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…I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but … am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I form with it a single entity.14
There may be just one whatness here, but it has more than one howness, and that matters.
Again, echoes of Frankle's higher dimensionality metaphor: the disparate 2D shadows of a 3D sphere.
Whereas the frontal lobes represent about 7 per cent of the total brain volume of a relatively intelligent animal such as the dog, and take up about 17 per cent of the brain in the lesser apes, they represent as much as 35 per cent of the human brain.
This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes.
One needs to bring what one has learned from one’s ascent back into the world where life is going on, and incorporate it in such a way that it enriches experience and enables more of whatever it is that ‘discloses itself’ to us (in Heidegger’s phrase) to do just that. But it is still only on the ground that it will do so, not up in the air.
The destinction between the ascetic (complete, sublime detachment from reality) and the two extremes of the mundane (Totalitarian authoritarianism and apathetic nihilism). The latter two react constantly to the terrain, the former is incapable even of response.
lol. This sounds like the impotence of an omniscient god.
There is an optimal degree of separation between our selves and the world we perceive, if we are to understand it, much as there is between the reader’s eye and the page: too much and we cannot make out what is written, but, equally, too little and we cannot read the letters at all.
If this necessary distance is midwife to the world of Machiavelli, it also delivers the world of Erasmus.
Constant interplay of shadow and light stemming from their shared source
In general terms, then, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focussed attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes or friends; and it is involved in bonding in social animals.
And it also turns out that the capacities that help us, as humans, form bonds with others – empathy, emotional understanding, and so on – which involve a quite different kind of attention paid to the world, are largely right-hemisphere functions.
Attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things.
There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.
Yet this highly objective stance, this ‘view from nowhere’, to use Nagel’s phrase, is itself value-laden. It is just one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed. For some purposes this can be undeniably useful. But its use in such causes does not make it truer or more real, closer to the nature of things.
by attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so – even, in fact, by thinking about certain sorts of people at all – we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think and feel. Through the direction and nature of our attention, we prove ourselves to be partners in creation, both of the world and of ourselves.
We are the sum of the people we send the most time with (thinking about included). So, those whom we read, watch listen etc. inform who we (our self as process) are becoming.
Values enter through the way in which those functions are exercised: they can be used in different ways for different purposes to different ends.
VIA strengths therefor are literaly Values In Action; virtues.
Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.
The way we attend informs our values (VIA strengths) not only the opposite.
The nature of the attention one brings to bear on anything alters what one finds; what we aim to understand changes its nature with the context in which it lies; and we can only ever understand anything as a something.
Is this a 1% difference example? Could a 1% difference alien be able to do so?
i.e. Threat or opportunity, both dependent on context or attention or an inclusive third option subsuming both simultaniously
are not ‘just’ looking at things in the world – a lump of rock, or even a person – but the processes whereby the world itself, together with the rock or the person, might be brought into being for us at all, the very foundations of the fact of our experience,
If it turns out that the hemispheres have different ways of construing the world, this is not just an interesting fact about an efficient information-processing system; it tells us something about the nature of reality,
it is not a matter of ‘data loss’, but of nothing less than the world itself truly having changed.
The frontal lobes are particularly highly developed in humans. Their function is to yield distance – necessary for our most characteristically human qualities, whether that be foresight or empathy. As a result we need to be able to be open to whatever there is, and yet, at the same time, to provide a ‘map’, a version of the world which is simpler, clearer and therefore more useful.
We are dependent on heuristics (maps of the 'world') for navigating it.
As soon as one starts to look in this way at the question – for example, not where language is, but what aspects of language are where – striking differences between the hemispheres emerge.
If what it is that exists comes into being for each one of us through its interaction with our brains and minds, the idea that we could have a knowledge of it that was not also an expression of ourselves, and dependent on what we brought to the relationship, is untenable.
It might turn out that for some purposes, those that involve making use of the world and manipulating it for our benefit, we need, in fact, to be quite selective about what we see. In other words we might need to know what is of use to us – but this might be very different from understanding in a broader sense, and certainly might require filtering out some aspects of experience.
Grouping things accordong tp usefulness fpr action, threat to continued action and that which serves as neither currently.
The world is no longer ‘present’ to us, but ‘re-presented’,
A 'matrix' of our own design (conscious, subconcious or unconcious as it may be)
While not identical, vigilance and sustained attention are similar, and they are often treated as one concept. Together with alertness, they form the basis of what has been called the intensity axis of attention. The other axis is selectivity, made up of the two remaining types, focussed and divided attention.
