More than a dozen studies published over the past
ten years have to a large degree vindicated Jaynes’s
neurological model. Furthermore, the mainstream
psychiatric view of auditory hallucinations fails to
explain why they occur on a continuum throughout
society (including children), frequently command
behavior, and often are religious in nature. Simplistic
labeling of historical or contemporary hallucinations
as instances of schizophrenia or temporal lobe
epilepsy40 fails to explain their origin or function. In
the years to come it will be interesting to see how
both advances in brain imaging technology and our
rapidly expanding understanding of genetics and
epigenetics continue to shed new light on the predictions
Julian Jaynes made more than three decades ago.