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November 6, 2023 - July 13, 2024
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. By contrast I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’, and that, except in the case of machines, there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.
If my beliefs are ‘nothing but’ the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinist’s tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously (since we are all determined either to believe it or not already). As the philosopher Hans Jonas observed, there is an unspoken hierarchical principle involved: 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
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However, we must also be prepared to find that, as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not. This is itself a version of the realisation that what applies at the local level does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level.
As a critic of Hamlet I state what I see: people either ‘click’ with what I say – get an insight from it – or don’t. They either feel that I (and now they) know more about Hamlet, or they don’t. This is not to give a single crumb of comfort to the ‘my view is as good as yours’ types. There are, very clearly, better and worse interpretations.
in humans the situation is slightly different, since we have eyes on the front of our heads. That means that the left visual field of each eye (both right and left) feeds to the right hemisphere and, of course, the right visual field of each eye feeds to the left hemisphere
Conversely, 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.
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
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the left hemisphere not only clearly does not know what it is talking about, but behaves as though it knows perfectly well. Its manner is confident and unhesitating, even when it is talking about something of which it knows absolutely nothing
Philosophers in every known culture have debated the nature of reality from time immemorial. While we cannot, in the nature of things, ever pin it down, we cannot give up the search: understanding, like reality itself, is an unending process, not a thing that is finished so as to be grasped. It is the process that offers to enlighten us, not the act of appropriation. ‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work’, goes one rabbinical saying, ‘but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.’92 The truly foundational aspects of our experience – starting with consciousness itself – belong
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As the British nuclear physicist 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’.
there are, ultimately, three very important things about the mammalian brain, of consummate importance for understanding the nature of the human mind. One concerns the top-to-bottom axis – the development of the neocortex; the second concerns the side-to-side axis – the development of the corpus callosum; and the third concerns the front-to-back axis – the development of the frontal lobes.
It does not seem right to me that the word ‘neglect’ should be used to describe it. I think they thought I was definitely, deliberately not looking to the left. I wasn’t really … If it is not there, you are not neglecting it. 37 Just let that sink in for a second. What this patient is insisting on is extraordinary. At least for the left hemisphere, attention constitutes the world in a very literal sense: as far as your left hemisphere is concerned, what it no longer attends to is not just unseen, but ceases to exist.
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 subject found that when he focussed upon anything he felt his gaze pulled towards the right and a stream of static images replaced the flow of movement: ‘the various images were arranged in parallel series, close to one another, and they were all of the same size’, like an old reel of film getting stuck.
These patients exhibit not just neglect, but what is called anosognosia (Greek a, not, + nosos, disease, + gnosis, knowledge), unwillingness to acknowledge a deficit,
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.
When the next thought comes along the residue of the last one is still there. Vague impression of all thoughts lingering in my mind at once. Several thoughts demanding attention at the same time.
It is thought that Charles Dodgson, the ‘real’ Lewis Carroll, was describing, or at any rate building on, his own experiences with either migraine or temporal lobe epilepsy, each of which can give rise to metamorphopsia, as well as disturbances of time and motion perception – the essence of the Alice in Wonderland syndrome.162
Delusions of infestation These are what they say they are. They are often delusional interpretations of bodily sensations such as itching or crawling of the skin, though the sensations themselves are usually hallucinatory. They are strongly associated with right hemisphere lesions;
There is also something called ‘gourmand’ syndrome, in which there is an out of character preoccupation with food and, often, a strong preference for fine eating, after the onset of a cerebral lesion. Such patients persistently crave fine food despite having apparently normal sensations of hunger and fullness.
Koro is a ‘culture-bound’ syndrome, found principally in the Far East, but also sometimes in Africa and Europe, in which in men there is an irrational and overwhelming belief that their genitalia are retracting and will disappear, often coupled with an intense fear that death will occur once the retraction is complete.
Peter Brugger, head of neuropsychology at University Hospital, Zurich, and probably the world’s leading researcher into magical thinking, to be ‘totally “unmagical” is very unhealthy’, and reduces one’s capacity to appreciate value and to take enjoyment in life.
If, for example, the right frontal cortex is so crucial in females for underwriting the empathic relationship with the infant, it may not be possible for the same area to make risk decisions, which, from an evolutionary psychology point of view, are more the domain of the male.
Additionally male brains exhibit greater intrahemispheric, and females greater interhemispheric, structural connectivity.203 What these findings together suggest is that the hemispheres are more specialised in the male than the female brain.
It has repeatedly been demonstrated that men tend to remember the gist of an emotional story more strongly than women, while women tend to remember the details of the same story more strongly than men.
