The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it? This is a paradox that has often been noted, and has sometimes been attributed to a fundamental perversity, a sort of ‘pure cussedness’, in human nature.

The world has changed since the philosopher Owen Barfield wrote those words thirty-five years ago.

Our increasing ability to manipulate the world does indeed appear somehow connected with its loss of meaning for us. Why? And does it even matter?

An influential strand in contemporary thinking suggests that the quest for meaning is itself meaningless.

Instead of resorting to myths to explain what we cannot understand, we now know that it is only a matter of time before science will offer us the answers.

In fact the whole idea that there might be meaning in life, like the idea that we have something called ‘consciousness’, emerged during evolution in order to dupe us into performing better.

The evlution 'consciousness' position.

Ultimately, we have come to believe that, whatever I or anyone else may say – really –

we are nothing but blind mechanisms, the dupes of our equally blind genes, with no choice but to play out the sorry farce that the force of evolution, so much bigger and greater than we are, dictates.

this vision is less compelling than it looks.

I think there is in fact evidence that it may itself be a cruel deception, one that we have been far too gullible in swallowing. And I think the explanation may have something to do with the evolution of our brains.

Good message, firmly seated in evolution though.

I am not asking you to listen to what I have to say about the brain on such flimsy pretexts. I am asking you to consider the facts: that what we experience is mediated by neural tissue, a lot of it in the brain, and that that neural tissue inevitably governs the nature of, indeed places constraints upon, what it is we are able to find in the world, in predictable ways. That's all. It doesn't tell us what we are – or how, or why, we are what we are: but it may tell us what we are missing.

We believe we understand so much more than other animals because our brains have evolved. Why suppose this moment in evolution to have offered us everything that could be needed to understand the world?

So let me go back to the brain, but with a degree of scepticism. My aim will be to illuminate not so much what we are, which no brain can tell us, but what we, and the world we create, are not – which it can.

this assertion is wrong in the face of Jaynesian evidence.

Looking at the brain may, funnily enough, even help us get a clearer view of the folly of trying to reduce mind to matter.

Evolution would never have sacrificed the apparent advantages of massively greater interconnectivity, unless there were a commanding advantage in, at the same time, keeping some things apart.

Fig. 1 The brain viewed from above, with right hemisphere displaced to reveal the corpus callosum.

Gradually, with unfolding research, it became obvious that both hemispheres seemed to contribute to language, both to visuospatial imagery: both were involved in reason and both in emotion, which were inextricably involved with one another. In fact it didn't matter what it was our brains were engaged in doing, both hemispheres were in it up to the neck (or whatever a hemisphere has for a neck).

Because the brain is not only profoundly divided, but profoundly asymmetrical. There are clear, subtle but significant, observable differences at every level.

(the right hemisphere is bigger and heavier in all social mammals);

Right at the core of our being, staring us in the face, is a massive fact or set of facts, which science should have been investigating, not denying. How had this strange dogma, this strange case of denial, come about?

I think it can be attributed to adopting the wrong model in our attempts to understand what we were looking at.

We can only ever understand anything by comparing it with something else that we think we already understand better.

The foundation of metaphor.

Instead of asking, as of a machine, what it does – does it ‘do’ reason, emotion, language, imagery? – we should have asked – as of a person – what's he or she like? How, in other words – with what values, goals, interests, in what manner and in what way – did it do what it did.

I should say that I do not adopt the naïve realist view of scientific materialism that there just is a world ‘out there’ unaltered by our experience of it, which like so many Geiger counters or photosensitive plates we can do no more than register.

whether we are scientists or not, we can only know the world as we have inevitably shaped it by the nature of our attention.

More than that, physics teaches us that, at the most fundamental level of existence, there simply are no discrete pieces of inert matter.

Matter is precisely as hard to explain as consciousness, so that trying to reduce one to the other would not help, even if it were not a strictly meaningless exercise.

On the other hand I am just as sceptical of the naïve idealist view, espoused by some post-modernists, that reality is all in our heads – we make it all up. For one thing there would be no point in my writing this, since you don't exist to read it.

What we do not expect to find, we just will not see: much elegant research demonstrates that we are essentially blind to what we do not think is there.

one consciousness can't be committed to two kinds of attention simultaneously.

Poor definition of consciousness.

(for that is what the word ‘attention’ means, the reaching out of a hand)

Metaphor for 'attention'.

since each hemisphere plays a part in everything we experience. We would need to cover differences in the ways of conceiving and construing knowledge itself, what we mean by newness, by wholeness, by types and aspects of reason and emotion, types and aspects of language, music, space, depth and time, as well as morality and the self.

Here I can present only some conclusions.

What are the key distinctions?

One way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere's raison d'être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere's is to open them up into possibility.

The old, fallacious belief that the behaviour of all systems was fundamentally predictable arose because the systems studied were abstracted from their real world complexity and studied very close to equilibrium, where the parts had settled into a balanced state.

When we say we see something clearly, we are not talking about perception but about a special kind of knowledge: when we can say we know that it is one of those. We have placed it.

Just as a joke is robbed of power when it has to be explained, metaphors and symbols lose their power when rendered explicit.

And metaphor is not a decorative turn, applied on top of the serious business of language in order to entertain: all thinking, most obviously philosophical and scientific thinking, is at bottom metaphorical in nature, though we are so familiar with the metaphors that we don't notice their existence.

Folding in to Jaynesian theory.

It is metaphors that carry us across (that is what the word ‘metaphor’ means) the implied gap between language and the world, and make what would otherwise be a hermetically sealed system of signs capable of meaning something in terms of embodied experience.

Metaphor of metaphor.