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

by Iain McGilchrist

Imitation gives rise, paradoxically as it may seem, to individuality. That is precisely because the process is not mechanical reproduction,

The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere, whereas copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, and is left-hemisphere-based.

‘We might characterise Early Humans as having a capacity for simile – they could be “like” an animal – but not for metaphor – they could not “become” an animal’.24 What he is getting at here is empathic identification.

he declared, ‘I am Charlemagne’. Be it noted that he did not say, ‘ I recall Charlemagne’, nor ‘My position is like Charlemagne’s’, nor even, ‘I am as Charlemagne’, but simply ‘I am he’. This is the mythical formula.25

I.e. This is how myths develop a literal misunderstanding of non-literal association. The metaphor conducts the information but if it is recieved via mechanical or literal means the fidelity of this ironicly fuzzy comparison is lost. i.e. Being a son of Zeus oraking a pact with Aphrodite is a metaphore for the assocation of one's self, unconciously or otherwise respectively, with the core qualities of those beings.

imitation is extremely infectious: thinking about something, or even just hearing words connected with it, alters the way we behave and how we perform on tasks.

of no use to individuals on their own, though of more than a little use to a group.

Skills are intuitive, ‘inhabited’ ways of being and behaving, not analytically structured, rule-based techniques.

the dual skills of flexibility and the power to mimic,

Capacity to change one's habits to match that of more succesful habits. - adaptation language and music as a ... (left over space of an arch in a rectangular opening) of the adaptive skills of flexibility and mimicry.

everyone would be swimming, some with the gene for swimming, some with the gene for imitation, and a few with both. But now suppose that another partially imitable behaviour came along, which had a similar, or even greater, competitive advantage – say, flying. Those with the gene for imitation would have a head start: they

This seems to equate to learni g/intelligence (been so long so since last reading; check he hasn't said this already) i.e. The capacity to adapt/transfer knowledge to different contexts or recognise groups ased on similarity or contrast.

there will be a tendency for increasing reliance on imitation rather than gene transmission to speed up the process still further

a skill that would enable further evolution to occur not only more rapidly but in a direction of our own choosing

The great human invention, made possible by imitation, is that we can choose who we become,

Perhaps we are not the ruthless competitors we have been conditioned to believe ourselves to be by mechanistic models of behaviour.

The overwhelming importance of mimesis points to the conclusion that we had better select good models to imitate, because as a species, not only as individuals, we will become what we imitate.

‘Action at a distance’ cannot be eliminated: something draws something else closer, something feels drawn. This is the fundamental fact: compared to this, the mechanistic notion of pressing and pushing is merely a hypothesis based on sight and touch, even if it does serve as a regulative hypothesis for the world of sight!

Compare to the idea in 'I am a strange loop' or Douglas Harding's 'Headless Way' that one 'level' of reality informs another. I.e. The external/objective and internal/subjective. ironically the 'objective' is hypothetical/inferred whilst the subjective is experientially concrete.

Each hemisphere risks inauthenticity from a different source, which is why each is vital to the other.

Cyclical nature of effective knowledge/knowing processes: the diad of abstract and concrete

Out of wary opposition arises empathy: out of the world of ‘eat or be eaten’ comes a shared meal round the fire.

‘battle’ of the hemispheres is only a battle from the left hemisphere’s point of view. From the more inclusive standpoint of the right hemisphere, it is simply another reverberative process, in which something comes into being – as all life does – through the union of separated forces, retaining their separation but within that union, one entity acting with another.

there are virtually no faces in prehistoric art.

Deliberate philosphical choice or developmental effect: representation of form to ensure/aknowledge limits of existance (i.e. Taboo surrounding photographh and Dorian Grey myths) or evolutionary incapacity to represent complexity of social reality with visual texts. i.e. Could it be somewhere inbetween, in that as a species the capacity required awakening though skill development rather than brain development, reflectng the developmemt of similarly abstract language from the utilitarian to the poetic.

union cannot exist without separation and distinction, but separation and distinction are of no use unless they form the prelude to a later, greater, union or synthesis.

when the heroes of the Iliad (and the Old Testament) are reported as having heard the voices of the gods (or God) giving them commands or advice, this is not a figurative expression: they literally heard voices. The voices were speaking their own intuitive thoughts, and arose from their own minds, but were perceived as external,

Compare also to the finding that not all people think linguistically (voices) some peoples thinking is pictorial or emotional or even textual. Consider the idea of the narcasistic voice whispering, 'You're special!' Does this neural change connect to a social change where unbalanced neural development presents in interpersonal imbalance?

Intuitions, no longer acted on unselfconsciously, no longer ‘transparent’, no longer simply subsumed into action without the necessity of deliberation, became objects of consciousness, brought into the plane of attention, opaque, objectified.

