"The Battle of the Brain" by IAIN MCGILCHRIST
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The mind's great conflict spills over onto the world stage
By IAIN MCGILCHRIST
Why is the brain divided? If it is about making connections, why has
evolution so carefully preserved the segregation of its hemispheres?
Almost every function once thought to be the province of one or other
hemisphere—language, imagery, reason, emotion—is served by both
hemispheres, not one.
There is nonetheless a highly significant difference in how the two
hemispheres work, giving rise to two wholly distinct takes on the
world. Normally we synthesize them without being aware that we are
doing so. But one of the two hemispheres can come to dominate—and just
as this may happen for individuals, it may also happen for a whole
culture.
The neuropsychological evidence shows that the right hemisphere pays
wide-open attention to the world, seeing the whole, whereas the left
hemisphere is adept at focusing on a detail. New experience, whatever
its kind, is better apprehended by the right hemisphere, whereas the
predictable is better dealt with by the left. And because the right
hemisphere sees things in context, as inseparably interconnected, it
recognizes the vast extent of what remains implicit. By contrast,
because of its narrow focus, the left hemisphere isolates what it
sees, and is relatively blind to things that can be conveyed only
indirectly.
In humans, the left hemisphere controls the grasping right hand and
the bits of language that enable us to pin down meaning unambiguously.
It helps us manipulate and use the world, in pursuit of our aims. The
left hemisphere's world is sharply delineated and certain, along the
lines of the general's strategy map on the command room wall, where
the complexity of the world is stripped away. Yet we still need to see
the essentially human world as it is before we simplify and disconnect
it. A general needs to be in touch with the world in which his
soldiers actually fight. The knowledge that is mediated by the left
hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage
of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price
of emptiness.
The right hemisphere's take on the world is far more complex and
nuanced. Instead of distinct mechanisms, the right hemisphere sees
interconnected, living, embodied entities. In communication the right
hemisphere recognizes all that is nonverbal, metaphorical, ironic or
humorous, where the left is literalistic. The right is at ease with
ambiguity and the idea that opposites may be compatible.
There is a reason we have two hemispheres: We need both versions of
the world.
Without the right hemisphere, we are socially and emotionally
insensitive, and have an impaired understanding of beauty, art and
religion. Effectively autistic, we have no sense of the broader
context of experience. Meanwhile, without the left hemisphere, we
struggle to bring detail into focus. If a culture were ever to rely
excessively on one take alone, there would sooner or later need to be
a correction.
Yet in the West there has been such an imbalance. And as a
consequence, over the past 2,500 years, there has been a kind of
battle going on in our brains, the result of which has been, despite
swings of the pendulum, an ever greater reliance on the left
hemisphere.
The peculiar strengths of the West emerged in ancient Greece and
reflect what can be achieved when each hemisphere develops relatively
independently, but in harmony. In art, there was a startling
development of empathy in the representation of the human face, with
even the direction of gaze shifting towards the left, favoring the
right hemisphere. The great outpouring of tragic drama, the emergence
of irony and poetry rich in metaphor all suggest a new prominence of
the right hemisphere view. Similarly, empiricism, the right
hemisphere's approach to the world, flourished in science: The
philosopher Thales was able to predict correctly an eclipse of the
sun. At the same time, the formalization of many systematic bodies of
knowledge and the emergence of analytic philosophy suggest an advance
in the theoretical, which the left hemisphere can yield.
While the hemisphere balance was initially preserved, a struggle was
brewing. With time the partnership was lost, and peculiar weaknesses
begin to show. The left hemisphere—relatively rigid, rule-bound and
abstract in its view—begins to take precedence. With Parmenides, and
still more with Plato, philosophy shifted from a respect for the
hidden and implicit to an emphasis on what can be made explicit alone.
The previously acknowledged idea that opposites can agree became
anathema.
