On the recommendation of an Australian psychiatrist friend, I recently I listened to a podcast on NPR’s Hidden Brain series, called One Head, Two Brains; How The Brain’s Hemispheres Shape The World We See. This was a conversation between host Shankar Vedantam and Dr Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, researcher, writer and literary scholar. McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World a profound and cerebral hypothesis about the importance of the relationship between the left and right sides of the human brain’s perceptions. The Master and His Emissary is a wonderfully engrossing book, it has already sold 100,000 copies; 500 pages of thoughtful analysis, scientific evidence and references from Socrates to Nietzsche, with an examination of power from the Ancient World to the Industrial Revolution, to demonstrate how the left hemisphere alone should not left to be the independent decision maker or kingmaker.
In a simplistic nutshell Dr McGilchrist’s hypothesis is, apart from its motor functions, each side of the brain has its own specific expertise. The left side absorbs detail, data, statistics(the purely mechanical, rather than creative, side of maths, physics, science), it focuses on categorisation, predictability, systems, and the right side appreciates intangibles, humour, the sound of music, the flow of time, emotion, beauty, subtlety, nuance, language, syntax, expression, virtues, values, judgement, danger, experience and metaphor; proper understanding and imagination requires both hemispheres to work together and share their findings. Through the corpus callosum the right gives context and meaning to the left, without both sides operating harmoniously together McGilchrist posits Western society as we know it is at risk. He believes that presently we are in thrall to the left hemisphere which has evolved and exaggerated itself largely eclipsing the right. McGilchrist explains the right hemisphere has first take on everything, it is attentive and vigilant to the world all around, the left selects and focusses on the details; reason and knowledge are no substitute for wisdom and intuition. Thus, we have an inability to see and understand the whole picture and to make strategies accordingly. The book title is a metaphor about a powerful master whose appointed emissary is supposed to carry his message across the world, in the absence of the master the emissary becomes deluded, does not recognise the value of the master and thinks he knows it all, and because he did not have the master’s big picture, the community began to decline.
McGilchrist examines the rise and downfall of the Greek and Roman Civilisations, and the Renaissance;all three go through a time when the left and right hemispheres are in the proper balance and everything flourishes. Then to maintain control and administer an empire the thinking shifts to the left hemisphere, to the present and to the explicit, it becomes rationalistic, linear and analytical but it cannot interpret or manipulate the information leading to inevitable collapse.
It may take me the rest of my life to unravel the sequence of thoughts McGilchrist unleashed in my mind,but I started with his idea of the downfall of Civilisations, he agreed to speak on the telephone from his home in the Isle of Skye. McGilchrist said the Roman Empire’s need to standardise meant administrative thinking gravitated to the left brain, the previous richness of Roman culture collapsed in 400AD following the dehumanising and hierarchical mindset of those in power. He said the commercial mindset alone is inimical to the civilised way of doing things, interestingly he believes that the Chinese and Japanese societies do not tend to get stuck in this way of thinking. I wondered if he thought the British Empire had left a legacy of left-brain colonial thinking in the Indian bureaucracy, which is famous for being mired in detail. McGilchrist replied that “since the C17th Enlightenment thinking had taken over the West and drew out in India a certain way of thinking that was damaging to native understanding.”
If the left hemisphere continues to ignore the right because it considers it inferior, our whole world would become different, McGilchrist fears “There would be a great emphasis on predictability, organisability, anonymity, categorisation, loss of the unique and an ability to break things down into parts but not really see what the whole is like. There would be a need for total control because the left hemisphere is somewhat paranoid… Anger would become the key-note in public discourse. Everything would become black and white…. We would misunderstand everything that is implicit and metaphorical and have to make rules about how to achieve it.”
My favourite McGilchrist conviction is that life and the world are best understood by myth and metaphor, it is so true and applies to faith as well as experience. His book wants us to re-evaluate our default, ad-hoc and piecemeal solutions for a quick fix, it wants us as a society to have a hemispherically integrated comprehensive vision for the future.In our age of infobesity and separation from nature, this is not just a book about one head and two brains, it is a reflection on how we perceive the millennia of culture from whence we came, globalisation and each other.