“It seems to me that we face very grave crises indeed and that, if we are to survive, we need not just a few new measures, but a complete change of heart and mind.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
There seems to be a sickness that has spread throughout society, and it has infected most people with a mindset that is not suitable for individual or social flourishing. In this video, we explore a fascinating hypothesis, put forth by the psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher Iain McGilchrist, that can help account for the sickness of the modern age. This hypothesis suggests that most people rely too heavily on one side of the brain, which is leading to a peculiar worldview, and a pathological way of being, that is characterized by stubbornness, a lack of empathy, a desire for power, and an overall disconnection from reality.
“Brains and minds are living, constantly adapting, interconnected systems. And they are conscious. A brain disease or mental illness, then, is a change in a person’s whole way of being in the world.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things
To understand the mental pathology that has infected society we must begin with a basic understanding of the structure of the human brain, or specifically its bipartite nature. The word bipartite means “involving or made up of two entities”. The human brain is bipartite as it is divided into two asymmetrical hemispheres, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. This asymmetrical division is not unique to humans, but is found in every neuronal system, of every known creature, stretching back to the beginning of evolutionary history. Why is this? What purpose does it serve? Or as McGilchrist asks:
“Why are the two cerebral hemispheres asymmetrical? Do they really differ in any important sense? If so, in what way?”
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Common in popular culture is the idea that the two hemispheres differ in what they do. For example, it is often said that the left hemisphere is locus of logic, analytic thought, language, and reason, while the right hemisphere is the locus of emotions, creativity, intuition, and artistic ability. But as McGilchrist notes:
“Just about everything that is said about the hemispheres in pop psychology is wrong because it rests on beliefs about what the hemispheres do, not about how they approach it. . .”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things
Both hemispheres play a role in virtually every human activity and in all mental processes and states. From language, to emotion, movement, thought, imagination, creativity, logic, and reason, all these activities are mediated by the operation of both hemispheres. Or as McGilchrist writes:
“. . .we will never learn anything about hemisphere differences if we wait for a situation in which one hemisphere is 100% responsible for whatever it is, and the other contributes nothing. It is always a matter of degree – a matter of asymmetry.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things
To understand the primary difference between the two hemispheres it is helpful to examine a fundamental problem that all creatures face in the struggle to survive: We must eat, while also protecting ourselves from being eaten. In his book The Matter with Things, McGilchrist provides the example of a bird to show how the bipartite nature of the brain helps to solve this fundamental problem of survival. When a bird is searching for food, it must deploy a narrow, focused, and precise attention to find, and attack, the worms and bugs it eats. But if a bird only deployed this narrow attention its survival fitness would be low as every time it focused on finding food, it would be oblivious to its surroundings and easy prey for predators. To solve this problem a bird simultaneously deploys a more open, broad, and sustained attention to monitor its surroundings and to be on the lookout for potential threats. The simultaneous deployment of two types of attention was made possible by the evolution of the two brain hemispheres, or as McGilchrist writes:
“How on earth can you dispose your consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once? The answer is the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently, but connected enough to work in concert with one another, each capable of sustaining consciousness on its own. In other words, a bipartite brain.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things
In the bipartite brain, the left hemisphere specializes in the narrow and precisely focused attention that is necessary to obtain the resources needed to survive. But the utility of the left hemisphere’s attention extends beyond its ability to help us attain resources. In a more general sense, we use this type of attention to focus in on specific elements of our environment, in order to manipulate and control them, in the service of a wide variety of ends. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, specializes in the broad, open, and sustained form of attention that keeps us on alert to potential threats. This form of attention, however, is also used to help us comprehend the world in its vast complexity and to integrate diverse elements of our experience into a cohesive whole. Together, these two hemispheres strike a balance between the need to control and manipulate our environment and the need to understand it. Or as McGilchrist explains:
“In humans the left hemisphere is designed for grasping, controls the right hand with which we grasp . . .and helps us manipulate, rather than understand, the world. It sees little, but what it does see seems clear. It is confident, tends to be black and white in its judgments, and jumps to conclusions. Since it is serving the predator in us, it has to if it is to succeed. It sees a linear relationship between the doer and the ‘done to’, between arrow and target. By contrast, the wide-open, vigilant, sustained attention of the right hemisphere, without preconception as to what it may find, is designed to look out for all the rest – whatever else might be going on in the world while we are busy grasping. Its purpose is to help us understand, rather than manipulate the world: to see the whole and how we relate to it. It is more exploratory, less certain: it is more interested in making discriminations, in shades of meaning.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things
We do not notice the discrepancy between the two modes of attending to the world that are provided by the left and right hemispheres. We have evolved so that both forms of attention can be deployed simultaneously while our experience appears as a unified gestalt.
“If in everyday life we were aware of the discrepancies in the view, or ‘take’, on the world each hemisphere offers, it would render the immediate business of survival impracticable. For this reason, nature has taken care that these discrepancies should not be part of our everyday awareness.” (M&HE)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
When both hemispheres work in harmony we function at optimal capacity. Sometimes, however, one of the hemispheres dominates and crowds out the contribution of the other. This may be a result of a physical injury to one of the hemispheres, such as occurs following a stroke. But physical changes to the brain are not necessary to effectuate an overreliance on one hemisphere. McGilchrist provides the analogy of using a radio to help elucidate how non-physical processes can result in one hemisphere dominating: Let’s say we buy a radio and at first we listen to a wide variety of stations across the spectrum. With time we increasingly tune into only one station and eventually we never turn the dial to explore what else is on. This does not imply that there is anything wrong with the physical components of the radio, we just never change the station. So it is with the brain: our lifestyle, habits and technological, cultural, and social trends can lead to a situation where we increasingly ‘tune in’ to one of the hemispheres and become overly reliant on its mode of attentional deployment. This situation can become so habitual that we don’t even realize that our experience is largely sculpted by one half of the brain and that we are ignoring the potential contributions of the other hemisphere.
McGilchrist suggests that in the modern day it is the left hemisphere that has come to dominate the experience of most people. We are a population of men and women who habitually rely on the narrow and precise form of attention that is the forte of the left hemisphere and this is exerting a formative influence on the type of people we become.
