Brain Hemisphere Theory
Discussion
How Brain Hemisphere Theory Helps us Understand the Metacrisis
Iain McGilchrist:
"In a nutshell, each hemisphere has evolved, for classical Darwinian reasons, to pay a different kind of attention to the world. When I saw this, I have to admit that the full import of the distinction did not immediately dawn on me, because I had been trained in the cognitive science paradigm that saw attention as simply another cognitive ‘function’. But the nature of the attention we pay is of critical importance. It creates and moulds the only world we can know.
The left hemisphere has evolved to pay narrow-beam attention, focussed on a detail that we already know and desire, and intent on grabbing and getting, whether it be something to eat or to use in some other way. In a word, the left hemisphere exists in the service of manipulation. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, is on the lookout for everything else that is going on while we are manipulating: for mates, conspecifics, offspring—and predators, so as not to be eaten while eating. Its attention is broad, sustained, coherent, vigilant, and uncommitted as to what it may find: the exact opposite of that of the left hemisphere. In brief, the right hemisphere is in the service of understanding the contextual whole, which is nothing less than the world. And context changes everything. The difference, then, is not, as used to be supposed, to do with what each hemisphere ‘does’—as though it were a machine—so much as the manner in which it does it—as though it were part of a person. The hemispheric difference in attention is beyond dispute: indeed, it is universally attested. And since the nature of attention also indisputably changes what it is that comes to our attention, such a difference logically cannot but lead to two different phenomenological worlds. Hence my belief that attention is a moral act. It helps form both us and the world we come to know.
What are these two worlds like?
Very briefly, if crudely, these worlds could be characterised like this. In the case of the left hemisphere, the world is simplified in the service of manipulation: it is made of isolated, static ‘things’; things moreover that are already known, familiar, predetermined, and fixed; they are fragments, that are importantly devoid of context, disembodied, and meaningless; abstract, generic in nature, quantifiable, fungible, mechanical: ultimately bloodless and lifeless. This is indeed not so much a world as a re-presentation of a world, which means a world that is actually no longer present, but reconstructed after the fact: literally two-dimensional, schematic, theoretical. Not in fact a world at all: more like a map. Nothing wrong with a map, of course, unless you mistake it for the world. And here the future is a fantasy that remains under our control. The left hemisphere is unreasonably optimistic and fails to see the dangers that loom.
In the case of the right hemisphere, by contrast, there is a world of flowing processes, not isolated things; one where nothing is simply fixed, entirely certain, exhaustively known or fully predictable, but always changing, and ultimately interconnected with everything else; where context is everything; where what exists are wholes, of which what we call the parts are an artefact of our way of attending; where what really matters is implicit; a world of uniqueness, one where quality is more important than quantity—a world that is essentially animate. Here the future is a product of realism, not denial. This is a world that is fully present, rich and complex, a world of experience, which calls for understanding; not the map at all, but the world that is mapped. The emotional timbre here is more cautious, and in general more realistic.
We need both of these ‘worlds’ to work together, but also independently: hence the need for connexion and separation. Naturally we are not aware of this disjunct, because these worlds are combined at a level below our awareness. We become aware only after an accident of nature, such as a stroke, tumour or injury; or after commissurotomy, the so-called ‘split-brain’ operation; or if one hemisphere at a time is experimentally suppressed. Then they may become suddenly, vividly, present to us. Yet, because these two worlds have mutually incompatible properties, when we come to reflect self-consciously, and to rationalise about what we find, we are forced, by the requirement for consistency, to choose between the pictures of the world they offer. This is why, as AN Whitehead observed, a culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse itself.[3] Once our lives become very largely mediated by self-reflexive language and discourse, as in our postmodern world they are, the explicit stands forward and the implicit retires. Yet almost everything that really matters to us—the beauty of nature, poetry, music, art, narrative, drama, myth, ritual, sex, love, the sense of the sacred—must remain implicit if we are not to destroy its nature. The attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature: we can no longer rely on the wisdom that comes from these all-important but hidden sources, from closeness to the long tradition of a society, to nature and to the sacred, to sophisticate our understanding. In fact we see these not as irreplaceable guides to truths deeper than those that science can encompass, but as lies. Possibly entertaining lies, but lies nonetheless. We begin to see only the self-created, self-referring world according to the left hemisphere. We go for the machine model: reductive materialism. And the consequences are all around us.
