More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Yes, a key can lie for ever in the place where the locksmith left it, and never be used to open the lock the master forged it for.
the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is.
The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.
Reductionism can mean a number of things, but here I mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made, and building up from there.
the scientist does take man to be determined by causal laws – but not himself while he assumes and exercises his freedom of enquiry and his openness to reason, evidence and truth. His own working assumptions involve free will, deliberation, and evaluation as aspects of himself, but those qualities and capacities are stripped away from and denied to the human object or thing that he is inspecting…
Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with.
believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere.
The explicit is not more fully real than the implicit. It is merely the limit case of the implicit, with much of its vital meaning sheared off: narrowed down and ‘finalised’. The literal is not more real than the metaphorical: it is merely the limit case of the metaphorical, in which the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a 1:1 correspondence for a useful, temporary, purpose.
Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal.
Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold.
The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature.
An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere.
The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent.
To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.
Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.
The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’.
In one way, the hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways.
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.
And since each hemisphere on its own is perfectly capable of yielding a coherent experiential world, the conclusion is therefore logically inescapable: that this situation should give rise to two different experiential worlds, with different qualities.
The LH is principally concerned with manipulation of the world; the RH with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it.
The LH deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and easily grasped; the RH with the whole picture, including the periphery or background, and all that is not immediately graspable.
The RH is on the lookout for, better at detecting and dealing with, whatever is new, the LH with what is familiar.
The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility.
The LH tends to see things as isolated, discrete, fragmentary, where the RH tends to see the whole.
The RH is better at seeing things as they are pre-conceptually – fresh, unique, embodied, and as they ‘presence’ to us, or first come into being for us. The LH, then, sees things as they are ‘re-presented’, literally ‘present again’ after the fact, as already familiar abstractions or signs. One could say that the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience; the LH that of the map, the RH that of the terrain.
All experience in this life as we know it (and this applies whether we conceive the brain as the originator, or as a transducer, of consciousness) comes to us through the brain, and is therefore inevitably constrained, and shaped, by it.
There are two such networks, par excellence, maximally connected within themselves, that are each capable of supporting consciousness on their own: the two brain hemispheres.
There is a little bit of yin in the yang and a little bit of yang in the yin, and the duality of yin and yang, while remaining distinct, together compose a single perfect circle.
Evolution has taken care to preserve, and even to intensify, the division of the brain, this organ whose whole purpose is to connect.
‘it takes only one hemisphere to have a mind’,
‘hemispheres can sustain the activity of two separate spheres of consciousness following commissurotomy’.
the point is that real differences may be apparent only when circumstances permit.
‘Abstract schemes of morphology’: all advances in science are made by observing patterns, by using metaphors and formal analogies.
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
‘The more we know’, writes astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser, ‘the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.’
And if we are interested in the capacities and limitations of the mind, we should be interested in the capacities and limitations of the brain.
Over evolution, as I described in the introduction to this book, asymmetry of the nervous system has been universally conserved as a means of addressing the problem of how to ‘get’ without being ‘got’.
Since, broadly speaking, the power of the brain increases with the number of cell layers, the development of the neocortex with the first mammals is a radical shift in brain capacity.
The evolution of larger brain size in primates, not just in humans, results in increasingly independent hemispheres.36 This arrangement is more efficient for two main reasons: first, the avoidance of interference, especially in complex cognition; and second, a potential doubling of working capacity.
The corpus callosum itself comes to embody the predicament of the entire cortex, and ultimately of the human world: how to hold things together, and yet keep them apart. Another theme of this book is the importance of union and division together.
And what is the frontal cortex for? Largely for stopping things happening.
‘As a man is, so he sees’, wrote William Blake.3 Who we are, then, determines how we see. And how we see determines what we find.
For those with right hemisphere damage, they and their world had changed. For those with left hemisphere damage, they and their world were recognisably the same: it was their ability to handle it, to make use of it, that had altered.
In normal subjects the extremes of space are supplied by the right hemisphere, even the extreme right of space.
So patients with neglect, secondary to a right hemisphere stroke or injury, also often exhibit not just a neglect of one half of the world, but simultaneously a narrowing of the window of attention paid to the part that remains.
Staring is a special kind of vision, in itself predatory: left hemisphere attention gets locked onto its target. As a result it more easily misses everything else.
As the researchers who discovered this noted, this means that visual neglect is a disorder of directing attention in time, as well as space.
If, as far as the left hemisphere is concerned, the world exists only when that hemisphere pays attention to it, we have a problem, because its attention is inadequate to sustain a coherent world, whether in space or time.
the right hemisphere integrates, while the left hemisphere fragments.
First, the fact of something coming and going from our awareness necessitates that it comes and goes from our awareness not just in space, but in time. If it is part of the living, embodied world, it is subject to time: outside of time it can have no embodied existence, and is purely an abstraction.
