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Talent hits a target no-one else can hit, wrote Schopenhauer; genius hits a target no-one else can see.
The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues …
‘Side issues’: remember that all the really valuable things in life defy pursuit, but come unbidden when we are looking elsewhere.
Just about everything that is said about the hemispheres in pop psychology is wrong because it rests on beliefs about what the hemispheres do, not about how they approach it: each does so in a consistently different way.
And the ‘divergent’ element isn’t all, as we shall see. Where there are rules and procedures to be followed, the left hemisphere is in its element; where there aren’t, it is lost.
Analytic, critical, convergent thinking must have something to work on: you can’t think critically without something to criticise, or narrow down the field without having a field to narrow.
‘Reason can be used to tear apart bad arguments and it can be used to apply universal principles to particular cases. But reason as an instrument of analysis on its own is uncreative.’33
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, but to know how to create is better … Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end.
Reason cannot be the creative principle, unlike intuition: it is the quality control department only.
‘A work of art is a unit originally,’ wrote Susanne Langer, ‘not by synthesis of independent factors. Analysis reveals elements in it, and can go on indefinitely, yielding more and more understanding; but it will never yield a recipe.’
The left hemisphere’s inclination, as Ramachandran observed, is to preserve the model at all costs, dismissing an anomaly; the right hemisphere again, according to Ramachandran, is the ‘anomaly detector’, the ‘devil’s advocate’.
Neurones make contact through synapses on branches called dendrites. In areas of association cortex such as the anterior temporal cortex, right hemisphere pyramidal neurones have more synapses overall, and especially more synapses far from the cell body, than those of the left hemisphere. What this means is that they make not only more connexions overall, but connexions over a far larger area.49 This in turn means that the areas connected are more differentiated one from another, and that there will be a variety of types of communication going on.
Already we can see three reasons why the left hemisphere will present problems for creativity: it is too linear, too detail-focussed, and too concerned with naming or labelling, which tends to crystallise meaning prematurely.
Details are not unimportant, but their significance becomes apparent only when taking in the whole.
After all, we will never learn anything about hemisphere differences if we wait for a situation in which one hemisphere is 100% responsible for whatever it is, and the other contributes nothing. It is always a matter of degree – a matter of asymmetry.
Deactivation of the left and activation of the right prefrontal cortex was associated with increased creativity in all domains studied: conceptual expansion, associative thinking, and set-shifting ability.
Convergent thinking is intensified if the left prefrontal cortex is stimulated,178 and conversely divergent thinking is enhanced by right frontal stimulation.
Making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas; that is what creativity is in a nutshell …
language is inevitably poor at capturing anything subtle.
If it is hard to define something neatly, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist: it often means that the phenomenon is complex, or that, though the term one is applying is a useful placeholder for the phenomenon, the phenomenon itself can’t be perfectly circumscribed by it.
All knowledge is uncertain, but not therefore invalid.
Illness produces a distancing effect, which allows us to observe normal human behaviour and cognition via their pathological counterpart.
Perception is not a mosaic of independent responses to local stimuli, but involves constant interactions, back and forth, between local stimuli and the context, as well as one another; understanding the resultant wholes is what makes sense of the world.
As the reader has seen, the right hemisphere is largely responsible, in a host of ways, for sustaining the lived world we inhabit, while the left hemisphere deals mainly with a theoretical schema or map – a representation only.
There are relatively few ‘final common pathways’.
The brain is a series of nested neuronal complexes: nuclei and ganglia at one level, organisational foci, and broader functional regions within specific gyri or sulci (the folds of the cortex) at another, up to the level of one or other cerebral hemisphere as a whole.
If, at the very top of the pyramid of functioning of the human central nervous system, the product of all this organisation is the phenomenological world we inhabit (and which we also help to constitute), and if that product, as I suggest, requires balancing the contributions of the two hemispheres, an imbalance of some kind between the two will be a common element in mind/brain abnormalities.
In fact if you look at the list on the left, it characterises embodied vitality; on the right, it characterises the dead hand of mechanism, scientism and bureaucracy, under the shadow of which all our lives are now ‘lived’.
Without a self, there is no capacity for intersubjectivity, for the experience of shared time in a shared world, and this is closely linked with the ‘freezing’ of reality, as we will see.
In schizophrenia, because of the lack of betweenness (without which the world is incomprehensible), boundaries are experienced where none should be, and where boundaries should be, none is experienced. These are two facets of the same thing: a loss of identity.
Indeed, excessive abstraction has been described as ‘probably at the source of cognitive deficit in schizophrenia’228 – living in the map, not the world: words that refer only to other words; abstractions that become more real than actualities; symbols that usurp the power of what they symbolise: the triumph of theory over embodied experience.
Concrete instances are always unique; only an abstraction can be general.
For the normal person, he maintained, the world is not just an assemblage of external stimuli, atoms, forces and energy, but ‘a moving stream which envelops us at all points and constitutes the milieu without which we would not know how to live.’
In schizophrenia, because of the lack of distinction between the living, the dead and the never-alive, while living beings become disturbingly like zombies or machines, inanimate things can on occasion become disturbingly alive.
As people become more like machines, machines become more like people – both in the modern world and in schizophrenia.
Myth is otherwise known as the deep, embodied, imaginative understanding available to the right hemisphere – and seen by the left hemisphere as a lie.
Flow is what makes sense of life. When it disappears all that is left is the disembodied forms of logic.
It is all consonant with an emphasis on the left hemisphere’s take on the world: the triumph of procedure over meaning in every walk of life.
One of the features of left hemisphere thinking is its tendency to ‘either/or’ thinking, while missing the ‘maybe’ area altogether.
What I think I have shown in these chapters is that the left hemisphere is, compared with the right hemisphere, unreliable in just about every way that matters.
The processes are self-referential, internally validating, and self-confirmatory. The serious problem for humanity is that the left hemisphere is prone to see the world this way and to ‘go it alone’. Not knowing what it is it doesn’t know, it tends to be overconfident it is right.
This does not happen the other way round because the right hemisphere seems to be aware of its limitations, as well as of shades of meaning and degrees of truth; and it is more in touch with reality, while the left hemisphere prefers its theory about reality: there is an analogy with the effects of what nowadays we’d call being inside a ‘thought bubble’.
‘as you learn the words for colour, as your categories become more linguistic, they become more left-hemisphere dominant’,
The trend has been for the left hemisphere to shift from perception to conception, from experience to abstraction, from life to language.
It may be that the advent of language alone produces, and indeed requires, this distancing from reality, this degree of alienation in one half of the brain.
The left hemisphere’s world is now an increasingly virtual world. It no longer even pretends to yield a faithful portrayal of reality. For that it depends on the right hemisphere.
I believe that, despite our always contributing to the reality we experience, there is something apart from ourselves to which we can be true – that reality, in other words, is not purely made up by the brain. There is a relationship there – something to be true to. Assuming there is something there to know implies that some understandings will inevitably be better than others.
The single most profound difference between the hemispheres, which I will have cause to return to repeatedly, is the distinction between the experience of something as it ‘presences’ to us in the right hemisphere, and as it is ‘re-presented’ to us in the left.
Truth and trust (belief) go together. One cannot have trust in a society where there is no truth; and one cannot be true to a society in which there is no trust.
The believer needs to be disposed to love, but the believed-in needs to inspire another’s belief or trust.