Unfortunately the two hemispheres are not equally veridical. In terms of our ability to apprehend—take hold of and use—the world, the left hemisphere is superior; but in terms of our ability to comprehend the world, the right hemisphere is superior. In each of what one might call the portals to understanding—attention, perception, judgment, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence (that is, IQ), and creativity—the right hemisphere is so much superior that the left hemisphere on its own has been repeatedly described as frankly delusional. That is not a rhetorical expression: denial of the facts and delusional beliefs are far commoner in association with damage to the right hemisphere—and consequently dependence on the left hemisphere—than the reverse. On its own the left hemisphere confabulates, makes up stories so as to fit with its beliefs: it will frankly insist that a paralysed limb is unaffected, or if challenged deny that the offending appendage belongs to the subject at all. Unlike the right hemisphere, which sees more than one angle, and has for this reason been called by VS Ramachandran ‘the devil’s advocate’, the left hemisphere never doubts that it is right.[4] It is never wrong and never at fault: someone else is always to blame.
Furthermore, in what I take to be the four important onward paths towards truth—science, reason, intuition, and imagination—though both hemispheres contribute, the crucial part in each case, including in science and reason, is played by the right hemisphere, not the left.
Our predicament is that we now live in a world, the understanding of which is largely limited to that of the inferior left hemisphere. Some signs of this include: our inability to see the broader picture, both in space and in time; the way in which wisdom has been lost, understanding reduced to mere knowledge, and knowledge replaced by information, tokens, or representations; the loss of the concepts of skill and judgment, which are the products of experience; the divorce of mind and matter, resulting in a strong tendency to simultaneous abstraction and the debasement of matter to mere, lumpen matter, there for our exploitation; an exponential growth of bureaucracy and administration; everywhere the proceduralisation of life; the reduction of justice to mere equality; a loss of the sense of the uniqueness of all things; the supplanting of quality by quantity; the abandonment of nuance in favour of simplistic ‘either/or’ positions; the loss of reasonableness, which is replaced by rationalisation; a complete disregard for common sense; the design of systems, not for humans, but to maximise utility; a growth of paranoia and pervasive mistrust—for if all is not under its control, the left hemisphere becomes anxious, and projects its anxiety outwards onto others. Nonetheless, we play the passive victim and abjure responsibility for our own lives. In addition, I might point to the rise of anger and aggression in the public sphere: the destruction of social cohesion, and its replacement by angry warring factions. Like almost everything that used to be said about hemisphere differences the idea that the left hemisphere is unemotional is wrong: the most highly lateralised emotion is anger, and it lateralises to the left hemisphere. And there are more indications, but for today’s purposes I will stop here.
In the second part of The Master and his Emissary, I traced the main turning points in the history of ideas in the West and concluded that three times we have seen enacted a certain pattern. First there is a sudden efflorescence of everything that comes from the proper working together of the two hemispheres in harmony. There then follows a stable period for a few hundred years at most; and soon a decline, after which the civilisation eventually crumbles under its own weight. I trace this pattern beginning in the Greek world around the sixth century BC; in the Roman world around the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire; and in the modern world with the Renaissance. In each case it is apparent that the vitality and harmony of a flourishing culture is lost as in due course it overreaches itself, becomes less creative, more and more sclerotic, unimaginative, over-administered, over-hierarchical—and power-hungry. There is a coarsening of values. Where goodness, beauty, and truth had once been the guiding values, power, the need to control, holds sway."
Why is the Left Hemisphere Dominant ?
Iain McGilchrist:
"I am sometimes asked why, if the right hemisphere is more intelligent and by a long way more insightful than the left, this progression is always leftwards. It is a good question. In brief there are a handful of reasons.
First, and most obviously, the left hemisphere view is designed to aid us in grabbing stuff. It controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing. As such it is seductive—not to say addictive.
