Julian Jaynes was an American psychologist who served at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His career was dedicated to exploring the problem of consciousness, which he described as "the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it."

Jaynes's work spans multiple disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archaeology, history, religion, and the analysis of ancient texts. He argued that consciousness is a cultural development based on metaphorical language that occurred about 3,000 years ago. Before this development, humans operated with a mentality Jaynes termed "the bicameral mind," vestiges of which he believed are still present throughout modern society.

Jaynes's definition of consciousness is synonymous with what philosophers now refer to as "meta-consciousness" or "meta-awareness," which is crucial to understanding his theory.