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

by Iain McGilchrist

It may be true that, to quote Patricia Churchland, ‘it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter … electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46 m’ [emphasis in the original].50 That is, I suppose, a sort of truth about the colour blue. That is one way in which blue discloses itself. Most of us would think it left rather a lot out. There are also other very important truths about the colour blue that we experience, for example, when we see a canvas by Ingres, or by Yves Klein, or view the sky, or sea, which are closed off by this. It is, in this sense, like the duck–rabbit: we can have only one ‘take’ on it at a time. We see things by seeing them as something. In this sense too we create the world by attending to it in a particular way.

We create the world by the manner of attendance. If we attend to he world in an embodied of somatic manner we experience it differently than if we do so in an abstract or cognitive manner; although the two are impossible to completely seperate or at the very least to imagine as such.