The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

We had modelled the brain as part of a machine, the hemispheres as mechanical parts of a mechanical body. There are, of course, only two possible models: seeing it as part of a machine or as part of a person. So we had a 50 per cent chance of getting it right. But we managed to make the wrong choice. Because if instead we had seen it as part of a person, we would immediately have noticed that we were asking the wrong question. 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.

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.

We all, whether we are poets or scientists, or just going about the business of daily life, have to begin somewhere, by a leap of intuition, as to what kind of thing it might be we are dealing with – not just any leap, of course, always a guided one, but nonetheless fallible and uncertain. Depending on where and how we leap is what we find. And depending on what we find is what we will find in due course, since it begins the process of hardening things up into what we call a certainty. 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.

The left hemisphere, as in birds and animals, pays the narrow-beam, precisely focussed, attention which enables us to get and grasp: it is the left hemisphere that controls the right hand with which we grasp something, and controls the aspects of language (not all language) by virtue of which we say we have ‘grasped’ the meaning – made it certain and pinned it down.

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.

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.

Although ‘seeing clearly’ is an image of grasping the truth, there is no such thing. At what level of magnification, at what level of description can you be said to have seen something clearly? Is a book seen clearly when it is

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.

Is this a noun vs verb?

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 neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere the devil's advocate, because it is always interested in the particular, upsetting the left hemisphere's tendency to collapse unlike into like, and see only what it is expecting to see.

It is not interested in understanding the world as a whole, only with having control of the bit it manipulates.

Tooliness (left) vs meaning (right)

Some kinds of rationality can be unreasonable. Rationality, the schematic carrying out of algorithmic procedures in the way that a machine would, is better done by the left hemisphere, it is true. But other kinds of reason, including the reason that tells you the limits of reason, depends on the right hemisphere.

The arts and humanities need to remember this: they don't have to feel inferior to science, and try to model themselves on them. Like physicists, but in a quite different way, they are in the ultimately important business of understanding the world and making sense of it, not just learning how to manipulate it.

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

Meanwhile a Lieutenant Sinyukhaev, who was years ago wrongly recorded as dead, struggles fruitlessly to assert that, contrary to received opinion, he is very much alive, and ends up a vagabond on the highways of Russia, relying on the charity of strangers. In the contemporary world, where I fear we are currently in thrall to the left hemisphere's way of thinking, this problem, that the piece of paper has become more important than the reality that it refers to, is endemic.

The authority we give to the left in our current culture is greater than the authority we give to the right

As Kant memorably put it, concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

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.

As Pascal wrote, ‘The ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can't get as far as understanding that.’

Almost three hundred years later, Gödel proved that this is necessarily so, not accidental but essential truth.

But to see this take...

Most people are completely and unreflectively seduced by the rhetoric of reason. And incidentally, some recent influential work in evolutionary theory suggests that this may be the whole purpose of logic – not to understand, but ...

Is it logical, or just a matter of faith, to believe that logic has no limits? Is it logical to rule out the possibility, understood for millennia, that there was a difference between the sort of knowledge that is available to logos and the sort that is available to mythos? Is it logical, or an assertion of faith, to assign reality to only one of these kinds of knowledge? Is it logical, or just a dogma, to assume that all will be understood, as long as we only carry on applying the model of the machine? Is there a cost to this approach, which, though it makes us powerful manipulators, puts us out of touch with so much that gives life value?

It is good for only one thing – manipulating the world.