Second, the left hemisphere view sees a very simplified schema of the world and offers simple answers to our questions. Its mode of thinking prizes consistency above all, and offers the same mechanistic model to explain everything that exists. When reductionist thinking encounters a problem in reconciling apparent irreconcilables—for example, matter and consciousness—it simply denies that one element or the other exists. That’s very convenient.
Third, the left hemisphere’s world view is easier to articulate. Though language is shared between hemispheres, speech is almost always confined to the left: the right hemisphere has literally no voice. And the map is ipso facto vastly simpler than the complex terrain that is mapped. Almost everything that really matters cannot be found there or in the banality of discursive prose.
Fourth, importantly there is, or should be, always an appeal from a theory back to the empirical evidence. If you like, the left hemisphere has a theoretical model; the right hemisphere looks out of the window to see if the model corresponds with experience. Since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last fifty years, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. What we see around us now—looking out of the metaphorical window—is rectilinear, manmade, utilitarian, each thing ripped from the context in which it alone has meaning. And for many, the two-dimensional representations provided by TV screens and computers have come largely to supplant direct face-to-face experience of three-dimensional life, in all its complexity.
Fifth, built into the relationship between the hemispheres is that they have a different take on everything—including on their own relationship. Essentially the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on what is offered to clarify, ‘unpack’, and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding, to produce a new, now enriched, whole. The left hemisphere’s contribution, then, is valuable, but must come at an intermediate stage. Problems arise when this is treated—as it now often is—as the end stage. Analysis is a valuable tool, but breaking things down must be followed by an attempt to understand the whole once more. Unfortunately the left hemisphere is unaware of what it is missing. It cannot see the Gestalt, the ultimately indivisible whole. Therefore it thinks it can go it alone.
Sixth, a culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere’s world attracts to itself, in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar, especially in the areas of science, technology, and administration which have an undue importance in shaping contemporary life. They then make us more like themselves. My worry is not that machines will become like people—an impossibility—but that people are already becoming more like machines.
Finally, I have already referred to the problem that a civilisation that is increasingly cut off from its intuitive life relies more heavily on exchange of explicit ideas in the public forum. Here, though truth is manifestly complicated and many-layered, an awareness of inherent ambiguities, and a capacity for seeing both sides of a question, is no longer considered a strength. The right hemisphere’s view is multifaceted and already takes into account the left hemisphere’s point of view; this virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency, and it is therefore liable to be dismissed.
I believe it is the left hemispheric view of the world, intellectually jejune and morally bankrupt as it is, that has resulted in what has been called the metacrisis: not just the odd crisis here and there, but the despoliation of the natural world; the decline of species on a colossal scale; the destabilisation of the climate; the destruction of the way of life of indigenous peoples; the fragmentation and polarisation of a once civilised society, with escalating, not diminishing, resentments on all sides; an escalating, not diminishing, gap between rich and poor; a surge in mental illness, not the promised increase in happiness; a proliferation of laws, but a rise in crime; the abandonment of civil discourse; a betrayal of standards in our major institutions—government, the BBC, the police, our hospitals, schools, and universities, once rightly admired all over the world—which have all become vastly overweighted with bureaucracy, inflexible and obsessed with enforcement of a world-view that is in flat contradiction to reality; and the looming menace of totalitarian control through AI. These aspects of the so-called metacrisis have a multitude of proximal causes: economic, political, social, psychological, technological, and so on. But beneath and beyond that, each manifests, within those realms, aspects of the left hemisphere’s dysfunctional view of the world.
The very thing that originates the problem also militates against seeing the problem. Seeing the wider picture—a necessary prelude to understanding—is now increasingly disfavoured, and as a consequence the crises I have referred to are often seen as isolated pieces of bad luck. But they are not: they could have been, and were by some, predicted. The metacrisis is the predictable outcome of a complete failure to understand what a human being is, what the world is, and what the one has to do with the other. And all this is the sort of thing the right hemisphere is far better able to understand than the left.
