The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

Our increasing ability to manipulate the world does indeed appear somehow connected with its loss of meaning for us.

Manipulate in what sense? Is it similat to: the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't understand?

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.

is there really a place for intuition any longer? It is often demonstrably misguided, as is bound to be the case, being no more than the relic of an instinctual existence which has outlived its usefulness now that we are able to break free of the world of myth.

Damn sir i beg you to not be so loud

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.

The left hemisphere, we learnt, was rational and linguistic, while the right hemisphere was pink and Fig. 1 The brain viewed from above, with right hemisphere displaced to reveal the corpus callosum. fluffy, emotional, creative, vague and given to painting pictures.

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).

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.

My consciousness cannot directly interact with yours such that i can't perceive the world through your consciousness, and vice versa.

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.

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.

Applicable to atheism?

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. 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.

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 right hemisphere seems to be involved more with new experience, new events, things, ideas, words, skills or music, or whatever it may be, while they are still fresh, original and unique, and so to speak present, to the mind. The right hemisphere's world is present – or more precisely ‘presences’ to us, as Heidegger puts it.

the left hemisphere's world takes over once whatever it is is represented – literally ‘re-presented’ after the fact: once it is familiar and known, as an instance of something, a concept.

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

As things are present in all their particularity, with all their individual, incarnate qualities, they are mediated by the right hemisphere: as they become general, abstract quantities, they are mediated by the left.

Suffice to say that the right perceives the world as it is, with all its intricacies and complexities, while the left breaks it down in a more mechanical way?

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.

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.

Aaaahhhh

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

The left

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.

Fascinating, but I'm starting to get creeped out .

the defining quality of the right hemisphere's world is that it is all in relations, what I call ‘betweenness’. This starts with its having a relationship with the world at large, not seeing it as a separate object, ripe for manipulation.

both hemispheres are involved in reasoning and in emotion. 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. Deeper and more complex expressions of emotion, and the reading of faces, are best dealt with, however, by the right hemisphere.

Makes sense

As far as reason goes, the left hemisphere is better at carrying out certain procedures that involve manipulating numbers, but has less of a grasp than the right hemisphere of what those numbers mean.

Deductive logic, it turns out, 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.

This made me feel emotional, ngl.

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

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.

Word.

In life we need the contributions of both hemispheres. As Kant memorably put it, concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

An uncritical following of intuition can lead us astray, but so can an uncritical following of logic.

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.