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

by Iain McGilchrist

Scientists tend to see philosophy as a luxury they can’t afford to get involved with, a ball and chain that will slow them down in their race for the next discovery; philosophers to see science as somewhat beneath them, and in any case irrelevant to the ponderings of the mind on itself.

Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not.

Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal.

The brain is asymmetrical in almost everything that can be measured, at many levels, in both its structure and function. Why?

How on earth can you dispose your consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once? The answer is the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently, but connected enough to work in concert with one another, each capable of sustaining consciousness on its own. In other words, a bipartite brain. Thus the need to sustain two incompatible ‘takes’ on the world simultaneously explains, I believe (and there is no significant competing theory), the extraordinary fact that the brain is so deeply divided, an otherwise inexplicable waste of potential in an organ that exists only to make connexions, and whose power lies, precisely, in the number of connexions it can make.

there is a strong right eye (left hemisphere) bias for tool manufacture in crows, even where using the right eye appears to make the task more difficult.

In humans the left hemisphere is designed for grasping, controls the right hand with which we grasp (as well as those aspects of language which enable us to say we have ‘grasped’ something – pinned it down) and helps us manipulate, rather than understand, the world. It sees little, but what it does see seems clear. It is confident, tends to be black and white in its judgments, and jumps to conclusions. Since it is serving the predator in us, it has to if it is to succeed.

The

Hemispheres

LH

So how might one characterise, as a whole, each hemisphere’s vision of reality? One view, the left hemisphere view, is of a world composed of static, isolated, fragmentary elements that can be manipulated easily, are decontextualised, abstracted, detached, disembodied, mechanical, relatively uncomplicated by issues of beauty and morality (except in a consequentialist sense) and relatively untroubled by the complexity of empathy, emotion and human significance. They are put together, like brick on brick to build a wall, so as to reach conclusions that are taken to be unimpeachable. It is an inanimate universe – and a bureaucrat’s dream. There is an excess of confidence and a lack of insight. This world is useful for purposes of manipulation, but is not a helpful guide to understanding the nature of what it encounters. Its use is local and for the short term.

The preference for consistency over truth is itself characteristic of the left hemisphere, as we will see; and it is inevitable that it results in an espousal of its own take.

Michael Gazzaniga,

‘the two hemispheres compete and co-operate with one another to maintain an online balance of two fundamentally opposed dispositions.’

we are unable to detect that we have two kinds of experiential world, for the very good reason that the process of fusion goes on below the threshold of consciousness.

All these are together parts of the whole successful predatory animal that is the cat. No one element is the ultimate cause of the rest. They are part of the flowing process called evolution. (In fact many of the problems that people have with evolution come from seeing it atomistically, rather than as a flow.)

Emerson Pugh put it: ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t’.97

If we are interested in truth, we ought to be interested in the mind through which it might be apprehended.

Our world view is not simply the way we look at the world … world views create worlds.

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

Since the left nostril has little or no direct sensory input to the right hemisphere, and since it is the right hemisphere that is damaged, one might assume – wrongly – that left-sided olfaction would be spared. But that is, precisely, to misunderstand the nature of the problem: to see the problem as at a purely sensory level. The problem arises at the level of the whole world coming into being – or, as in this case, not coming into being.26

And finally there is a further, fifth, phenomenon. It has long been debated whether we can conceive of, or, in a stronger version, even be aware of, things for which we have no words: the so-called, largely discredited, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.34 An interesting piece of research suggests that language does interfere with perception in the left hemisphere (the right visual field), but not in the right hemisphere (left visual field). The authors conclude that ‘it appears that people view the

right (but not the left) half of their visual world through the lens of their native language, providing an unexpected resolution to the language-and-thought debate’.35 If this is the case, it suggests that there may be still greater constraints on what the left hemisphere ‘sees’ compared with the right.

69 The left hemisphere’s focus, however, narrows both. If I want to focus precisely on a particular element in my environment, clearly and in sharp detail, I have not just to home in on it in space, but to immobilise or freeze it in time, too. It becomes like a snapshot

The more precise anything is, the less content it has: ‘the more certain our knowledge the less we know.’

Some such right hemisphere deficit, resulting in fragmentation of the sense of self, may be involved in dissociative states and multiple personality syndromes.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not than looking.

And in humans it is advanced out of all recognition by language, which gives us a virtually inexhaustible way of mapping the world, to which perception is, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant – and from which it may even prove a distraction.

