The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

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.

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.

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

If we ask this question – what sort of a way of engaging with the world, each hemisphere has, and thus what sort of a world each hemisphere engages with – we find a pervasive pattern, giving rise to an entirely coherent picture.

Even the same person finds different things on different occasions, when the context or the type of attention changes.

we can only know the world as we have inevitably shaped it by the nature of our attention.

I take it that we bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

The right hemisphere underwrites sustained attention and vigilance for whatever may be, without preconception. Its attention is not in the service of manipulation, but in the service of connection, exploration and relation. That is, after all another reason why we reach out a hand – to connect, to create, to share in another's fate, or to explore the world for what it is.

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.

Another way of thinking of the difference between the hemispheres is to see the left hemisphere's world as tending towards fixity, whereas that of the right tends towards flow.

The left hemisphere's take on things comes from assessing thousands of points of information in turn and trying to reach a conclusion about the whole picture that way. This has the profoundest consequences for the way it sees the world, when contrasted with the take of the right hemisphere, which sees things as a whole, never as isolated particles independent of a context.

Only the left hemisphere encodes tools and machines – you will remember that the purpose of the left hemisphere is to allow us to manipulate the world, not to understand it.

The left hemisphere abstracts and generalises, where the right hemisphere's world remains truer to each embodied instance, and appreciates the unique.

The left hemisphere's world is a representation only. It is like a map, useful precisely because almost all the information about the land to which it refers has been left out.

The left hemisphere is not in touch with reality but with its representation of reality, which turns out to be a remarkably self-enclosed, self-referring system of tokens.

The left hemisphere is especially good at voluntary and social expressions of emotion and one of the most clearly lateralised emotional registers is that of anger, which lateralises to the left hemisphere.

Deductive logic, it turns out, depends on the right hemisphere.

left hemisphere sees truth as internal coherence of the system, not correspondence with the reality we experience.

Again there is always a tension between these perspectives, and we need to be able to learn from either of them, but there is a serious problem when we begin to see truth as being, in the words of one of the experimental subjects with her right hemisphere inactivated, just ‘what it says here on this piece of paper’.

Here again we come up against one of the defining differences between the two hemispheres: the right hemisphere is perfectly happy with ‘both/and’ – sees in fact how necessary that is in understanding the world. The left hemisphere, by contrast, says: ‘What's the matter? Can't you make up your mind?’ It has to be ‘either/or’, black or white, never a life within the full colour spectrum.

So the meaning of an utterance begins in the right hemisphere, is made explicit (literally folded out, or unfolded) in the left, and then the whole utterance needs to be ‘returned’ to the right hemisphere, where it is reintegrated with all that is implicit – tone, irony, metaphor, humour, and so on, as well as a feel of the context in which the utterance is to be understood.

If I say ‘it is hot in here’, your right hemisphere knows that what I mean is ‘please open the window’, while your left hemisphere thinks I am offering helpful meteorological data. The left hemisphere is adept at procedures, but sees them as ends in themselves.

is demonstrably self-deceiving, and confabulates – makes up a story, when it cannot understand something, and tells it with conviction.

The left hemisphere tells us that the quest for meaning is meaningless, because it is not equipped to deal in meaning or understanding, but manipulating and processing.

More generally, despite apparently having at least secured ourselves some leisure (for what, by the way?), we now find ourselves slaves of the machine that was to liberate us, working longer hours and longer years, while the work itself gets less intrinsically rewarding: more controlled, less skill-dependent, lacking an obvious purpose other than the accumulation of more wealth.

is, I repeat, a culture that is very good at using the world, as if it were just a heap of resource to further our plans. But are our plans necessarily wise?

the left hemisphere is also, as I suggest in the book, the Berlusconi of the brain – the political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour.

The left hemisphere's values are those of utility and pleasure. But meaning cannot come from this linear project, any more than happiness can be pursued.

Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.

It comes from the world as process, not from the world as a thing, and relies on patient and consistent attention to whatever might remind us of what meaning might be like. Whatever slight movement of recognition ensues might then begin to grow in and inform a mind not entirely closed to its existence.