In the Roman world, too, the hemisphere views were reconciled at
first. But the balance achieved in the Augustan era, which
corresponded with a burgeoning of the arts, the codification of
jurisprudence and the rise of ideals of reasonableness and moral
rectitude, gave way to ever more rigidly systematized ways of
thinking, increasing bureaucracy and, ultimately, a decline in the
representation of the human figure and face. The imperial vastness of
late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of
concrete. The weight of rigid codification which served the left
hemisphere's way to power drove out the subtler sense of part to whole
which informed architecture of the Classical era.
A whole millennium later, the flowering of the Renaissance again
manifested this enhanced distinctness, yet cooperation, of the
hemispheres. It did so equally in science and the arts. There was an
openness to things as they are, not in theory, a respect such as one
sees, for example, in Montaigne, for our embodied nature, a delight in
the coincidence of opposites. There was a vast enlargement of context,
with the opening of deep perspectives in both time and space, which
situate the individual in relationship to the world at large: One sees
it in the poetry of Villon as much as in the paintings of Ghirlandaio.
A rise in harmony and counterpoint in music expressed the importance
of the relationship between part and whole. In Shakespeare, unique
individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the
play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged.
Individuals trump the category. Exuberant metaphor takes language far
beyond the explicit. Even the combination of humor and pathos which
characterized the period suggests a take on the world that was
mediated by the right hemisphere.
But with the Reformation, and with the beginnings of the
Enlightenment, there again saw a shift in mentality towards what is
certain, rigid, fixed and simplified. The left hemisphere was fighting
back, pushing for a renewed emphasis on symmetry and stasis. Ambiguity
was no longer a sign of richness, but of obscurity. Imagination was
mistrusted and metaphor became a lie. Rationalism came to replace the
humane balance implied in reason. As Descartes said, things can be
seen clearly only if they are seen singly, one by one. The world was
atomized. And with these developments came a rise in the mechanical
model as the only framework for understanding ourselves and the world.
This led to our own age, to a world where the right hemisphere, with
its broader view, has been systematically discounted. Like the brain
itself, the battle I describe is asymmetrical. Each swing of the
pendulum has carried us further into the territory of the left
hemisphere's world.
The two hemispheres also differ in their attitude to their
differences. The right hemisphere is inclusive in its attitude to what
the left hemisphere might know, but the left hemisphere is exclusive
of the right. Where the right hemisphere's world responds to negative
feedback, the left hemisphere gets locked ever further into its own
point of view. Its capacities are limited to doing the same things it
has always done, and no more.
And so our world has become increasingly rule-bound. Loss of the
implicit damages our ability to convey, or even to see at all, aspects
of ourselves and our world that transcend the mechanistic. Perspective
in art has receded along with harmony in music: We tend more and more
to see the world as a heap of intrinsically meaningless fragments.
There is an inevitable rise in bureaucracy, with paper replacing
people, and experience increasingly virtualized. In going all out for
what we believe will be our own happiness, we exploit the world and
see ourselves as alien to it, rather than seeing that our happiness
depends on being part of it, and therefore on helping it to thrive.
This is the world of the left hemisphere, ever keen on control.
Yet the pursuit of self-interest has not left us happier. Over the
last 25 years, a period during which there has been an enormous
increase in prosperity, levels of satisfaction with life have declined
in the U.S. Since those blessed with employment spend much of their
life at work, the quality of that experience matters. In 1955 in the
U.S., 44% of all workers enjoyed their working hours more than
anything else they did; by 1999 only 16% did, according to Gallup poll
data. What makes us happy is not wealth but the reciprocal
relationship between ourselves and one another, ourselves and the
world. This is something the right hemisphere alone understands, since
it is the ground of empathy and interconnectedness, where the left
hemisphere is concerned with manipulation and sees the world
atomistically.
The left hemisphere has evolved to help us use the world to achieve
our ends. But it is a specialist in denial. After a right hemisphere
stroke, subjects will often flatly deny that anything is wrong, even
when attention is drawn to the fact that half of their body may lie
there useless. Or they may say it belongs to someone else, the guy in
the next bed. The left hemisphere, ever optimistic, is like a
sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as it ambles towards the abyss.
Let's wake up before we free-fall into the void.
—This essay is adapted from psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's book "The
Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the
Western World," recently published by Yale University Press.