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

by Iain McGilchrist

However, my position in brief is that the nature and structure of the brain must be reciprocally related to the nature and structure of consciousness, but does not necessarily give rise to it (rather than, say, transduce it). It might, or it might not.

What I suggest is that nowadays we use – draw on the potential of – our brains differently from the way in which we have used them at different periods in the past, periods which also differ from one another in this same respect.

They work well together not because they have the same role, but precisely because they have different ones.

The hemispheres are vastly more connected within themselves than they are connected to one another, though of course interhemispheric information transfer is still important.

Consider Taleb's concept of antifragility in decentralised systems

we should not expect absolute differences in order for the differences to be substantial, even dramatic, as in the case of those two countries.

sometimes in life it is the differences that count.

Science, truly to be such, must centre not on descriptions and names but on principles – that is, generalisations, theories, relationships, interconnections, explanations about and among the facts.

With that comes the knowledge that those ‘two worlds’ the philosophers intuited are each underwritten by one hemisphere of the brain.

If a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterise most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathise.

First, the left-hemisphere view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff. Its purpose is utility and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing ‘things’.

the decline of civilisation has been associated, not just with more left-hemisphere ways of thinking, but appropriately with forms of military or economic imperialism, and a consequent overextension of administration, a coarsening of values, and a failure of vitality, vision and integrity.

Increased structure, inflexible order as cause for sociatel decline. Excessive deference to the left hemisphere as deference to systems of tyrannical order or totalitarianism

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.

The role of myth as comunicating understandings about the world can be ideNtified though the right hemisphere's capacity for metaphor and interconnectivity. Expessing it explicitly requires a reduction in connectivity to achieve higher resolution linguistically. I.e. Words narrow meaning-infomation in the same way tri-coloured pixels narrow visual information. e.g. The journey of articulating ethics from enbodied action, through narrative, to explicit legalism and philosphy.

The implicit has, now, to be made explicit. The catch is that in becoming explicit it is no longer the same thing at all.

The cerebral and the abstract – for example, management and its systems – have become more highly valued than the hands-on task that management exists to serve, with the odd effect that the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it.

Reward is given for progression to management not develoent and practice of field speciality. To earn better a teacher must become a manager.

There is a self-reflexive hall of mirrors at work, where logic seems to lead back to a solution within the system itself, rather than a need to break out of it.

The matrix maintains its own systems of reality, an internal logic for which to break put of seems illogical. Plato's Cave.

the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on it to clarify, ‘unpack’ and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding, to produce a new, now enriched, whole.

The right hemisphere’s view is inclusive, ‘both/and’, synthetic, integrative; it realises the need for both. The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, ‘either/or’, analytic and fragmentary – but, crucially, unaware of what it is missing. It therefore thinks it can go it alone.

One can not know what one does not know so one must eternally push the perimeters of ones percieved conceptual understanding, to broaden them, to embrace and come to know the unknown.

Increasing technologisation and bureaucratisation of life help to erode the more integrative modes of attention to people and things which might help us resist the advances of technology and bureaucracy, so that in this way they aid their own replication. They make us more like themselves.

Imagine The Borg. We are ourselves this self replicating threat, the neurons or nodes of a societal neurosis.

The catch is that in such a society as ours, any apparent inconsistency is treated as a sign of error or intellectual muddle. Ambiguity is no longer a strength, given that truth is known to be complicated and many-layered; it is a weakness, since truth is thought of as single and straightforward.

The reason we disown or decry complexity in an individual despite knowing that we ourselves contain that same complexity. Additionaly, a cause of the self-disatisfaction (self-loathing) in the face of our own complexity.

what the left hemisphere can offer must be used in service of what the right hemisphere knows and sees, not the other way round.

Why we ask thd question 'so what' of the kids regarding their inquiries. I.e. How does knowin 'this' help or connect us.

‘The question is not what you look at, but what you see.’8

Partly for this very reason it nonetheless seems to me worthwhile to try to make links outside and across the boundaries of the disciplines, even though the price may be that one is always at best an interested outsider, at worst an interloper condemned to make mistakes that will be obvious to those who really know.

Intradisciplinary understandings and their shortcomings.

It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle,

The sense of duality within a whole and the importance of active tension between the two apparent opposites the resolve a conception of the whole. Recall Frankle's metaphor of the cylinder observed from two points in a lower dimension or the idea of raising a point into progressively higher dimensions (point, line, square, cube, tesseract, osv.)

The difference, I shall argue, is not in the ‘what’, but in the ‘how’ – by which I don’t mean ‘the means by which’ (machine model again), but ‘the manner in which’, something no one ever asked of a machine. I am not interested purely in ‘functions’ but in ways of being, something only living things can have.

Responding to a childs behaviour: the means may be conversational or physical, but the manner of the conversation (or physicality) has a distinct effect on the affect experienced by the child. So to the way the hemispheres perceive experience, based on their disparate manners of interpretation.

the left hemisphere tends to deal more with pieces of information in isolation, and the right hemisphere with the entity as a whole, the so-called Gestalt – possibly underlying and helping to explain the apparent verbal/visual dichotomy, since words are processed serially, while pictures are taken in all at once.