Compare to my own experience of feeling that I often act(ed) most effectively when acting intuitively. Reflection on the action revealed the process/thoughts that inormed the action despite those thoughts remaining all but unconcious at the time of action. How does one distinguish this from a delusion? I.e. Self appeasing explanantions for action after the fact in the same manner as the experiments discussed earlier, where one hemisphere justified the choices of another without access to the stimulus that appears to actually motivate action.

with the world at large. The best example of this is the fascinating rise of drama in the Greek world, in which the thoughts and feelings of our selves and of others are apparently objectified, and yet returned to us as our own.

Compare to the ideas of abstract imagery allowing us to place ourselves 'in the shoes' of those depicted discused in 'EXPLAINING COMICS'

the efflorescence, the ‘unpacking’, of both right and left hemisphere capacities in the service of both art and science.

Note the word efflorescence. It is a flowing process; an arising, through hidden chemical reaction, of observable material. I.e. The synthesis of devoping theses, on either side of an apparent dichotomous duality, revealing a diadic duality.

Thus, Iliadic men have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will.’

The inherent dependence of one on the other: What does the mind percieve without a body with which to recieve stimuli? What can a body do but recieve stimuli without the mind to assume a stance toward (form a perception of) it? (forward, back, center of mass)

‘The crux is that the two planes exist in harmony, and the god’s intervention need not imply that the mortal man is less fully responsible for his actions.’

Trying to reconcile this with ideas of The Dreaming in which cyclical processes allow ancestors and creator spirits to impact living persons and their actions without absolving these persons of agency. Similarly, the idea that we are all capable of redemption but must choose it to recieve it. The redeemable actions taken are beyond our capacity to have done/chosen otherwise yet can be redeemed only through our capacity to do/choose so now.

what count as ‘my’ thoughts, beliefs, intentions, etc., do not have to be those which I am consciously aware are mine.

The idea of the eye coldly transmitting certain sense data to our perception, of it apprehending its object, does not enter the language until late.

There were originally only words for relations with things, the quality of the experience, how the ‘seer’ stood towards the ‘seen’.

These opposing principles within the apeiron, according to Anaximander, are of crucial importance. They balance one another, and it is this giving and taking, this ebb and flow of opposites, that gives rise to all things, since, as he puts it, they ‘pay retribution to one another’ for their trespasses on each other,

Ying and yang in ancient Greece

something fruitfully undetermined, perhaps inevitably incomplete, requiring an individual process of exploration, and evoked from within us by a response to the suggestive possibility in the text.

Sounds Like a description of yarning

The point is not that the nature of things is contradictory, but that the attempt to render them in language leads inevitably to what we call paradox, and the attempt to avoid paradox therefore distorts.

he does not advise a turning inwards in order to discover the nature of reality, but a patient and careful attention to the phenomenal world. Most people, he says, make the mistake of prioritising opinion, their ideas, over experience, over ‘things as they encounter

But experience is not enough on its own. It needs understanding; and most people are not in a position to understand what they experience: ‘eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language’.

Appreciating this coming together, wherein all opposing principles are reconciled, was the essence of sophia

an endless process (requital), rather than as a ‘cause’, or occupying a point in time. Fire is also unique amongst the elements in not being in any sense a thing or substance, but a pure process, pure phenomenal energy

Consider the prehistoric cration diad of fire and ice in norse mythology: chaos and order, movemmt and stagnation, the place of creation is the boundary where these two opposites meet. Their tension also creates rather than annihilates.

‘Man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself,’ as Snell says; and it is in drama that we find that echo.

There was in Athens a special cult of Prometheus, the god of technical skill and intelligence

Gnothi seauton: know thyself.

This represents a shift, perhaps not a great one, but a shift nonetheless, towards abstraction.

As long as language remains syllabic, rather than purely phonemic, it inevitably relies on context for the differentiation between written characters which represent potentially quite different meanings.

In both these respects syllabic languages favour understanding by the right hemisphere, whereas phonemic languages favour that of the left hemisphere.

The insertion of vowels, which happened for the first time with the Greek alphabet’s evolution out of Phoenician, further consolidated a shift in the balance of hemispheric power, removing the last unconscious processing strategies from context-based to sequence-based coding.

The direction of writing

‘The Greek system’, writes de Kerckhove, ‘introduced a level of abstraction that would all but remove the script from the context of its production in oral forms … its basic process was the atomisation of speech.’

kanji, a pictographic Japanese script,

kana, a Japanese phonographic script,

The inclusion of vowels appears to have been necessitated by the sequential, as opposed to contextual, analytic approach of the left hemisphere, not the other way round. Other languages had managed fine without vowels.

‘Writing is an instrument of power,’

Perhaps, however, it is not so much that empires are the children of writing, but that both empires and writing, at least as it came into being in the West, are the children of the left hemisphere.