Without alertness, we are as if asleep, unresponsive to the world around us; without sustained attention, the world fragments; without vigilance, we cannot become aware of anything we do not already know.
To sum up, the right hemisphere is responsible for every type of attention except focussed attention. Even where there is divided attention, and both hemispheres appear to be involved, it seems probable that the right hemisphere plays the primary role (possibly that of unifying the divided input – see below).
in almost every case what is new must first be present in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus for the left.
However, once the skills have become familiar through practice, they shift to being the concern of the left hemisphere,
The left hemisphere deals with what it knows, and therefore prioritises the expected – its process is predictive. It positively prefers what it knows.
The link between the right hemisphere and what is new or emotionally engaging exists not just in humans,
The right hemisphere is, in other words, more capable of a frame shift;65 and not surprisingly the right frontal lobe is especially important for flexibility of thought, with damage in that area leading to perseveration, a pathological inability to respond flexibly to changing situations.
a tendency for the left hemisphere to deny discrepancies that do not fit its already generated schema of things. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is actively watching for discrepancies, more like a devil’s advocate.71 These approaches are both needed, but pull in opposite directions.
Whereas close lexical semantic relationships rely more on the left hemisphere, looser semantic associations rely on the right.
Since efforts of will focus attention and deliberately narrow its range,82 it may be that cessation of the effort to ‘produce something’ – relaxation, in other words – favours creativity because it permits broadening of attention, and, with the expansion of the attentional field, engagement of the right hemisphere.
But this is only part of the story. Both hemispheres are importantly involved. Creativity depends on the union of things that are also maintained separately – the precise function of the corpus callosum, both to separate and connect; and interestingly division of the corpus callosum does impair creativity.
In short the left hemisphere takes a local short-term view, whereas the right hemisphere sees the bigger picture.
it therefore guides the left hemisphere’s local attention, rather than the other way about.101 As an illustration, we would normally see the images below
This is an instance of the right → left → right progression which will be a theme of this book. And it lies at the very foundation of experience: attention, where the world actually comes into being.
The best-known example of this process of Gestalt perception is the way in which the Dalmatian dog, sniffing the ground in the shade of a tree, suddenly emerges from this mass of dots and splashes (Figure 2.4
Drawings of a man by a subject with a right parietal lesion, and of a bicycle and a house by a subject with a right parieto-occipital lesion (from Hécaen & Ajuriaguerra, 1952).
Kids difficulties drawing. Is it more to do with brain development than coodination or drawing skill?
Tree drawn by the same subject: under normal conditions; with the right hemiphere inactivated; and with the left hemisphere inactivated (from
The right recognises the tree but not details like the angle of the branches etc. The left has no comcept of the whole and comstructs a single branch .
For the same reason that the right hemisphere sees things as a whole, before they have been digested into parts, it also sees each thing in its context, as standing in a qualifying relationship with all that surrounds it, rather than taking it as a single isolated entity.131 Its awareness of the world is anything but abstract.
The right hemisphere understands from indirect contextual clues, not only from explicit statement, whereas the left hemisphere will identify by labels rather than context (e.g. identifies that it must be winter because it is ‘January’, not by looking at the trees).133
The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction,138 which, as the word itself tells us, is the process of wresting things from their context.
The contextual versus abstract distinction is illustrated by the different use of symbols by each hemisphere. In one sense of the word, a symbol such as the rose is the focus or centre of an endless network of connotations which ramify through our physical and mental, personal and cultural, experience in life, literature and art: the strength of the symbol is in direct proportion to the power it has to convey an array of implicit meanings, which need to remain implicit to be powerful. In this it is like a joke that has several layers of meaning – explaining them destroys its power. The other
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This appears to link thos book's apparent later half's arguments wit JBP's ideas of moral meaning being communicated increasingly abstractly (and explicity) through time. I.e. From ceremony and myth, through laws (both list form and paragraph) and drama to philosophy and psychology; mirrored in historically increasing decerence tp the left over the right neural hemisphere .
Individuals are, after all, Gestalt wholes: that face, that voice, that gait, that sheer ‘quiddity’ of the person or thing, defying analysis into parts.
The right hemisphere’s role as what Ramachandran has described as the ‘anomaly detector’ might in fact be seen rather as an aspect of its preference for things as they actually exist (which are never entirely static or congruent – always changing, never the same) over abstract representation, in which things are made to be fixed and equivalent, types rather than individuals.
