The Bicameral Muse

Ok, here you go, an actual scientific theory of the muse, taken from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:

According to Jaynes, there are two halves to the human mind, the conscious half, and what I’ll call the non-conscious half. (Subconscious and unconscious are used, and we don’t want any of their unfortunate connotations confusing us, anyway.) In general, you think of yourself as the conscious half, because it is logically impossible to be conscious of any of your non-conscious processes.

You may be aware that something mysterious is going on over there on the right side (usually) of your brain, from other clues, and the truth is, consciousness really doesn’t take up that much of your mental time. Most thinking and processing goes on non-consciously. Jaynes gives some nice examples:

It does seem that it is in the more abstract sciences, where the materials of scrutiny are less and less interfered with by everyday experience, that this business of sudden flooding insights is most obvious. A close friend of Einstein’s has told me that many of the physicist’s greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while he was shaving that he had to move the blade of the straight razor very carefully each morning, lest he cut himself with surprise. And a well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Kölher, “We often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath and the Bed. That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.”

I’ve had this experience myself in mathematics, which is, perhaps, why I recognize it so readily when writing fiction. (My muse is fondest of the Bed and the Bath, though she’s been known to act up on public transportation as well.) Jaynes explains how a certain amount of preparation goes into the process - setting up or contemplating the problem, then putting it aside, after which (one hopes) comes the flash of insight, and finally, the logical justification.

So, without getting into the more debated areas of Jaynes’ theory, we can establish certain facts about the muse. Because the muse is a non-conscious process, it cannot be controlled by the conscious mind, that is, by the writer herself. The muse’s process of creation can be neither “fun” nor painful, because the conscious writer, the only party involved who can feel amusement or pain, is involved in the act of creation purely as a spectator.

Of course, the muse can cause the writer no end of frustration when absent, and when present, can give the writer a feeling of transcendence. The point here is that any conscious writing, whether fun or sweat-and-blood painful, is not from the muse. The muse is, by definion, a non-conscious process. Just as you cannot have fun or feel pain while you are sound asleep, you cannot have fun or feel pain while the muse is producing. As Lori has noted, she may leave you quite a mess to clean up, but editing is not a muse process - it’s the logical justification at the end.

Another point to note about the muse so far is that what she writes is not necessarily better than what some other, conscious writer writes. She is, of course, generally accepted to be smarter than her own writer - she has the best bits of your brain in her non-conscious hands, so of course she’s going to show you up big-time.

Matters are a bit more complicated than this; it can be hard to separate the muse from the man. To do so, we’ll need more theory from Julian Jaynes. Join us next time on Mutual of Jemima’s Wild Fandom…

Comments are closed.