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

by Iain McGilchrist

the problem is not one of understanding (comprehension), but of manipulating (apprehension), the world.

left cingulum,53 but what, by contrast, is called ‘emotional empathy’

Psychopath

interpersonal understanding is seldom, if ever, a matter of two people assigning intentional states to each other but emerges out of a context of interaction between them. Self and other form a coupled system rather than two wholly separate entities equipped with an internalised capacity to assign mental states to the other. This applies even in those instances where one might seem to adopt a ‘detached’ perspective towards others.

It sounds like a nice symmetrical division of labour: what in the left, versus why in the right.

‘The right hemisphere, in fact, truly interprets the mental state not only of its own brain, but the brains (and minds) of others.’

One patient with a resection of a large part of his right hemisphere, when asked six weeks after the operation, ‘Al, how do you feel?’, replied, without a trace of irony or humour, indeed ‘without any change in voice, tone or facial expression’: ‘With my hands’.

This

Indeed it is not so much a matter of cogito ergo sum, as sentio ergo sum.

The scientific world-view, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial people … Today we have no difficulty freeing logic from concrete referents and reasoning about purely hypothetical situations. People were not always thus. From interviews Luria conducted with peasants in remote areas of Russia, [Christopher] Hallpike culls some wonderful examples.70 The dialogues paraphrased run as follows:

One should say ‘it thinks’, just as one says: ‘it’s lightning’

I just want to draw attention to the fact that a creative person is a microcosm of the process of creativity itself: drawing together at once factors not commonly combined.

Talent hits a target no-one else can hit, wrote Schopenhauer; genius hits a target no-one else can see.11

As George Steiner puts it, speaking eloquently of Heidegger: As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the centre, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of ‘grasping’ and pragmatic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying ‘to listen to the voice of Being’. It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for.30

Or, as Schopenhauer put it succinctly: reasoning ‘can give only after it has received’.

He reported that he was ‘more sensitive to the hidden beauty of nature’ and that he ‘wanted to live and paint spontaneously, explore the world, and represent it in its raw strength’. He also indicated a loss of interest in ‘impressionists’, whom he had preferred for the previous 21 years. Impressionism was now no longer sufficiently real or representative of his creative strength. Intriguingly, he said that it was the use of the left hand that led him into this new artistic dimension … He realised that his creativity was increased by the use of his left hand.

It appears that calendrical calculating autistic savants engage the posterior right hemisphere to solve seemingly impossible maths problems.173 Donald Treffert, who has spent his life studying savants, had by 2010 assembled a worldwide registry of 319, of whom 32 had the acquired form. In a paper in Scientific American, he reports that in most of these acquired cases, leading to exceptional mathematical, musical or artistic talents, there was damage to the left hemisphere, leading to a release phenomenon involving recruitment and rewiring in the right hemisphere (he calls this the ‘three Rs’).174 Savant syndrome is usually associated with a knockout of the left frontotemporal area, whether by birth, or by accident, or by TMS.175 And as if to confirm this, a mathematical prodigy was found to be activating mainly right hemisphere prefrontal and temporal areas:

There is, then, a considerable body of evidence from naturally occurring, or temporarily experimentally induced, lesion studies, from direct observation of creative artists, and from a host of different kinds of experimental studies, that quite consistently suggests not just that depressing the right hemisphere tends to depress creativity, including originality, flexibility and divergent thinking, but that depressing the left hemisphere enhances creativity, probably because the mind is released from tendencies towards the linear, explicit and linguistic modes of apprehension typical of the left. There is in fact direct evidence that both rationalising and verbalising have a damaging effect on creativity, at least during the generative process itself. The evidence on this matter is detailed in Chapters 17 & 18. However, an fMRI study at Stanford is particularly interesting. Not only did it find a negative

many situations, the effort to reduce mistakes may potentially interfere with the achievement of insight by limiting time and resources and by directing attention toward precision, and away from reflection. The effort at reducing mistakes – the documentation of sources and of areas of uncertainty, and the assignment of probabilities to assumptions – can get in the way of apprehending new patterns.194 Chrysikou and colleagues write that:

It’s also not just a matter of the convergent approach being uncreative, but of its positively leading to a certain kind of mistake. Insight can be mistaken, but so can analysis.196 Subjects who solve predominantly by insight tend to make errors of omission (‘time-outs’) rather than errors of commission (incorrect answers); those who solve analytically make the reverse pattern, giving incorrect answers, rather than failing to complete. When confronted with a deadline,

In a letter to a Baron B — who had enquired about how he set about writing, and how it was that his work was so distinctive, Mozart wrote (the text may have been embellished: see note): How do I write, and how do I come to flesh out what are large, general ideas? I really can’t tell you any more than this – because I myself don’t know any more about it, and can’t get any further with it. It’s when I’m feeling right and things are good, perhaps riding in a coach or taking a walk after a good meal, or in the night when I can’t sleep – these are the best times, when thoughts come flowing into my mind, like a stream. How they come, and where they come from, I don’t know, and I can’t do anything about it. The ones I like I keep in my head and go around humming them; at least that’s what people tell me. If I hang onto them, I soon come to see, one by one, how to use such and such a phrase, how to make a tasty dish out of them all, using counterpoint, and respecting the timbre of the different instruments,

etc, etc, etc. That fires up my soul, and as long as I am not distracted, the work grows; I expand it, and it becomes clearer, until I have the thing pretty much finished in my head, even if it’s long; so that from then on I see it all in my mind’s eye at a glance, much as one sees a beautiful picture or a pretty woman, and I don’t hear it sequentially in my imagination, as it will have to be later on, but, as it were, all at once … When I later come to write it down, I just take, straight out of my brain box, what’s already assembled there, as I’ve explained. For that reason it goes down on paper pretty quickly, since, as I say, it’s really already finished, and rarely turns out much different from what was in my head all along. That’s why I don’t mind being disturbed while writing; and I quite like all sorts of things going on around me; I carry on writing just the same; and can even chat away at the same time about hens and geese, or Jack and Jill, or whatever … As to how it is that during the process my pieces come to take on a Mozartian form or style, one not like anybody else’s, it’s like asking why my nose is big and curved – it’s Mozartian, and not like other people’s! I don’t aim for distinctiveness and I can’t really describe what’s different about my style. But it’s obvious that people who really have something particular about them will be different from each other on the inside as well as on the outside. All I know is that I am not the author of either kind of...

Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought by Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers. Published