The rightful Master, the right hemisphere, has been subjugated by his emissary or servant, the left. In an entirely predictable parallel, we have become enslaved by the machine that should be our servant, as so many have predicted since the time of Goethe: we cannot say we were not warned. Even physics now teaches us that the mechanical model of the universe is mistaken. But because of our success in making machines, we still imagine that the machine is the best model for understanding everything we come across. We ourselves, our brains and minds, our society, and the living world are now supposed to be explained by the metaphor of the machine. Yet only the tiniest handful of things in the entire known universe are at all like a machine: namely the machines we made in the last few hundred years. Machines, unlike life and all complex systems, whether animate or inanimate, are linear and sequential; are put together, part by part, from the ground up; and can be switched on and off at will. Their default status is stasis, not flow; they are not resonantly embroiled with their environment; they have precise boundaries; their parts do not change structure and function as the whole evolves—not least because in a machine the whole does not evolve; and they are utilitarian constructs in service of the power of their maker. None of this applies to life—nor does it to anything else in the universe. The brilliant mathematician and biophysicist Robert Rosen, in his book Life Itself, demonstrates just how unlike machines organisms are.[5] He further argues that the best way to understand all naturally occurring systems—which are never merely complicated, but complex, and therefore never fully predictable—is as organisms, whether we choose to see them as alive or not. And that’s before one gets to consider the neglect of our emotional, moral, and spiritual nature, which is at the core of being human.
We seem to have been seduced into thinking we understand everything, and what’s more can master it and mould it, like a machine, so as to provide a future that will benefit mankind. That this is a malign fantasy becomes plainer with every passing day. Those with grand schemes to improve humanity have caused misery on an almost unimaginable scale by their narcissism, cruelty, and wilful blindness. In psychology there is something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which tells us that the less people know, the more they think they know. It’s hardly rocket science, I admit, but it is worth bearing in mind.
Instead of seeing all things as processes, running organically from the past to the future across time, and spreading out across the world through space, like water finding its way across a landscape, we see ourselves and the world as composed of static slices—here and now—compartmentalised in a way that conforms to the modus operandi of the left hemisphere. A world of meaningless bits. We owe nothing to, and can learn nothing from, history—or so we believe. We owe nothing to, and need leave nothing to, posterity. We turn a blind eye to the inevitable impact of our rapacity on more humble and more stable ways of life that have stood the test of time better than ours. We neglect the importance of context: we believe we are right, and that one size fits all, justifying the imposition of vast global bureaucratic structures, not to say wars, so as to impose our thinking on cultures far different from our own. Equally we arrogantly critique our ancestors for not sharing the idiosyncratic view of the world we have generated in the last 20 years and which, we believe, must now be forced on all, whatever their reasonable misgivings. And we treat people not as unique living beings but as exemplars of a category."
How do we restore balance and the role of the right hemisphere ?
Iain McGilchrist:
"The three things on which human flourishing and well-being most depend are these: belonging to a cohesive social group which one can trust, and with which one can share one’s life; closeness to the natural world; and communion with a divine realm, however conceived. This is not just my opinion, but borne out by a vast and ever-increasing body of research. But none of this accords with our current value: power. It is hardly a surprise, then, when we see that material affluence does not make us happy if accompanied by spiritual poverty.
Let me finally consider the influence of left hemisphere capture on the realm of value. For over two thousand years, in the Platonic, and later the Christian, tradition of Western thought, human life was seen as orientated towards three great values: goodness, beauty, and truth, each of them in turn seen as a manifestation of an aspect of the sacred. During my lifetime, I have seen each of these important values, along with the sacred, repudiated and reviled. A model that favours the machine over the human being, the inanimate over the living, is one that is corrosive of all that is beautiful, good, and true. And has no place in it for the sacred.
The early twentieth century philosopher Max Scheler was much concerned with questions of value. When he died in 1928, Heidegger, who gave his funeral oration, described him as the most potent force in the world of philosophy at the time.[11] Scheler thought there was a hierarchy of values, with those of pleasure and utility—the values of utilitarianism and the left hemisphere—at the lowest level, and rising by stages to that of the holy or sacred, which he considered the highest, a value which I suggest is incomprehensible to the left hemisphere. In between were, first, the Lebenswerte or values of ‘life’, such as courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility; and then the geistige Werte, the values of mind or spirit, such as beauty, goodness, and truth—which I suggest are better understood by the right hemisphere.[12]
The left hemisphere’s raison d’être being power and control, it naturally puts values of utility and hedonism, those of the lowest rank in Scheler’s pyramid, first. I may be wrong, but it is my distinct impression that there has been a decline in courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility in our society—indeed in all behaviour that carries its costs upfront, rather than concealing its sting in the tail. Speaking the truth takes courage, and it would seem that those in our public institutions would rather conform than confront untruth. And along with the loss of courage to speak the truth, there has been an undeniable withdrawal from the beautiful and the sacred. All of this combines to reinforce a loss of sense of purpose and direction; hence the crisis of meaning that it is, by now, a commonplace that we face.
