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

by Iain McGilchrist

Similar considerations apply to the thoracic vertebral canal in supplying the nerves that control respiration to the muscles of the chest wall.

But, and here is the thought-provoking oddity, examination of the earliest human skeletons, from long before the time we believe language arose, reveals canal sizes almost indistinguishable from those of modern humans. Why

many subtle aspects of language are mediated by regions of the right hemisphere which also mediate the performance and experience of music.

In both music and speech, the phrase is the basic unit of structure and function, and both speech phrases and musical phrases have melody and rhythm, which play a crucial role in their expressiveness.

There are those who believe that music is a useless spin-off, or epiphenomenon, of the development of language; there are those, on the contrary, who believe that language itself developed out of musical communication (a kind of singing); and finally there are those who hold that music and language developed independently but alongside one another, out of a common ancestor, which has been dubbed

why we should adopt the view that music came first?

In the first place, the ‘syntax’ of music is simpler, less highly evolved, than that of language, suggesting an earlier origin. More importantly, observation of the development of language in children confirms that the musical aspects of language do indeed come first. Intonation, phrasing and rhythm develop first; syntax and vocabulary come only later.

Newborns are already sensitive to the rhythms of language;34 they prefer ‘infant-directed speech’ – otherwise known as ‘baby talk’ – which emphasises what is called prosody, the music of speech.

they rely on aspects of right-hemisphere holistic processing capable of making fine discriminations in global patterns and having little to do with the analytic processing of language by the left

These processes, then, in newborns have more to do with the activation of areas of the brain which subserve the non-verbal, the musical, aspects of speech.

Salomon Henschen: ‘The musical faculty is phylogenetically older than language; some animals have a musical faculty—birds in a high degree. It is also ontogenetically older, for the child begins to sing earlier than to speak.’

Ultimately music is the communication of emotion, the most fundamental form of communication, which in phylogeny, as well as ontogeny, came and comes first.

‘the deeply emotional stirrings generated by music’, writes the influential anthropologist Robin Dunbar, ‘suggest to me that music has very ancient origins, long predating the evolution of

A metaphor asserts a common life that is experienced in the body of the one who makes it, and the separation is only present at the linguistic level.

Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’)105 or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings.

Our attention is responsive to the world.

Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.

Wittgenstein was sceptical of the scientific method for two main reasons: its tendency to ‘reduce’,

and the deceptive clarity of its models. He referred to the ‘preoccupation with the method of science … reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural

moral engagement with the world, depend on the right hemisphere.

The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and

abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.

IF THE TWO HEMISPHERES PRODUCE TWO WORLDS, WHICH SHOULD WE TRUST IF WE are after the truth about the world?

I believe that the relationship between the hemispheres is not equal, and that while both contribute to our knowledge of the world, which therefore needs to be synthesised, one hemisphere, the right hemisphere, has precedence, in that it underwrites the knowledge that the other comes to have, and is alone able to synthesise what both know into a usable whole.

Science has to prioritise clarity; detached, narrowly focussed attention; the knowledge of things as built up from parts; sequential analytic logic as the path to knowledge; and the prioritising of detail over the bigger picture.

Here uncertainty replaces certainty; the fixed turns out to be constantly changing and cannot be pinned down; straight lines are curved: in other words, Einstein’s laws account better than Newton’s.

the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world. These include: empathy and intersubjectivity as the ground of consciousness; the importance of an open, patient attention to the world, as opposed to a wilful, grasping attention; the implicit or hidden nature of truth; the emphasis on process rather than stasis, the journey being more important than the arrival; the primacy of perception; the importance of the body in constituting reality; an emphasis on uniqueness; the objectifying nature of vision; the irreducibility of all value to utility; and creativity as an unveiling (no-saying) process rather than a wilfully constructive process.

The mark of the true philosopher becomes not the capacity to see things as they are, and therefore to be awestruck by the fact of Being, but precisely the opposite, to keep cool in the face of existence, to systematise and clarify the

world, so that it is re-presented as an object of knowledge. The role of the philosopher, as of the scientist, becomes to demystify.

there is the primacy of wholeness: the right hemisphere deals with the world before separation, division, analysis has transformed it into something else, before the left hemisphere has re-presented it.

Metaphor (subserved by the right hemisphere) comes before denotation (subserved by the left).

Metaphorical meaning is in every sense prior to abstraction and explicitness.

The very words tell one this: one cannot draw something away (Latin, abs- away, trahere pull), unless there is something to draw it away from. One cannot unfold something and make it explicit (Latin, ex- out, plicare fold), unless it is already folded. The roots of explicitness lie in the implicit. As Lichtenberg said, ‘Most ...

The metaphor we choose governs what we see.

The paradox of philosophy is that we need to get beyond what can be grasped or explicitly stated, but the drift of philosophy is always and inevitably back towards the explicit.

These philosophers’ writings are replete with metaphorical images which not only embody,

but themselves express, implicitness.

It is, however, precisely the left hemisphere’s task to bring things into focus, to render the implicit explicit, in order that what is seen may become the object of our will.

With the beginnings of modernity our experience itself becomes increasingly pictorial. As Heidegger writes: ‘The world picture does not change from an earlier one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern

Explicitness always forces this sheering away, this concentration on the surface, and the loss of transparency – or more correctly semi-transparency.

Metaphoric meaning depends on this semi-transparency, this being-seen-and-not-being-seen.

Depth, as opposed to distance from a surface, never implies detachment. Depth brings us into a relationship, whatever the distance involved, with the other, and allows us to ‘feel across’ the intervening space. It situates us in the same world as the other.

What produces alienation is not depth, but lack of depth.

Depth is of great psychological significance, and it is relevant that in schizophrenia, which simulates an overactive left-hemisphere state, there is, as Louis Sass has shown, a perspectival slippage, a loss of grip on the frame of reference.24 Attention ceases to be paid to, say, the scene pictured on the paper, and is transferred to the plane of the paper itself. There is a loss of precisely the transparency that operates when we understand something in the normal way.

The left hemisphere is competitive, and its concern, its prime motivation, is power.

We must inhibit one in order to inhabit the other.

Research in schizophrenia, using neuropsychological testing, as well as EEG and other measures, demonstrates precisely a failure of

interhemispheric inhibition.

In schizotypy, too, there is known to be intrusion of left-hemisphere modes into righ...

What is more, such interhemispheric competition appears yet again to be asymmetrical, with the suppressive effect of the left hemisphere on the right being greater than that of the right on the