Or speech: obviously, listening to speech affects the power of speech, but does the power of speech have an effect on the capacity to hear speech? It seems so.7 Disrupting premotor cortex disrupts the perception and understanding of action language, as well as its execution.8

But

On this view, the left hemisphere ‘re-presents’ a digest of the specific views presented by the right, with all their complex features and holistic roundness neatly excised. However,

The acuity of eye and ear is, however, as nothing to that of the nose. An estimate of a lower limit of 1,720,000,000,000 (otherwise known as 1.72 trillion), for the number of olfactory stimuli that humans can discriminate is apparently, I was abashed to learn, conservative.55 The characteristic scent of a rose, for example, is produced by a blend of not, perhaps, five, or 15, but 275 components, none of which on its own smells like a rose.56 A considerable body of evidence suggests that olfactory recognition and discrimination are preferentially carried out in the right hemisphere, 57 especially the right orbitofrontal cortex, though, oddly enough, emotional reactions to scent may be stronger in the left hemisphere, possibly a relic of its role as predator.58 Apart from five very basic tastes – salt, sweet, sour, bitter

Perception is a judgment, but one that is unaware of its reasons, which is as much as to say that the object perceived gives itself as a whole and as a unity before we have grasped its intelligible principle.

body schema lies in the right parietal cortex, in cases where anorexia was associated with a hemispheric lesion, the majority were right-sided; imaging and EEG studies of anorexia nervosa show hypofunction of the right hemisphere; psychological profiles of subjects with anorexia show typical right hemisphere deficits;

This is in line with Eugène Minkowski’s insight that the problem in psychosis is not loss of reason, but its hypertrophy: ‘The mad person is much less frequently “irrational” than is believed: perhaps, indeed, he is never irrational at all.’239 Here he was anticipated by G.K. Chesterton:

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

‘motion-induced blindness’.

Spr na wiki

APPREHENSION

Jezyk

Rushing into action, you fail. Trying to grasp things, you lose them.

Speech arose in humans in an area of the left frontal cortex, called Broca’s area, which lies just next to the area that controls movement of the right hand. Indeed it is widely thought that language developed, in part, from gesture. This speech area has been found to be activated even by grasp and manipulation, and is constantly involved in the production of meaningful gestures.3 Equally, restricting hand movements impairs verbal fluency.4 Speech and pointing develop together in infants: the child ‘always points while naming and does not name without pointing – stretching out the right hand’, according to Marcel Kinsbourne.5 Most remarkable of all, as mentioned, patients born without arms can nonetheless experience phantom upper limbs; VS Ramachandran describes the case of just such a woman who experienced uncontrollable gesticulation by her phantom limbs. 6 Once again, it looks as if there must be some morphogenetic schema that is innate. Detailed phantom limbs are not infrequently reported by people born without limbs.

we say we ‘grasp’ the meaning, and so on.

Language and the hand turn out to have a lot more in common than just being next-door neighbours in the brain. In left hemisphere damage, the two most serious consequences are motor impairments, particularly of the right arm and hand; and language impairments.

By contrast, the concern of the right hemisphere is exploration, not grasp.

And this finding is not confined to humans: when great apes, and monkeys, want to utilise inanimate objects, they reach out with the right hand (left hemisphere). Yet they reach out the left hand (right hemisphere) towards living things.

The nature and purpose of language is a large topic, and my thoughts on the subject have been elaborated elsewhere.19 In The Master and his Emissary I argued that language is neither necessary for communication – not even for some highly sophisticated kinds of communication; nor for thinking – not even for some highly sophisticated kinds of thinking; although, since we have it, it is clearly involved in some aspects of both.

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’

But another way of thinking suggests that language may not be about communication, primarily, at all. It may instead be a way of mapping the world – a system of symbols that reflects the world. Words, according to this view, are tokens for things, and grammar a schema of how they relate, enabling us to plan a strategy and manipulate more effectively.

So it is with language. All language is metaphoric in nature. All meaning eventually arises from personal experience in the body; and language – including, and especially clearly, philosophical and scientific language – metaphorises bodily experience, however abstract (literally ‘dragged away’) its discourse (literally ‘running to and fro’) may appear. It is metaphor alone (the word itself is a metaphor: it means one that ‘carries across’) that can carry us across the apparent gap between language and the real lived world. The meaning of language begins and ends in the body – where it ‘cashes out’ in experience. As I have suggested

This is just more evidence that human hemisphere difference could be seen as that between the experienced world (right hemisphere) and the virtual world (left hemisphere).