The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

making a comparison. 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

your life. 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.

isolated points, the left hemisphere imagines that there are atomistically distinct entities, rather than seeing everything embedded in its context, which radically changes its nature: part

of a web of interconnections.

the left hemisphere, this is true. 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.

flows, the answer is clearly ‘yes’. As Novalis remarked, our body is a moulded river.

influential work in evolutionary theory suggests that this may be the whole purpose of logic – not to understand, but to persuade, to seduce, others and win a competitive argument.

It is not reasonable. It is angry when challenged, dismisses evidence it doesn't like or can't understand, and is unreasonably sure of its own rightness. It is not good at understanding the world.

financial collapse was a perfect example of the following of algorithms that had been ‘proved’ to work in the abstract, and was repeatedly marked by self-referential loops of reasoning that cut it off from the