The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning by Iain McGilchrist

Author:Iain McGilchrist
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300190021
Publisher: Yale University Press

Fig. 4 Flower as drawn by the same subjects: in normal conditions; with right hemisphere inactivated; and with left hemisphere inactivated.

Fig. 5 Everyday objects drawn ‘according to the left hemisphere’, with right hemisphere inactivated.

complexity of the living world is reduced to a set of simple geometric figures. Take a look at the column that shows a ‘person’. I am reminded of Emerson's pessimism about what was happening to human beings in the modern world. ‘Man’, he wrote, ‘is a dwarf of himself.’ In the world of the left hemisphere, this is true. The left hemisphere is not in touch with reality but with its representation of reality, which turns out to be a remarkably self-enclosed, self-referring system of tokens.

I'd say the defining quality of the right hemisphere's world is that it is all in relations, what I call ‘betweenness’. This starts with its having a relationship with the world at large, not seeing it as a separate object, ripe for manipulation. What do I mean by ‘betweenness'? Think about the nature of music. Music does not exist in one particular note – which is in itself meaningless; or in a lot of such single notes, each in itself meaningless. I am tempted to say it exists more in the spaces than in the notes: the spaces between successive notes in pitch that creates the melody, the spaces between simultaneously sounding notes, that is the harmony, the spaces in time between the beats, that makes the rhythm. But that too is wrong, because the spaces are just silence, apparently nothing. It is not in the spaces or the notes, but in the spaces and the notes together, plus whatever it is that comes about from their union: much as electricity isn't in the positive pole, or the negative pole, or for that matter just in the space between them, or the sum of all those, but in the whole taken together. This is what I mean by betweenness, and it is also what mathematics consists in as much as music. It is what physics, too, tells us the world is made of – not a universe of billiard balls pinging off one another in predictable ways. And it is what the human world, rightly understood is made of, too. We are not atoms, nor mixtures, but compounds with rich emergent properties, nowhere dreamed of in the single human heart.

Some people have thought I might be subtly decrying reason or exalting emotion. But I should remind you that both hemispheres are involved in reasoning and in emotion. The left hemisphere is especially good at voluntary and social expressions of emotion and one of the most clearly lateralised emotional registers is that of anger, which lateralises to the left hemisphere. Deeper and more complex expressions of emotion, and the reading of faces, are best dealt with, however, by the right hemisphere. As far as reason goes, the left hemisphere is better at carrying out certain procedures that involve manipulating numbers, but has less of a grasp than the right hemisphere of what those numbers mean.

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