What role does imitation play in releasing us from determinism

Return to this whem finished the book; how has he answered this?

The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation.

The responsibility hinted at and declared by people like the Buddhists, the Stoics and even writers like Shakespeare.

I believe that over time there has been a relentless growth of self-consciousness, leading to increasing difficulties in co-operation.

Compare to mythological assertions of the parallel ascension of self-consiousness and 'suffering' e.g. Genesis

Here I suggest that it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand.

Sounds like the goal of enlightenment in meditation; to recognise this self referencing 'hall of mirrors'. I.e. A mentalscape in which everything appears to confirm the existamce of Self.

To say that language holds truth concealed is not to say that language simply serves to conceal truth (though it certainly can do), or, much worse, that there is no such thing as truth (though it may be far from simple).

reason, which, along with imagination, is the most precious thing we owe to the working together of the two hemispheres.

Brings to mind imagery pf Hugin og Mugin

even if it were possible for mind to be ‘reduced’, as we say, to matter, this would necessarily and equally compel us to sophisticate our idea of what matter is, and is capable of becoming, namely something as extraordinary as mind.

In other words he believed that the brain not merely mediated our experience, but shaped it too.

Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in a similar way … We receive along with our body a highly differentiated brain which brings with it its entire history, and when it becomes creative it creates out of this history – out of the history of mankind … that age-old natural history which has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely the history of the brain structure.8

We are the products of the past both biologically and psychologicaly (these two inherently intwined in each other), not to mention the historicity of elements or factors that shape these, such as evolution and narrative.

But the evolution of the brain is different from the evolution of the body. In the brain, unlike in most other human organs, later developments do not so much replace earlier ones as add to, and build on top of, them.

In this sense the brain is – in fact it has to be – a metaphor of the world.

Metaphor in that it is not the world but presents its perceptions or awareness' as though they are the world. i.e. 'she has the teeth of a lion' doesnt mean she has lion teeth but rather that they are 'like', so too 'the world'

Thus the brain can be seen as something like a huge country: as a nested structure,

brain is, in one sense, a system of opponent processors. In other words, it contains mutually opposed elements whose contrary influence make possible finely calibrated responses to complex situations.

Two parts working together to resolve a single preferential/more balanced effect. But note footnote eleven (below this highlight) that up-down and forward-back differ relationally to left-right in that the former relate sequentially whilst the latter relate in parralel (reflecting their evolutionary development, either is series or simultaneously).

at the level of experience, the world we know is synthesised from the work of the two cerebral hemispheres, each hemisphere having its own way of understanding the world – its own ‘take’ on it. This synthesis is unlikely to be symmetrical, and the world we actually experience, phenomenologically, at any point in time is determined by which hemisphere’s version of the world ultimately comes to predominate.

On those occasions where the ‘wrong’ hemisphere does get in first, however, and starts to take control, at least for not very demanding tasks, it will most probably continue to trump the other hemisphere, even if the other hemisphere would have been a better choice at the outset – possibly because the time costs of sharing or transferring control are greater than the costs of continuing with the current arrangement.

Can we train the 'correct' hemisphere to improve its capacity to act is such situations in the future? e.g. Meditation as training in using the right hemispheres capacity for context when responding to emotions

The nature of generalisations is that they are approximate, but they are nonetheless of critical importance for understanding what is going on.

The challenge of seeing the forest but not fogetting the trees and vice-versa

Louis Pasteur wrote: ‘Life as manifested to us is a function of the asymmetry of the universe … I can even imagine that all living species are primordially, in their structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic asymmetry.’

In fact speculation on the subject goes back more than two millennia: Greek physicians in the third century BC held that the right hemisphere was specialised for perception, and the left hemisphere for understanding – which, if nothing else, shows a remarkably interesting train of thought.1

Wow! Gives some credence to the idea that ancient knowledge can have modern valence. I.e. Given the oral nature of knowledge transmission prior to this, surely some undersandings exist either warped or 'hidden' in the language of myth.

the view of Kinsbourne that, following the physiological principle of opponent processors, duality refines control. I believe that is right, as far as it goes. But the story goes a long, long way further than that, because the brain is not just a tool for grappling with the world. It’s what brings the world about.

Brain then necessarily gives structure to mind.

The structural self and the self as process

All attempts at explanation depend, whether explicitly or implicitly, on drawing parallels between the thing to be explained and some other thing that we believe we already understand better. But the fundamental problem in explaining the experience of consciousness is that there is nothing else remotely like it to compare it with: it is itself the ground of all experience.

the analytic process cannot deal with uniqueness: there is an irresistible temptation for it to move from the uniqueness of something to its assumed non-existence, since the reality of the unique would have to be captured by idioms that apply to nothing else.13

everything we know of the brain is a product of consciousness. That is, scientifically speaking, far more certain than that consciousness itself is a product of the brain.

We do not know if mind depends on matter, because everything we know about matter is itself a mental creation.

Mind has the characteristics of a process more than of a thing; a becoming, a way of being, more than an entity. Every individual mind is a process of interaction with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves according to its own private history.