The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist

Third, the left hemisphere’s world view is easier to articulate. The left hemisphere is the speaking hemisphere: the right hemisphere has literally no voice. The attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature; as a result, finding the language to put across the way of being of the right hemisphere is simply harder than doing so for the naturally explicit left hemisphere. The left hemisphere relies on concatenations of serial propositions and the literal aspects of language to make meaning explicit; by contrast, metaphor and narrative are often required to convey the implicit meanings available to the right hemisphere, and in a left-hemisphere-dominated culture, metaphors and narratives are disregarded as myths and fables or, at worst, downright lies. We live in an era where articulating and making explicit are of increasing importance and are treated as a mark of truth, and their inverse treated with increasing suspicion. Partly this is another sign of the ‘move to the left hemisphere’ that I am describing, but that is not the only reason for it: it is also necessitated by large-scale movements of populations with different languages and cultures, as well as the sheer size of modern urban societies in which one can no longer rely on much that was once taken for granted in smaller and more closely knit communities. The implicit has, now, to be made explicit. The catch is that in becoming explicit it is no longer the same thing at all.