Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years, best known for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

"[2] Jaynes's solution touches on many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archeology, history, religion and analysis of ancient texts.

The family had a summer home in Keppoch, Prince Edward Island, which was a place Jaynes loved, and which gave him a Canadian connection for his entire life.

His studies were interrupted during the Second World War: because of his Unitarian principles, he applied for and received official recognition as a conscientious objector, but refused to comply with the U.S. government's law for pacifists; Jaynes spent three years in the penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, working in the prison hospital.

[8] He returned to Yale in 1954, working as an Instructor and Lecturer until 1960, making significant contributions in the fields of experimental psychology, learning, and ethology, and co-publishing some papers with Frank A.

"[18] This took Jaynes, as he put it, directly into "the earliest writings of mankind to see if we can find any hints as to when this important invention of consciousness might have occurred.

In the semi-historical Greek epic the Iliad Jaynes found "the earliest writing of men in a language that we can really comprehend, [which] when looked at objectively, reveals a very different mentality from our own.

His analysis of the evidence leads him not only to place the origin of consciousness during the 2nd millennium BCE but also to hypothesize the existence of an older non-conscious "mentality that he calls the bicameral mind, referring to the brain's two hemispheres".

[24] After publishing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes was frequently invited to speak at conferences and as a guest lecturer at other universities.

In 2006, his biographers Woodward and Tower reported that Jaynes "felt he had not truly succeeded" in his lifelong work because, in their words, "[h]e was right" about his feeling that "there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it.