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

by Iain McGilchrist

associated with over-reliance on the left hemisphere at the expense of the right. And this is exactly what research suggests – not just imaging and EEG studies, but lesion studies, and tests of cognitive function.

the deficits reveal a repeated pattern of hypofunction of the normal right hemisphere, and an exaggerated reliance on the provisions of the left.

Thus a culture with prominent ‘schizoid’ characteristics attracts to positions of influence individuals who will help it ever further down the same path. And the increasing domination of life by both technology and bureaucracy helps to erode the more integrative modes of attention to people and things which might help us to resist the advances of technology and bureaucracy, much as they erode the social and cultural structures that would have facilitated other ways of being, so that in this way they aid their own replication.

The left hemisphere ‘creates’ newness by recombining in a novel fashion what is already known, not as imagination does, by allowing something that we thought we knew to be truly revealed for the first time.

In the process of creation, the artist’s plane of focus needs to be somewhere beyond and through the work of art, not just on its being art, otherwise it becomes less than art.

When directing '... Rose Garden' I was thinking about relationships, perception and morality etc, not the story.

We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to the art work, as Merleau-Ponty says, necessitating that it is neither opaque nor wholly transparent, but ‘semi-transparent’.

while works cannot be created for art’s sake, they must be judged for art’s sake, not for some ulterior purpose.

Put that way it is not that different from any human relationship: I might regard Mother Teresa in a way that would worry me if I believed it was also the way she saw herself.

its problem is made more intractable by a different sort of deracination – more than just the severance from place, or even from history, but the inevitably consequent severance from the roots of all meaning in shared values and experiences, the vast implicit realm from which imagination draws its power.

Meaninglessness is emptiness. The opposite of addiction is purpose. -Jimmy Carr Meaning is drawn from that which we fill our lives; meaningfull. It is meaningfull so far as we take/accept responsibility for it. These are the inflection points where one accepts and makes a choice. Choice relies on ones capacity to imagine the potentialities, both great, good and terrible. Life without choice, responsibility and meaning is empty and this is that vacume we spak of that is often filled with addictive behaviours/reactions. Thus, consider how communities torn from place and space, individuals displace from time etc, struggle to find meaning, accept responsibility, percieve purpose and make thier own concious choice, submitting instead to additions both social and anti-social.

the absence of a message we tend to ‘stare’ at it until it is freighted with meaning.

Finding analytical meaning where there is only experiential? Or, where there is none? The latter is frightening but is that fear arising from that need for meaning he asserts comes from an excitable left hemisphere. In that case, the last sentence coud be the same.

We mistake our lonely monologue for a dialogue.

Cultural Revolution and totalitarianism are spiritual allies.

‘War is the world’s only hygiene,’

An admiration for what is powerful rather than beautiful, a sense of alienated objectivity rather than engagement or empathy, and an almost dogmatic trampling on all taboos, lies at the heart of the modernist enterprise.

Ilse Koch, the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’, who turned prisoners skins into art brut

Untrue according to her trails. Rather is seems a better example of the judgments of the mob and the proliferative power of sensationalist claims. Something that would support the 'othering' of figures like Ilse whose punishment seems to have been exagerated on the basis of her sex.

Hermann Nitsch or the mutilations of Rudolf Schwarzkogler.

Trangressive artists but not so trangressive as he seems to suggest here.

One can see the problem as a contingent loss of the authenticity of the right-hemisphere world and try to re-engage the right hemisphere, by patiently clearing away the adhesions of familiarity overlying one’s subject; or one can see the right hemisphere’s world as intrinsically inauthentic and try to sweep it away altogether. Newness (seeing afresh what one thought of as familiar, as though for the first time – the patient process of Romanticism) and novelty (deliberately disturbing the representation of reality in an attempt to ‘shock’ oneself into something that feels unfamiliar) are contrary concepts.

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known….’

Experiential & abstract knowing. Implicit & explicit learning. The two, in diadic relation, are required for successfull learning to lead to effective knowing. The concrete without the oblique (or vice-versa) leads to incomplete, stagnant and unstatisfactory knowledge creation. Wisdom requires two wings to fly.

‘originality is antithetical to novelty’

No one ever decided not to fall in love because it’s been done before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both as old as the hills and completely fresh in every case of genuine love.

Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know – only release something in us that is already there.

The shift from the abstract/analytical/conceptual/ to the gestalt/experiential/perceptual As the cycle is completed, that which is reawakened via linguistic means is cemented through its abstraction, then grounded in subsequent practice. And so on, perpetualy building upon itself.

all surfaces of an object be represented in a single plane again goes straight back to the left hemisphere’s tendency to represent schematically:

Compare or contrast with Temple Grandin

The de animation of the body reaches its most disturbing apotheosis in the bizarrely distorted and dismembered marionettes of Hans Bellmer,

The tension in the intervals between successive tones (melody), co-occurring tones (harmony) and stresses (rhythm) are immediately and involuntarily conveyed as the relaxation and tension of muscular tone in the physical frame, and have manifestly direct effects on respiration and heart rate.

since the twentieth century music has aspired to, and attained, a high level of abstraction.

