Valueception
Description
Daniel Thorson:
"Iain McGilchrist's extensive research on the divided brain offers compelling insights into this question. In his groundbreaking works "The Master and His Emissary" and "The Matter With Things," McGilchrist introduces the concept of "valueception" – our capacity to directly perceive values as realities that exist independently of our preferences or judgments.
This perceptual capacity, McGilchrist argues, is primarily mediated by the right hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in direct, embodied engagement with reality in its wholeness. Unlike the left hemisphere, which excels at abstraction, categorization, and manipulation, the right hemisphere maintains an open, receptive relationship with what is. It perceives reality not as a collection of objects to be utilized but as a living presence imbued with inherent meaning and value.
The cultural dominance of left-hemisphere modes of attention has led to what McGilchrist describes as a "hall of mirrors" – a world where we increasingly engage not with reality itself but with our representations and models of it. In this abstracted space, values become mere preferences or subjective projections rather than qualities we can directly perceive in the world.
Crucially, McGilchrist argues that how we attend to reality shapes what we're able to perceive. The narrow, utilitarian focus characteristic of left-hemisphere attention systematically blinds us to the presence of intrinsic value. Like looking through a pinhole, we see only what our mode of attention allows. A world approached primarily as resource, as means to our ends, gradually loses its inherent value and meaning, not because these qualities disappear from reality, but because our way of attending makes them imperceptible to us."