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scanning studies provide further confirmatory evidence of right-hemisphere dominance in alertness and sustained
The other main axis of attention is selectivity (focussed and divided attention). Turning to focussed attention first, the story here is quite different. Deficits in focussed attention are more severe with left-hemisphere
To sum up, the right hemisphere is responsible for every type of attention except focussed attention.
right hemisphere alone attends to the peripheral field of vision from which new experience tends to come; only the right hemisphere can direct attention to what comes to us from the edges of our awareness, regardless of
Novel experience induces changes in the right hippocampus, but not the left.54 So it is no surprise that phenomenologically it is the right hemisphere that is attuned to the apprehension of anything
the left hemisphere to have an inhibitory effect on the right hemisphere to a greater extent than the right hemisphere has on the left.
The full significance of the left hemisphere’s incapacity for, and the right hemisphere’s affinity for, metaphor will become clear in the next chapter. While it does, certainly, mean that understanding of the indirect, connotative language of poetry
depends on the right hemisphere, the importance of metaphor is that it underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and
Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle, for that matter, but are irreducible aspects of the phenomenal world, like colour.
Empathy is intrinsic to morality.
Moral judgment involves a complex right-hemisphere network, particularly the right ventromedial and orbitofrontal cortex, as well as the amygdala in both
Our sense of justice is underwritten by the right hemisphere, particularly by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.481 With inactivation of this area, we act more selfishly. This is probably related to the right frontal lobe’s capacity to see the other’s point of view, and for empathy in general.
The left hemisphere’s ‘stickiness’, its tendency to recur to what it is familiar with, tends to reinforce whatever it is already doing. There is a reflexivity to the process, as if trapped in a hall of
mirrors: it only discovers more of what it already knows, and it only does more of what it already is doing.
The right hemisphere by contrast, seeing more of the picture, and taking a broader perspective that characteristically includes both its own and the left hemisphere’s, is more reciprocally inclin...
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However, systems can become unstable and enter a situation in which ‘positive feedback’ obtains – in other words, a move in one direction,
The right hemisphere, then, is capable of freeing us through negative feedback. The left hemisphere tends to positive feedback, and we can become
Damage to the right
parietal and medial regions may result in confusions of self with other;521 damage to the right frontal lobe creates a disturbance of ego boundaries, suggesting ‘that the right hemisphere, particularly the right frontal region, under normal circumstances plays a crucial role in establishing the appropriate relationship between the self and the world’.
The frontal lobes achieve what they achieve largely through what is normally described as inhibition of the posterior part of the same hemisphere.
if the right hemisphere’s immediacy of association with emotion and the body leads it to prioritise what is close, what is ‘mine’, the right frontal lobe brings distance and
delay to espousing ‘my’ position.
An appropriately cautious and objective review of the literature to date by Michael Trimble concludes that there is a slow accumulation of evidence in favour of religious experience being more closely linked with the ‘non-dominant’ hemisphere, especially the posterior right hemisphere (temporoparietal region).
I want to draw it together, and suggest that the hemispheric differences are not just a curiosity, with no further significance, a bunch of neuropsychological facts, but actually represent two individually coherent, but incompatible, aspects of the world.
new experience of any kind – whether it be of music, or words, or real-life objects, or imaginary constructs – engages the right hemisphere. As soon as it starts to become familiar or routine, the right hemisphere is less engaged and eventually the ‘information’ becomes the concern of the left hemisphere
In one sense knowledge is essentially an encounter with something or someone, therefore with something ‘other’ (a truth embodied in the phrase ‘carnal knowledge’).
It’s the way we naturally approach knowledge of a living being; it’s to do with individuals, and permits a sense of uniqueness; it’s ‘mine’, personal, not
something I can just hand on to someone else unchanged; and it is not fixed or certain.
But there is another kind of knowledge, a knowledge that comes from putting things together from bits.
they are associated with the left hemisphere: an affinity with the non-living; with ‘pieces’ of information; general, impersonal, fixed, certain and disengaged.
Latin cognoscere, French connaître, German kennen; the second by Latin sapere,
What Goldberg and Costa may be uncovering is not just something about novelty and familiarity but about two whole ways of knowing in the two hemispheres.
To know (in the sense of wissen) is to pin something down so that it is repeatable and repeated, so that it becomes familiar in the other sense: routine, inauthentic, lacking the spark of life.
‘it is through “knowing” [erkennen, re-cognition] that we come to have the feeling that we already know [wissen] something; thus it means combating a feeling of newness and transforming the apparently new into something
Our senses respond to the difference between values – to relative, not absolute, values.
Thus how we think about our selves and our relationship to the world is already revealed in the metaphors we unconsciously choose to talk about it.
The model of the machine is the only one that the left hemisphere likes; remember that it is specialised in dealing with tools and machines. The machine is something that has been put together by the left hemisphere from the bits, so it is understandable purely in terms of its parts; the machine is lifeless and its parts are inert – the tappets don’t change their nature with their context.
The unconscious, while not identical with, is certainly more strongly associated with, the right hemisphere
the unconscious is ‘a particular realm of the mind with its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression and its peculiar mental mechanisms which are not in force elsewhere’.14 This is just another model, and like all models it should be taken for what it is, a comparison, not an identification.
Language is the province of both hemispheres and, like everything else, has different meanings in either hemisphere.
While it is true that the left hemisphere expansion is now associated with language functions,15 there are difficulties with the belief that it is language that necessitated the
The planum temporale, which in humans is certainly associated with language, and is generally larger on the left than on the right, is also larger asymmetrically, also on the left, in orang-utans, gorillas
And Yakovlevian torque, too, is present not only in fossil humans, but in the great
it is not actually true that language is subserved by one hemisphere: its functioning is distributed across the two.
If it is true that most syntax and vocabulary, the nitty-gritty of language, are in most subjects housed in the left hemisphere, it is nonetheless the right hemisphere which subserves higher linguistic functions, such as understanding the meaning of a whole phrase or sentence in context, its tone, its emotional significance, along with use of humour, irony, metaphor, and so on.
It is, however, an evolutionary fact that, for using and making, we have tended strongly to prefer the right hand, which is controlled by the left side of the brain – in fact by part of the brain that is, as it happens, very close to Broca’s area, the part of the left hemisphere that has come to subserve the expressive power of syntax and vocabulary, the names of things and how we put them together.
Most bizarrely, it would seem that it is not an expansion at all. It’s just that there is a deliberate inhibition of expansion in the corresponding area in the right hemisphere.
‘It is safe to assume that the asymmetry that ended up leading to language is unlikely to have appeared because of language … It is likely to have appeared for some other reason and basically got co-opted by
the evidence suggests that we did not develop the degree of sophisticated symbol manipulation that language requires until a much later point, possibly as little as 40,000 years ago, but at any rate not earlier than a mere 80,000 years ago, when the first cultural artefacts, along with evidence of visual representation, suddenly and profusely arise, and humans began to adopt ritualised burial of the
In order to reach the tongue, the nerve which supplies it, the hypoglossal nerve, has to pass through an opening in the base of the skull, called the anterior condylar canal. The amount of work a nerve has to do is reflected in its size; in turn the size of the hole through which it passes indicates the size of the nerve. So by measuring the size of the canal in the base of the skull, we can get a very good idea of how much articulatory work the tongue of the skull’s ‘owner’ had to do.
