An Interview with Dr. Clive Svendsen
“Consciousness, Neuroimaging, and the Bicameral Mind,” an interview with renowned neuroscientist Clive Svendsen.
Clive Svendsen is Executive Director, Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a Julian Jaynes Society Board Member.
In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss new evidence for Julian Jaynes’s theory and Julian Jaynes’s neurological model, hypnosis as a vestige of the bicameral mind, meditation, the future of consciousness, artificial intelligence, HBO’s “Westworld,” and much more.
Watch the full interview, and many other lectures and interviews on Julian Jaynes’s theory, by joining the Julian Jaynes Society.
Transcript:
Marcel Kuijsten: Welcome, today I’m very pleased to have with me Dr. Clive Svendsen. Dr Svendsen is a neuroscientist and stem cell biologist. He did his pre-doctoral training at Harvard University. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in England, where he subsequently became a Welcome Fellow and established a laboratory focusing on stem cell research. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin in 2000, as a professor of Neurology and Anatomy, and founded their Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles and founded the Cedar Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute, which currently has 23 faculty members and over 120 staff. Dr. Svendsen is also a member of the Julian Jaynes Society Science Advisory Board. He has a long-standing interest in Julian Jaynes’s theory, and began his career looking at postmortem schizophrenic brain tissue and determining how the left and right hemispheres may drive aspects of the disease. Currently, his work involves transplanting stem cells into the brain and spinal cord of patients with ALS in order to establish how neural transplants may be able to modify neuronal functioning and survival. Welcome, Dr. Svendsen.
Clive Svendsen: Thank you, great to be here.
Marcel Kuijsten: So to start off, can you talk a little bit about your research that you’re doing right now, and some of the things you hope to achieve with that?
Clive Svendsen: Yeah, in general my research involves both treating and modeling neurological diseases like ALS, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s. And the two areas we’re working in is transplantation cells into the brain or the spinal cord to modulate the disease, and then actually growing the patient’s own cells in the petri dish to understand more about the disease. So those are the two areas that we’re focusing in.
Marcel Kuijsten: That is fascinating research. And how did you first become interested in Julian Jaynes’s theory, and also can you talk a little bit about some of your early research with schizophrenia?
Clive Svendsen: So I first became interested in Julian Jaynes through a very good friend of mine, Michael Byrd, when I was back in Boston in the early 80s, working at McClain Hospital, which is a Harvard hospital focusing on mental illness, mental disease. And Michael — I went went to his house for dinner one night, he gave me this weird looking book with a very long title, and said, “You have to read this Clive, it’s going to change your life.” And, you know, as usual people give you books and say it’s going to change your life — I started reading it the next day and I could not put it down. I mean, I’m a neuroscientist, I’m a neurobiologist, so it was kind of light reading for me, but when I got to the cultural part it was heavy, and I just really enjoyed learning about all these civilizations I didn’t didn’t really know about, I had a good grasp on history, but I hadn’t put together the pieces as Jaynes had. And that just just got me in — got me addicted — and fit beautifully with the work I was doing with people like Tim Crow and Flor Henry, because coincidentally — or not coincidentally maybe I was meant to do this — we were working on the on brains of schizophrenic patients, and looking at — back then, before genetics really — in the 80s we were looking at neurochemistry.
And the question we posed was maybe in schizophrenia is caused by an imbalance of the right brain/left brain. And we addressed that by doing neurochemistry on the right amygdala — that was the area we were focused in, which is to do with mood and emotion — and comparing it to the left amygdala, in patients who died of schizophrenia. So that was my research project back then, in the early days, and it got me very close to Flor Henry and to Tim Crow — including a visit to South America to visit the pyramids, which I’ll never forget, because all these conversations came up, like “how do these civilizations work all the way back then?” And because I was a Jaynes fan at that point, I remember pushing that idea — I don’t know if it affected Tim Crow or not, but I know he was a proponent. So yeah, that’s how I got into into this whole area.
Marcel Kuijsten: Okay yeah, and I know Tim Crow’s definitely mentioned Jaynes in some of his articles and has some research that very relevant about language and schizophrenia. And you also had a little bit of experience with hypnosis as well, right? Early in life?
Clive Svendsen: Yes, my father could hypnotize people. And he would he would take 10 people at a party if he held and he’d ask them all to stand up in front of him, and one after the other, and then he’d say, “You’re going backwards into the darkness, backwards into the darkness, backwards into the darkness,” just for a few minutes. And then they he said, “now fall back, fall back” — and if they fell back, without any stuttering, he knew he could hypnotize them, and if they didn’t, he pushed them off to the side, and said “I can’t hypnotize you.”
And so he pick his two cases, put them under through that kind of trance, and then do some post suggestions, like go up … and he actually did it to one of my girlfriends — and she didn’t believe it, I didn’t believe it. But he got her under — she went right under. And then in the middle of dinner — he said when I say “roses, roses, roses,” you’ll get up and water the plants. So in the middle of dinner, he said “roses, roses, roses,” she got up like a machine, watered the plants, and sat back down — didn’t have a clue she just done it. And it just really — I’m like, “oh my God, how did that work?”
And anyway, so you know following it forward, it’s now from Jaynes’s theory very clear, you know he just he just cut off executive function from …. Coincidentally, this area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and the cingulate, that someone at McClain hospital was actually working on at that time, and she was showing that the neurons don’t line up correct — like soldiers normally, all straight — they’re all wonky. And Francine Bennis, she was running the brain bank, and it’s all coming together now. And now, I’m you know looking retrospectively 30 years back, but it was all the pieces were all there — the executive function goes in the dominant hemisphere, and you lose that contro,l and then it switches back on again after you get out of the hypnosis, and you’re back.
So all you do with hypnosis is you turn that executive function off and now you’re back to the bicameral mind, and a very simple way of getting back. So every time something happened in my life with neuroscience — and I’ve been doing this for 35 years — it never has disproved Jaynes’s theory, it’s only supported it more. But we’re never going to prove it 100%, that’s going to be the challenge, but I can’t find any piece of evidence that really nails it, other than people who are very upset with the fact that he came up with this idea and they didn’t.
Marcel Kuijsten: Yeah, exactly. And definitely the evidence has been mounting in the decades since he published his book…