also shocked by the justification as are we always. Now that Covid restrictions are being lifted, I'm very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books, the Dawit Isaac Library in the Malmo archives. There's a new lamp.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that students can see the extent of limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world. Thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series. Kind regards med venglige Helsnigar. That is must just be a salutation in Swedish that comes from Ms. Alice Antunson. She her hers.

[Josh Clark]

Thank you, Alice. That is amazing. I'm so glad we got to that listener mail because I've been proud of that person for a very long time, ever since that email came in.

[Chuck Bryant]

Totally.

[Josh Clark]

How about Sweden, huh? Keeping the American dream alive.

[Chuck Bryant]

I love it.

[Josh Clark]

And Chuck, also, before we sign off, there's something I've been meaning to address that you said earlier. You said you have a dumb brain. No, you don't.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did I say that?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you did. Okay, so if you want to get in touch with us like Alice did and show the world what a hero you are, we would love to hear that kind of thing. You can email us to stuff podcastheartradio.com

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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[Josh Clark]

It feels good when the story ends with savings.

[Chuck Bryant]

It feels good to Geico. Hey, everybody.

[Sponsor Voice]

Home security can be a real headache sometimes. There are expensive monthly fees, there are contracts that lock you in for years and years, and system hardware that requires a technician to set up.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, well, welcome to SimpliSafe, friend. Because they do away with all that stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Sponsor Voice]

You can easily customize a system that's right for your home. @simplisafe.com, it's going to ship right to your door in just a few days. And with their app guided setup and no drilling required, you can install and arm your system in under an hour.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, no need to wait around for a technician appointment. And we're not talking about just cameras. We're Talking about what SimpliSafe calls a comprehensive ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and out and 24,7 professional monitoring. In the event of a break, fire, flood, Simplisafe's agents are ready to help you.

[Sponsor Voice]

That's right. No long term contracts, affordable pricing and proven trust. Over 5 million people trust SimpliSafe every day. And right now you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simplisafe.com stuff that's half [e-mail] stuff there's no safe like Simplisafe. Hey everybody, it's time to spring into deals at Lowe's Freshen up your yard with stay green premium 2 cubic foot mulch. Buy bags for $10, then head inside and save up to 35% off. Select major appliances to keep clothes, food and dishes fresh, plus get an additional $100 off select laundry pairs. The best lineup is there at Lowes, valid through May 6, while supplies last. Selection varies by location. Mulch offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. See an associate or lowe's.com for details.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Sponsor Voice]

Guaranteed Human.