The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

by Iain McGilchrist

Our intuitions may be uneasy about some of this, but then 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.

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. That does not mean, of course, that everything that exists owes its nature and existence solely to us. But it does mean that, whether we are scientists or not, we can only know the world as we have inevitably shaped it by the nature of our attention.

We make the world we live in by attending to it in a certain way, by our disposition towards it. Having done so, our experience of it then determines how we attend, and so on. There is no royal road to certainty about what the world is, or what it is like. 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.

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.

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. And metaphor is not a decorative turn, applied on top of the serious business of language in order to entertain: all thinking, most obviously philosophical and scientific thinking, is at bottom metaphorical in nature, though we are so familiar with the metaphors that we don't notice their existence. It is the metaphors which provide the ‘something else’ which we know more intimately from our embodied, preconceptual experience, and to which we are, in every word we use, properly understood, making a comparison. 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. They are how we understand everything. 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.

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.

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’.

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

I am constantly reminded, as I go about life in the modern Western world, of a story by Yuri Tynyanov, called Lieutenant Kizhe. Published in 1927, the story concerns an error of transcription in an official list of the Imperial army, whereby the word poruchiki, lieutenants, gets conflated with a subsequent syllable zhe, seeming to refer to a certain poruchik Kizhe, a Lieutenant Kizhe – who never existed. Despite this apparent drawback, Lieutenant Kizhe plays a starring role in subsequent military reports, rises through the ranks, where he never gets into trouble and is known for his dependability, marries, fathers a child, is decorated for bravery, and finally finds himself promoted by the Tsar to the rank of General. Mysteriously, when the Tsar demands to meet this human paragon, he cannot be found. The Tsar, in despair, mutters ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’, and accords him a state funeral.

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.

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