The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

Concepts such as the sacred or spiritual, which we invented in an attempt to find meaning in the world, are obviously outmoded, the product of misplaced guilt and primitive animism, and have no place in the lives of mature human beings in the twenty-first century.

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

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.

All existing things could be thought of as the product of this fruitful tension.

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 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.

As Kant memorably put it, concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. We need the contributions of both, but for different purposes.

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

We are not prepared to trust; we feel we must micro-control. The aim is to increase efficiency by avoiding what are conceptualised as waste or error, but it assures only one thing: mediocrity.

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.

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.

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