Two Hemisphere Hypothesis
Description
Second Renaissance:
"McGilchrist’s most cited theory concerns the distinct adaptive functions of the brain’s two hemispheres, and how their different modes of attention shape the world we perceive and create. An imbalance between these two modes of perception gives rise to manifold dysfunctions in modern society.
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Neuroscientists have long known that the human brain is divided into two non-identical hemispheres of similar size, but the function of this separation has remained a topic of debate. A popular myth—that the left hemisphere governs reason, logic, and language, while the right hosts creativity, emotion and image—was long ago debunked.
McGilchrist proposes that the principal difference between the hemispheres is the way they pay attention: two profoundly different ways of looking at the world; both of which were vital for survival in our ancestors’ evolutionary landscape. Narrowly focused upon separate details, left hemisphere awareness (LH) supports short-term goals that involve grabbing and controlling familiar aspects of our environment—such as obtaining the right food. Meanwhile the right hemisphere (RH) is broadly vigilant and alert to emergent danger—awake to the whole picture of the world around us.
McGilchrist notes that because our mode of attention shapes the world we encounter, the hemispheres render two fundamentally different realities. The left hemisphere builds stripped-down maps that facilitate action; while the right remains coupled to real-time experience; present with the fullness of ‘ever-flowing’ reality, including that which simply can’t be grasped. Thus, LH consciousness gives rise to a virtual world of inert, isolated parts; while the RH experiences direct relationship, within a complex, continuous, meaning-full whole.
The divide is expressed acutely when the LH is suppressed, through injury or clinical processes such as transcranial magnetic stimulation: “people see things that we would call inanimate sometimes as animate. And if you do the opposite and suppress the right hemisphere, they begin to see even people and animals as machines or pieces of furniture.”
McGilchrist proposes that while both hemispheric functions are vital, and can work well in harmony, the RH’s reality is fundamentally more in touch with the world—and that the LH’s abstracting, grasping function evolved as ancillary to this more primary, whole-istic understanding—hence, The Master and His Emissary. Healthy individuals, groups, and societies encounter the world through direct presence (RH), focus on specific parts to map and analyse how we might act upon them (LH)—then, crucially, reintegrate the results of this LH analysis into a broader and deeper picture of the interconnected whole: the Emissary submits to the Master.
Whereas the right hemisphere values the function of its counterpart, the same is not true of the left. In fact, our LH harbours an inflated self-confidence; experiencing its partial understanding as total, and filtering out information that doesn’t fit its model of reality. McGilchrist gives the example of stroke victims who have suffered right hemisphere damage resulting in partial paralysis, denying that anything is wrong—even claiming to have moved the limb in question or inventing stories about the limb belonging to someone else.
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The left hemisphere isn’t “bad”—indeed, its analytical strength has vastly extended the reach of human ingenuity and power over our environment. For this very reason, the structures of modern society have come to embody a LH (mis)understanding of the world; reflecting it back to us wherever we go, and reinforcing our tendency to trust it. Accelerated by the industrial revolution, the LH has built a world in its own image; over-valuing the virtual, technical, mechanical and bureaucratic; fixated on control. Empowered by the LH-centric tools of logic and scientific method, we treasure only what we can measure and dismiss everything that resists the model as less important—even less real.
In this impoverished, atomistic reality; fixated upon the “explicit, definable, and controllable,” we are increasingly cut off from what’s sacred—including the living world, beyond its ‘utility’. The cost of getting stuck in this feedback loop, conditioned by an inanimate, mechanical view of life, is manifesting in crises of runaway extractivism and social breakdown."
(https://news.secondrenaissance.net/p/seeds-of-a-second-renaissance-iain-mcgilchrist)
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