Jan 2022 summary of Iain McGilchrist’s breakthru brain laterality discussion
If Iain is brand new to you, in a nutshell…
Everyone should read Iain McGilchrist’s wonderful book called The Master and his Emissary. His basic thesis is we live in a divided world, which is mirrored in our brain. The two different hemispheres of the brain permit us to conceive of the world in two asymmetrical, often conflicting ways. When the left hemisphere (the emissary) usurps the right hemisphere (the master), society becomes rigid, machine-like and pathological. When the two hemispheres dance together, we have collective surges of high culture, like the Renaissance ~ Andrew Sweeny on Medium.com 2017
EXCERPTS FROM “Insights from The Matter with Things by Tom Morgan
January 31, 2022
Iain’s [extremely simplified] thesis: There is a characterological difference between the hemispheres of our brain. Counter to pop psychology, both sides do similar things, but they do them in very different ways. Counter to scientific rebuttals, just because both sides can do similar things, doesn’t mean the way they do them isn’t radically important.
Moreover, there is an absolutely necessary tension between the two sides. McGilchrist likes to use the example of a bird. A bird uses its left hemisphere (LH) to identify if a grain is food or sand, while simultaneously using its right hemisphere (RH) to be on guard for predators. Narrow focus and broad focus, simultaneously and in balance. Without the narrow focus of the left, you can’t interact with the world and sort things into useful categories, without the right, you focus too narrowly and get eaten by a cat.
The LH treats the world like a predator would; it locks onto something to chase it down and kill it. The primary tool we now use to manipulate the world is language, so that’s where it dominates.
Like a child pulling the wings off a butterfly, the LH reduces things down to ingredients, so as to understand them and manipulate them, but it often kills what it touches.
the ideal is a Right => Left => Right transition. McGilchrist talks about the need for real world experience to originate in the right hemisphere, to be moved to the left for processing, but then returned to the right for synthesis into its global context. The musician hears a piece of beautiful music, deconstructs it into notes and learns it painstakingly, then eventually performs it intuitively. Problems emerge when we fail to do the essential final stage of putting the pieces back together.
The central idea of McGilchrist’s work is that of an imbalance between the hemispheres: the left should be the servant of the right, but it is now too often the master. McGilchrist illustrates why this is radically problematic. The LH has access to infinitely less information, yet tends to [merely get defensive] when faced with its own limitations.
The left hemisphere is more competitive; and, less able to admit when it’s wrong.
“It should be stressed that the right-hemisphere [deficit] patients virtually never respond ‘I don’t know’ to an open-ended question. Instead, they generally contrive an answer — confabulating if necessary — in seeming indifference to the inappropriateness of the response.” — Penelope Myers.
“In my opinion, it is the most stunning result from split-brain research … The right hemisphere does not do this. It is totally truthful.” — Michael Gazzaniga
A central problem is that the RH is comparatively mute. The LH, as its goal is power and control over the world, has greater usage of language, linearity, and logic. It is great at “grasping” things, breaking them down and working out how to use them, but it consistently misses the importance of the whole. Just because something is logical, consistent. and articulately expressed doesn’t make it [ethically coherent or morally appropriate].
McGilchrist’s general take is easily anticipated: we have overemphasized reductive reasoning at the significant cost of intuition.
Pascal, one of the greatest philosopher-mathematicians that ever lived, nonetheless said, ‘the ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize an infinity of things surpass it[left hemisphere ego]. It is indeed feeble if it can’t get as far as [this honesty and humility].’
“Reason alone will not serve. Intuition alone can be improved by reason, but reason alone without intuition can easily lead the wrong way. They both are necessary. The way I like to put it is that when I have an intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department. Then after I’ve checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department to make sure that it’s still all right.” — Jonas Salk
Impact on civilization: It originally seemed implausible to me that an “internal” imbalance in our brains could influence and reflect our “external” world.
Now I see it literally everywhere I look. I clearly observe limited LH thought in myself and in people around me, as well as the way our modern world is shaped and treated. Cultures across time have myths that warn about the dangers of exactly the hemispheric imbalance we are currently experiencing. In both ancient Greece and Rome, it heralded the collapse of their civilizations. John Glubb’s theory of civilizations found that they last on average two hundred and fifty years, and the “age of intellect” typically arrives just before a collapse. The period of most separation and disengagement from our environment also makes us the most fragile. McGilchrist thinks we’re now at urgent risk of it happening again.
Modernity is filled with grids and straight lines, features totally absent in nature. We exist separated from our immediate environment, with our lives increasingly mediated by screens and digital abstractions. Everything we value; intimacy, friendship, community is now provided in digital form, but with all the nourishment removed. We are already living in a simulation. Our focus is on safety, power, and control, yet we’ve never felt so disconnected. If the LH could invent a world, it would surely look a lot like this.
Why is any of this important to us as individuals? Carl Jung believed personal transition back from “ego” (LH) to “Self” (RH) was the meaning of life.
All that matters most to us can be understood only by the indirect path: music, art, humour, poems, love, metaphors, myths, and religious meaning, are all nullified by the attempt to make them explicit.
eight ideas that stood out.
Again, this isn’t a summary, just some resonant ideas and illustrations.
Anger. This is one of the most strongly lateralised of all emotions, and it lateralises to the LH. “What is striking is that anger, irritability, and disgust stand out as the exceptions to right hemisphere dominance, fairly dependably lateralising to the left hemisphere.” Hence whenever I get angry, or see others getting angry, I almost invariably notice it’s a reaction to a threat to the individual ego. It is now a staggeringly useful tool for self-knowledge.
Cooperation and competition. The LH provides competition, the RH cooperation. “the right hemisphere is engaged in social bonding and empathy, the left hemisphere in social rivalry and self-regard.”
The dangers of following scientific orthodoxy. Well into the 1980s, human infants were operated on without anaesthetic. The scientific consensus was that they couldn’t feel pain because they couldn’t verbalize it. “Their screams were just the creakings of a machine.” We might be committing the same atrocity with other species due to a related flawed logic.
As McGilchrist puts it “Life becomes lifeless — boring: a very modern concept (the word arose only in the eighteenth century, and is associated with a disengagement from the world which began with the Enlightenment)
Embodiment: As you may have read in my recent piece, embodiment seems like a critical missing piece for the rediscovery of our connection. It will not be surprising that it’s a RH trait. “It is widely accepted in clinical neurology that the right hemisphere is specialised for perception of the body… A meta-analysis shows that it is the right hemisphere that predominates in receiving and interpreting information from the heart.”
The book closes with a story related by a member of the Swiss Parliament Lukas Fierz:
Jung told us about his encounter with a Pueblo chief whose name was ‘Mountain Lake.’ This chief told him, that the white man was doomed. When asked why, the chief took both hands before his eyes and — Jung imitating the gesture — moved the outstretched index fingers convergingly towards one point before him, saying ‘because the white man looks at only one point, excluding all other aspects’.
Later in life, Fierz met a successful industrialist, self-made billionaire and significant adversary of his Green Party movement in Switzerland.
I asked him what in his view was the reason for his incredible entrepreneurial and political success. He took both hands before his eyes and moved the outstretched index fingers convergingly towards one point before him, saying ‘because I am able to concentrate on only one point, excluding all other aspects’. I remember that I had to swallow hard two or three times, so as not to say anything …
FULL TEXT: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/articles/insights-from-the-matter-with-things/
To Learn More
The Rebel Wisdom interview with Iain
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-matter-with-things-iain-mcgilchrist/id1414973780?i=1000542249242
