The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

language is used for communication it probably began as a form of music, deeply rooted in emotion and the body – the most expressive aspects of language still are its ‘musical’ qualities, pitch variations, intonation, rhythm, speed, volume and flow; and that it approximated the rather more abstract and symbolic nature of language as we now know it by degrees, beginning in the right hemisphere, as language still does in children, and gradually crossing to the left hemisphere, leaving music behind in the regions of the right hemisphere that are homologous to the ‘language areas’ of the left. My own view is that formal language was required, possibly as an effect of the increasing size of social groups, only when I–Thou relationships ceded gradually to I–It relationships. It enabled ‘me’ to communicate with ‘you’ not just about ‘us’, but about an object or third party, ‘over there’