The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

In fact the whole idea that there might be meaning in life, like the idea that we have something called ‘consciousness’, emerged during evolution in order to dupe us into performing better.

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.

We believe we understand so much more than other animals because our brains have evolved. Why suppose this moment in evolution to have offered us everything that could be needed to understand the world? The fact that it may look that way to us now does not prove anything, except the impossibility of conceiving what it is that one cannot conceive.

Then there was a Volvo ad about the car for your right brain. That did it. From then on, no self-respecting scientist could be found to touch the topic. There developed, in reaction to this, a dogma that it was not worth looking at the issue, because there simply was no difference between the two hemispheres.

the brain is not only profoundly divided, but profoundly asymmetrical.

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

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.

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.

For one thing, whatever we know, we cannot know what it would be like in the absence of our knowing it, and different people find different things in the world. 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.

physics teaches us that, at the most fundamental level of existence, there simply are no discrete pieces of inert matter. Instead there are clusters of interrelated probabilistic events that change their nature when observed.

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.

A bird needs to be able, for example, to pick out a seed against the background of grit on which it lies, to pick up a particular twig to build a nest, and so on. But if that is the only attention it is paying, it will soon end up as someone else's lunch while it is getting its own, because it needs at the same time to pay a quite different type of attention to the world – a broad, open, sustained vigilance, without any preconception of what it is that may be found, be it predator or mate, foe or friend.

attention is an aspect of consciousness (a machine can carry out tasks, but it cannot attend)

that is what the word ‘attention’ means, the reaching out of a hand)

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.

certainty itself is an illusion – albeit, as I say, a useful one.

There is no certainty. The more closely one pins down one measure (such as the position of a particle), the less precise another measurement pertaining to the same particle (such as its momentum) must become. It is not possible to know the values of all of the properties of the system at the same time.

I sometimes think of the right hemisphere as what enables Schrödinger's cat to remain on reprieve, and the left hemisphere as what makes it either alive or dead when you open the box. It collapses the infinite web of interconnected possibilities into a point-like certainty for the purposes of our interaction with the world.

At what level of magnification, at what level of description can you be said to have seen something clearly?

When we say we see something clearly, we are not talking about perception but about a special kind of knowledge: when we can say we know that it is one of those. We have placed it.

An important consequence of this narrow-focus attention, aiming for certainty, is that it renders everything explicit. Just as a joke is robbed of power when it has to be explained, metaphors and symbols lose their power when rendered explicit.

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 otherwise be a hermetically sealed system of signs capable of meaning something in terms of embodied experience.

It follows that limiting the possible meaning of language by rendering it explicit also limits the possible meaning that could be found in the world.

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.

All systems in nature, from particles to the greater universe, from the world of cellular processes to that of all living things, depend on a necessary balance of the forces for stasis with the forces for flow.

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.

By contrast 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.

From the right hemisphere came careful observation of the natural world (the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales correctly predicted an eclipse of the sun); a sense of the uniqueness of the individual, with interests that needed to be harmonised with those of the community, which itself was seen as a living, changing entity that was more than the sum of its parts; and there arose, for the first time, wonderful, expressive depictions of the human face, narratives of human lives, and poetry rich in metaphor. It gave rise to the phenomenon of drama, whereby we see ourselves more clearly at a distance, but not in some detached and lifeless way – able more than ever to empathise. There was a keen sense of what needed to remain implicit, an understanding of the all-important conjunction of opposites, and, perhaps most strikingly, a sense of proportion and a sense of humour. From the left hemisphere came the working out of the fruits of natural observation into useful predictions of behaviour of natural bodies, the codification of laws, the creation of maps, the development of some aspects of mathematics, the introduction of monetary currency, the further evolution of written language (at this point starting for the first time to be written, as now in the West only, from left to right), and in general the systematisation of knowledge.