The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it? This is a paradox that has often been noted, and has sometimes been attributed to a fundamental perversity, a sort of ‘pure cussedness’, in human nature.

Ultimately, we have come to believe that, whatever I or anyone else may say – really – when the chips are down, when the rhetoric fades, and we have stopped trying to cheer ourselves up by believing in sentimental ideas such as virtue, love and courage, the possibility of truly unselfish behaviour, or a realm of spiritual value – really, we are nothing but blind mechanisms, the dupes of our equally blind genes, with no choice but to play out the sorry farce that the force of evolution, so much bigger and greater than we are, dictates. But at least now we have the dignity of knowing that we are not deceiving ourselves.

People got terribly excited a while ago when they found what they took to be the ‘neural circuitry’ that lights up when you fall in love. So? What did they expect? That your brain would be a blank when you fell in love? Something lights up in my brain when I eat a cheese sandwich.

If we take a look at the brain, lying there on the pathologist's slab [fig 1], the first thing that will strike us is that, despite millions of years of evolution, it has remained deeply divided.

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.

What are the key distinctions? 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. In life we need both. In fact for practical purposes, narrowing things down to a certainty, so that we can grasp them, is more helpful. But it is also illusory, since certainty itself is an illusion – albeit, as I say, a useful one.

(the simple double pendulum – one pendulum attached to the bottom of another – is a classical example of ‘chaotic dynamics').

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.

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.

I'd say the defining quality of the right hemisphere's world is that it is all in relations, what I call ‘betweenness’.

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.

a self-consistent system of signs,

can come to seem more real than the lived world itself.

You may know the ‘Ship of Theseus’ paradox, also known as the ‘Growing Paradox’, because it arises in the case of all living things. It goes like this: the ship in which Theseus returned to Athens from his exploits in Crete was preserved there in the harbour as a memorial. With time the timbers perished one by one and were replaced, so that after thirty years none of the original timbers remained. Was this still the Ship of Theseus? This is an analogue of the problem that few of the cells in my body were there a year ago – so is it still my body? To anyone seeing the whole, and who realises that everything flows, the answer is clearly ‘yes’. As Novalis remarked, our body is a moulded river. However, to someone who sees only parts and believes that permanence is stasis, the answer is ‘no’.

Beautifully designed experimental research, which I detail in The Master and His Emissary, shows that the left hemisphere sees truth as internal coherence of the system, not correspondence with the reality we experience.

Surgeons have a saying that is, I sometimes think, only half-facetious: ‘the operation was a success, but the patient died’.

thought begins and ends in the right hemisphere, passing through the necessary staging post of the left hemisphere,

the origins and the end lie in the right hemisphere's world, but it is greatly enriched by what the left hemisphere can ‘unpack’ along the way.

It is like learning a piece of music: first you are drawn to play it as a whole; then you break it down into bits and practice certain passages, and analyse harmonic transitions, and so on; but in the performance all that must once again be set ruthlessly aside, or the results will be disastrous.

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 to persuade, to seduce, others and win a competitive argument.

Let me begin to sum up, before making some concluding remarks about where we are now. It used to be said, according to the popular cliché, that though the left hemisphere might lack charm, it was solid, down to earth, realistic and a sure path to the truth. But this is not at all the case. The left hemisphere is not in touch with the world. It is demonstrably self-deceiving, and confabulates – makes up a story, when it cannot understand something, and tells it with conviction. Michael Gazzaniga first demonstrated this in split-brain patients. Subsequent research shows that, unlike the right hemisphere, which tends toward self-doubt, it takes a distinctly flattering view of its own capabilities. And when, as in the case of a paralysed limb, it is confronted with evidence that all is not well, it refuses to recognise the problem. If forced to do so, it disowns it – won't take responsibility: the paralysed limb belongs to the person in the next bed.

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. Its attention is narrow, its vision myopic, and it can't see how the parts fit together. It is good for only one thing – manipulating the world. Its world is a representation, a virtual world, only. It neglects the incarnate nature of human beings, reducing them to the equivalent of brains in a vat. It reduces the living to the mechanical. It prioritises the procedure, without a grasp of its meaning or purpose. And it requires certainty where none can be found.

Doctors are less popular now than they were in the days when my grandfather practised, when there were quite literally only six treatments that worked. But they gave time to a relationship and understood its power to bring healing: which meant that they were often to be found at the deathbed, useless though this might now seem.

Sadly many of those doing the most interesting work in any field are increasingly having to do so outside the mainstream.

Despite the brittle optimism constantly proclaimed by advertising, and not infrequently by government spokesmen, the defining mood of the modern era is one of disappointment. That is not just my opinion: it's as near a fact as such things can be.