Scheler calls the human being ens amans, the being that is capable of love; in its place we have homo economicus. In the world we live in, reductionist materialism inverts Scheler’s perception, and in a thoroughly cynical assessment of what it means to be human, we have exalted the individual ego over all else. This has rendered many virtues, including but not confined to beauty, goodness, and truth, obsolete. These values, I believe, far from being human inventions, are ontological primitives, for they are aspects of the ground of Being: our capacity to respond to them and draw them ever further into being is our privilege, and indeed, I argue, our purpose. This is why there is life. We can of course also ignore them, devalue them, and cause them to wither away—at what cost to us personally and to the whole of the living world we can only surmise. The world we are creating is one that ‘computes’ as far as the left hemisphere is concerned, but is grossly impoverished, demoralised, and lacking in meaning. One that is, in sum, more fit for a computer than a human being.
I’m often asked what we need to do about our predicament. This is understandable, of course, but I think that any list of bullet points, though no doubt needed at one level, risks missing the point almost entirely at another. For it is not that we took the wrong decision here or there, but that we have completely lost direction because of the value we have come to espouse. As I get nearer to the end of life, I am more and more convinced that not only is being receptive to the summons offered by values the key to a fulfilling life, the key to a flourishing society and a flourishing natural world at large, but every bit as important as survival itself. What I mean is this: even if we were by a massive effort and a massive stroke of fortune enabled to prevent any further loss of the world’s forests, reverse the pollution of the oceans, reverse the decline of species, and similarly tackle the other aspects of the metacrisis I have mentioned, this would be in vain unless we underwent a complete change of heart and mind. For we would still be the same hubristic, entitled, resentful power-hungry animals that we have become. And this, like the rest, has everything to do with the dominance of the left hemisphere’s mode of being.
So what are we to do? I could list the bullet points, which along the way would inevitably refer to reforming the education system, to a revival of the humanities, a serious reduction in bureaucracy, to the cultivation of meditative or spiritual practices, to abstinence from social media, keeping machines in the background where they can be helpful but away from intercourse with humans, and much more that we all know might help. And of course it goes without saying that we must tirelessly seek to stop, and where possible reverse, the damage to Nature—I will not call it the environment, since the term expresses the separation from Nature that is part of the problem. But these will not in themselves heal a matter of psyche, of soul. There is no quick fix for such problems, alas. As a psychiatrist, I would often know after listening to a patient for an hour or more on their first visit, what it was they needed to do. And when I was inexperienced I used to tell them. That was a mistake. Until a person truly sees for him- or herself, from the inside, what it is they need to do, they will not do it, and once they do see it, they will not need to be told. The work is to get them to that place.
The good news is that we can begin the healing work, each one of us, today. People say: ‘But what can I do? The world is so huge and I am so small’. And sometimes they add ‘and our planet is so small in an incomprehensibly vast universe’. But this is to think in the left hemisphere’s terms, measuring and quantifying. When the lover says ‘my love is as deep as the ocean and as wide as the skies’, how large or small is that? All the important changes happen from in here, not out there. If we could recover some humility in the face of our ignorance; some compassion in dealing with our fellow human beings; and some sense of awe and wonder before the cosmos, we would be already a long way along our journey. It has been said that if we could change radically the hearts and minds of only 3% of people, we would be able to make the changes we need to see in the world around us. For this we need to understand ourselves anew. Gnothi seauton: know thyself. We need every insight we can get into what we are doing to ourselves, to life itself, and to our inexpressibly beautiful and complex world. I hope I may have here offered one such insight, however small. The work is great, but we are capable of greater things than we know."
More information
Books:
- The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) and
- The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).