Shadowing Practice: Did Caveman Believe in God? - Learn English Speaking with Video

What if that little voice inside your head, the one you're using to listen to me right now, wasn't always there? What if it's an invention?

And a surprisingly recent one? It's a wild thought, but for most of human history, that private world inside your mind, where you think things over, might not have existed.

This is the core of a wild idea from a psychologist named Julian Jaynes.

He suggested that when faced with a choice, our ancestors didn't think as we do.

They listened.

They heard voices which they believed were direct commands from gods.

This isn't a metaphor. Jaynes proposed that early humans didn't just believe in gods, they heard them inside their own minds.

While most experts disagree and think this idea is way out there, it raises some fascinating questions.

And some evidence has led its supporters to ask, what if he was onto something?

To even begin to understand this, we have to look at a puzzle in our oldest stories.

If you read Homer's Iliad, you might notice something odd.

The characters, heroes like Achilles and Hector, almost never seem to stop and think for themselves.

They don't weigh options or have quiet debates inside their heads.

According to Julian Jaynes'controversial reading of the story, their actions are driven by something from the outside.

When Achilles is about to draw his sword in a rage, he doesn't take a deep breath and control himself. Instead, a goddess, Athena, appears, visible only to him, grabs him by the hair and tells him to stop.

For Janes, this wasn't just a fancy way of telling a story.

He argued this was a real description of how their minds worked, a different kind of human mind that experienced its own thoughts as the voices of gods.

Jaynes also looked at language. He argued that words for the mind had more physical meanings back then. For example, the word psyche, which today we might translate as soul or mind, may have just meant something physical, like your breath.

Many experts on ancient Greece disagree with this, but still, the heroes of the Iliad show a surprising lack of what we'd call an inner life.

It leaves us with a deep mystery.

Were these people just not telling us what they were thinking, or did they not even have a concept of an inside world to tell us about?

In 1976, Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes published a book with a truly mind-bending title, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

In it, he argued that until about 3000 years ago, humans weren't conscious like we are today, with that inner voice that tells the story of me. Instead, he claimed they had what he called a bicameral mind, which just means a mind with two chambers.

Here's how he pictured it.

Imagine your brain was split into two parts that didn't work together like ours do now.

One part was like a boss, and in new or stressful situations it would just shout a command.

The other part was like a worker. It would hear the command and just do it.

No questions asked.

Because people back then didn't have our sense of an inner me, they didn't think these voices were coming from inside their own head. They felt external, powerful, divine.

They were the voices of gods. According to Jaynes'idea, this wasn't just a belief, it was how their brains were wired.

People didn't believe a god told them to act, they heard the god tell them to act.

He argued this could explain how kings in ancient times had total power and how everyone managed to work together to build the first cities.

You didn't argue with a god's command, you built the pyramid.

It's a big jump in logic, and historians would say there were lots of other reasons, but it's a key part of his idea. Long before the Iliad, our ancestors were building their world around talking with unseen forces. For tens of thousands of years, there's evidence that humans were acting as if they were in a constant conversation with an invisible world.

There's evidence of people doing things with a deeper meaning, like using paints, going back 100,000 years or more.

Early modern humans were burying their dead on purpose, sometimes with special objects like beads. This doesn't prove they believed in gods, but it shows they had complex thoughts about what happens after death.

There are even ideas that other scientists heavily disagree with, suggesting that an ancient human relative, Homo naledi, may have performed funeral rituals much, much earlier. And then there's Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. Around 11,500 years ago, a shocking 6,000 years before Stonehenge, hunter-gatherers built a huge, complex temple with giant stone pillars.

This suggests that the drive to connect with a spirit world was a powerful motivator.

This has led some to think that building temples came before building towns, that the need to worship together actually kick-started civilization.

For most of our time on Earth, humans have acted as though we are surrounded by powerful forces that needed to be heard and kept happy.

So if this world of divine voices, real or not, was normal, what changed?

Why don't we all hear gods anymore? In his theory, Jaynes points to a time of total chaos about 3,000 years ago, the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

This was a terrible period when the great empires of the Mediterranean fell apart.

Historians think it was a perfect storm of war, hunger, climate change, and people fleeing their homes.

Jaynes argued that in a stable world, his two-part mind worked fine.

But in a chaotic world, the divine voices either gave bad advice or went quiet.

A command that led to your city being destroyed wasn't the voice of a god.

It was a disaster.

The divine authority that held society together fell apart.

Out of this disaster, Jane said, a new mental operating system had to appear.

With the gods silent, people had to learn to figure things out on their own.

They had to invent a new, private space inside their heads for making choices.

This was the birth of consciousness as we know it, the ability to look inward and think about the past and future in our own minds.

The voice of a god speaking to you was replaced by the voice of I speaking within you. We learn to talk to ourselves.

As proof, Jaynes looks at the stories that came after the collapse.

Compare the Iliad to the later Odyssey.

The hero Odysseus is totally different from Achilles.

He's clever, he lies, and he's always thinking things through inside his own head.

The gods are still around, but they interact with humans differently.

For Janes, Odysseus was a new kind of human, one who had learned to think for himself.

Maybe the most unsettling part of Janes'theory is the idea that the old brain wiring for this two-part mind hasn't disappeared.

He suggested it's just sleeping, and sometimes it can wake up.

He pointed to several things in the modern world as possible echoes of this ancient mind.

Think about people who hear voices, which is a symptom of conditions like schizophrenia.

People who experience this often feel the voices aren't their own thoughts but are coming from outside, sometimes giving them commands.

While the science is very complex, some modern brain scans have shown something interesting.

When scientists scan people's brains while they're hearing these voices, one part of the brain that creates language lights up, but at the same time, the part that hears sound also lights up, as if they're listening to someone else speak.

Now, to be crystal clear, this does not prove Jaynes was right about history.

Most scientists see this as a clue about how brains can create hallucinations today, not as proof that everyone's brains used to work that way.

Still, it shows how the brain can mistake its own activity for an outside voice.

Jaynes also pointed to things like hypnosis, or even the act of praying, speaking to a god and waiting for an answer, as leftover habits from a time when an answer was not just hoped for, but heard. So, did early humans talk to gods?

The ancient evidence shows that for tens of thousands of years, they certainly acted like they were listening to something. They built their whole world around rituals and actions with deep meaning, living their lives as if focused on an unseen world.

And according to the provocative and again mostly unproven theory of the bicameral mind, the answer is an even stronger yes. They didn't just talk to gods, they heard them.

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What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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