“A narrow focus, serial analytic approach encourages us to think that the way to understand music is to see what is in each note, and then add them together to find out the sum. Or to understand flow by looking at a single molecule of water, or even at a small sequence of contiguous molecules of water, and work out from that what flow really is.

Two main consequences result from this fallacy of reduction to parts.

One is that the search goes in the wrong direction: not upwards, to understand how a phenomenon such as flow functions in the context of everything it takes part in, but downwards, towards units that not only do not exist as discrete entities, but, even if they did, would contain no more of the secret of flow than an agglomeration of single notes explains Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

The other consequence of the atomistic, serial, linear approach is a futile search for what causes what. As an example, a lot of effort has been, and continues to be, directed at disentangling what it is that the right hemisphere is contributing, when we say it is good at understanding metaphor. Is it its affinity for novelty? For complexity? For the implicit? For understanding utterances in context? Or for seeing the connexion between superficially unrelated elements? Which causes what?

This is a little like asking what explains the cat’s success in catching mice. Its swiftness? Its agility? Its visual acuity? The sharpness of its claws? Its habit of going out hunting at night? Which is the primary quality? This is the typical left hemisphere approach: if we can only break it up into bits, we will finally understand it, by stringing the bits together in the right order.”