By stimulating the right hemisphere, the patient had a heightened sense of ‘smells, sounds, visible objects, and pressures’. He called it ‘new awareness’ of whatever he was experiencing, whether it was his own backyard or simply cigarette smoke. He had previously experienced the same thing at a cinema when, as he walked out, he was ‘unusually conscious of the weight of his coat and of the weight of his feet upon the floor’.
Intelligence is a very general mental capacity which, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings – ‘catching on’, ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.
It is conventional to distinguish Gf, which signifies ‘fluid’ intelligence, from Gc, signifying ‘crystallised’ intelligence. The intended distinction here is between, as far as possible, intelligence in and of itself, that can therefore be applied to any new situation or set of factors, and is hence ‘fluid’; contrasted with that which requires a certain context, builds on education, general knowledge, experience and cultural factors, and is in that sense ‘crystallised’.
Shorter reaction times (whether in simple or four-choice tests) are strongly associated with general intelligence, and the correlation increases with age.18 Another physiological measure is colour discrimination ability: ‘colour acuity is strongly correlated with g’.19 Such a correlation turns out to be surprisingly strong, between approximately 0.7 and 0.9.
those who say they have not read a single book in the last year rose from 16% in 2013 to 27% in 2019.
Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning.
As mentioned earlier, there are one or two physiological measures that have been found consistently to parallel IQ closely, and to be free from any possible training effect: reaction time and colour acuity.66 Simple reaction time has been measured in large populations since the middle of the nineteenth century, and has been found to be declining since the late nineteenth century.67 Using it as a measure suggests a real decline of 13.3 IQ points between 1884 and 2004.68 Colour acuity shows a similar trend.
When subjects were primed by asking them to think about the distant future, they subsequently did better on insight and creativity tasks; those asked to think about the near future did better on analytic tasks.
Intuition could also be thought of as the synthesis of experience with unconscious reasoning on the basis of that experience.
Incidentally, higher intelligence has also been found to be associated with better performance on insight problems,55 and it has been shown to be associated with the ability to solve British-style cryptic crossword puzzles, which depend on making remote associations, radically shifting perspective, and ignoring the literal and obvious.
had a left hemisphere stroke in 1997, when she was 44. Her pre-stroke art was somewhat conceptual, even ideological, but her subsequent work, described as raw, intuitive and flowing, feels to her different. She says there is ‘a new ease in my process. I did not feel I had to intellectualize away my every move and an extreme amount of struggle faded away. A freer, more enjoyable state of painting existed far different than in my previous work.’
Jon Sarkin, a previously rather reserved chiropractor, was seized after a left brain haemorrhage by an insatiable desire to paint, on any surfaces that presented themselves, a desire which took over his life. He said he saw things differently and more vividly than he had before.
Composers activate ‘areas specific to melody generation’ in the right temporal pole and right frontal operculum.187 In both male and female composers, the compositions that received the highest ratings were by subjects that had smaller left hemisphere advantages in verbal processing, suggesting a greater reliance on the right hemisphere.
It seems that creative individuals do have different patterns of brain activity, even when not actively engaged in a creative task. According to one study, insightful individuals show greater right hemisphere activity at rest, relative to analytic individuals
One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.
Inventing the bagless vacuum cleaner involved James Dyson in making a connexion between an air-filtering system used in sawmills and oil refineries, called an industrial cyclonic separator, and a domestic floor cleaner: divergent thinking. It then took him and his team 15 years and 5,127 attempts, once the insight had been had, to build it: mainly convergent thinking.
And then there is Handel, who wrote the whole of The Messiah, approaching four hours’ worth of some of the greatest and most inspired music ever written, in just over three weeks, between 21 August and 14 September 1741, interestingly while still recovering from his left hemisphere stroke.
‘Illness, madness and death were the dark angels who watched over my cradle and have accompanied me throughout my life’, wrote Edvard Munch. ‘Without anxiety and illness, I should have been like a ship without a rudder.’
Dryden famously wrote: ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’ But some two thousand years earlier Aristotle asked: ‘Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic?’
This prejudice against broadly true generalisations, on the basis that we can all think of examples that don’t conform, is one of the prevalent fallacies of our age.
It is a common experience, confirmed by research, that alcohol can enhance insight-solving, but not analytic-solving.
For 158 suicides in poets to be expected, there would have to be Wikipedia entries for about 1,580,000 poets. As far as I can tell there are 2,386.
‘For some composers it seems that they are most productive immediately after a phase of depression’, as one study of depression in the lives of 12 composers concludes.
It has been repeatedly shown that the healthy relatives of people with psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and who presumably share some traits, are more creative than average.
A study of every school leaver in Sweden over a 10-year period found that excellence in academic achievement at school was associated with later development of bipolar disorder,