Though the analytic left hemisphere may add to the experience of music, the same principle applies here as everywhere: the products of the left hemisphere’s work need to be returned to the right hemisphere where they can live. It is in this no different from the process of musical performance, which may represent hours of effortful analysis, and piecemeal labour behind the scenes, all of which has to be forgotten when it is transmuted into the living work once again.

our senses have in fact become somewhat dulled because we always inquire after the reason, what ‘it means’, and no longer for what ‘it is’ … our ear has become coarsened.

Joy is transferred to the brain; the sense organs themselves become dull and weak. More and more, the symbolic replaces that which exists.

there is a specific right hemisphere link with processing consonance, and a left hemisphere link with processing dissonance.

Harmony in music is an analogue of perspective in painting. Each produces what is experienced as ‘depth’: each is right-hemisphere-dependent.

The same element that adds relish to the dish makes it inedible if it comes to predominate.

Context is once again absolutely critical – in fact nowhere can context be more important than in music, since music is pure context, even if the context is silence.

Return to this sectipn for inspiration for the use and importance of usic in the classroom

There is an enormously subtle range of emotional expression over the entire range of the harmonic, with the tiniest changes making enormous differences in meaning. But we cannot make the same subtle discriminations of emotional timbre between discords, because the human nervous system, and the mammalian nervous system from which it derives, appreciates discord as distress, so that all threatens quickly to become merely angst-ridden, and the emotional range is inevitably reduced.

In music there is an intuitive language, the dialects of which are literally as widespread as, and older than, the human race.

In music and the visual arts the formal conventions embodied intuitive wisdom that could not be discarded without loss of meaning.

With post-modernism, meaning drains away.

Why would any solipsist write? The attempt to convince another of one’s point of view explodes the solipsistposition.

the work of art gets to be ‘decoded’, as if the value of the work lay in some message of which the author was once more unaware, but which we in our superiority can now reveal.

left hemisphere sets about making things explicit, in an attempt to discover what it is; but meanwhile is not really aware of the ‘thisness’ of the work of art, in which the real ‘meaning’ lies, at all.

It is familiar to psychiatrists because of the way that psychopaths use displays of lack of feeling – a jokey, gamesy, but chilling, indifference to subjects that spontaneously call forth strong human emotions – to gain control of others and make them feel vulnerable.

Art is a tool of emotion and is purposefu when it successfully shares/translates an emotion from one to another. It is a right hemispheric equivelant to the left hemispheric abstraction of words. The cruelty is in the degree with which that emotional transmission is permitted to be or minimised. The latter is the role of the psychopath and school bully refered to here. Consider the roleplay exhibited in the scene in the film, Inside Out, where Sadness emotes with BingBong whilst Joy attempts to dissemble the sittuation with 'playful' comments that in contrast with Sadness' response increasingly fell like jibes.

Reductionism, like disengagement, makes people feel powerful.

the left hemisphere sees everything as made up from fundamental building blocks, the nature of which is assumed to be obvious, or at least knowable in principle in isolation from whatever it is they go to make up.

just this that the left hemisphere, being cut off from reality, its self-reflections reverberating endlessly round its mirrored walls, exemplifies.

The fractal nature presented in I Am A Strange Loop represent one half of the brain's conception of its whole

The post-modern revolt against the silent, static, contrived, lifeless world displayed in the fresco on the wall is not because of its artificiality – the fact that it is untrue to the living world outside – but because of its ‘pretence’ that there exists a world outside to be true to.

One says ‘I do not know,’ the other ‘I know – that there is nothing to know.’ One believes that one cannot know: the other ‘knows’ that one cannot believe.

The right hemisphere, the one that believes, but does not know, has to depend on the other, the left hemisphere, that knows, but doesn’t believe.

Skills themselves would be reduced to algorithmic procedures which could be drawn up, and even if necessary regulated, by administrators, since without that the mistrustful tendencies of the left hemisphere could not be certain that these nebulous ‘skills’ were being evenly and ‘correctly’ applied.

Sounds like robots and AI driven systems.

more and more work would come to be overtaken by the meta-process of documenting or justifying what one was doing or supposed to be doing – at the expense of the real job in the living world.

Compare to Oliver Burkeman's comments i '4000 Weeks'.

The authors list them as: the necessity of procedures that are known, and in principle knowable; anonymity; organisability; predictability; a concept of justice that is reduced to mere equality; and explicit abstraction.

When we deal with a machine, there are three things we want to know: how much it can do, how fast it can do it, and with what degree of precision. These qualities summarise what distinguishes a good machine from a bad one: it is more productive, faster and more precise than a less good one. However, changes in scale, speed and precision in the real world all change the quality of the experience, and the ways in which we interact with one another: increasing them no longer gives a clearly positive outcome – it can even be very damaging. In human affairs, increasing the amount or extent of something, or the speed with which something happens, or the inflexible precision with which it is conceived or applied, can actually destroy.