Psychology 101

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things we make are also more certain: we know them inside out, because we put them together. They are not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp. Because the right hemisphere sees things as they are, they are constantly new for it, so it has nothing like the databank of information about categories that the left hemisphere has. It cannot have the certainty of knowledge that comes from being able to fix things and isolate them. In order to remain true to what is, it does not form abstractions, and categories that are based on abstraction, which are the strengths of denotative language. By contrast, the right hemisphere's interest in language lies in all the things that help to take it beyond the limiting effects of denotation to connotation: it acknowledges the importance of ambiguity. It therefore is virtually silent, relatively shifting and uncertain, where the left hemisphere, by contrast, may be unreasonably, even stubbornly, convinced of its own correctness. As John Cutting puts it, despite ‘an astonishing degree of ignorance on the part of the left (supposed major) hemisphere about what its partner, the right (supposed minor) hemisphere, [is] up to, [it] abrogates decision-making to itself in the absence of any rational evidence as to what is going on’.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The left hemisphere tends to positive feedback, and we can become stuck.483 This is not unlike the difference between the normal drinker and the addict. After a certain point, the normal drinker begins to feel less like another drink.
What makes an addict is the lack of an ‘off switch’ – another drink only makes the next, and the next, more likely. And, interestingly enough, lesions of the frontolimbic systems, mainly in the right hemisphere, are associated with addictive behaviour. Pathological gamblers, for example, have frontal deficits which are mainly right-sided;484 by contrast, in cocaine addicts, for example, stimulating the right prefrontal cortex reduces craving for cocaine.485 And denial, a left-hemisphere speciality, is typical of addiction.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

THE SELF
Conscious awareness of the self is a surprisingly late development in evolution. The higher apes, such as chimpanzees and orang-utans, are capable of self-recognition, but monkeys are not: they fail the mirror test.486 The right prefrontal region is critically involved in self-recognition, whether by face or by voice.487 Imaging studies of self-recognition by face or voice confirm the importance of the right frontal region and the right cingulate cortex.488 An important correlate of self-awareness in humans is the correct use of the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’, which is lacking in autism, a condition which replicates many right-hemisphere deficits.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The personal ‘interior’ sense of the self with a history, and a personal and emotional memory, as well as what is, rather confusingly, sometimes called ‘the self-concept’, appears to be dependent to a very large extent on the right hemisphere. The self-concept is impaired by right-hemisphere injury, wherever in the right hemisphere it may occur; but the right frontal region is of critical importance here. This could be described as self-experience. The right hemisphere seems more engaged by emotional, autobiographical memories. It is hardly surprising that the ‘sense of self’ should be grounded in the right hemisphere, because the self originates in the interaction with ‘the Other’, not as an entity in atomistic isolation: ‘The sense of self emerges from the activity of the brain in interaction with other selves.’ The right orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the right frontal lobe most crucial for social and empathic understanding, is larger in primates than the left.496 It is likely that this part of the brain expands during the period of playful interaction between infant and mother in the second half of the first year, and the second year, of life, during which the sense of the self emerges, and indeed the right orbitofrontal cortex is seen by Allan Schore as the crucible of the growing self. The right hemisphere matures earlier than the left, and is more involved than the left in almost every aspect of the development of mental functioning in early childhood, and of the self as a social, empathic being. Social development in the infant takes place independently of language development, another pointer to its right-hemisphere origins.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

In keeping with this, those with damage to the right frontotemporal cortex may experience a cognitive detachment from self. When subjects read a first-person narrative, they activate the precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex bilaterally, but also preferentially the right temporo-parietal junction, compared with reading a third-person narrative.
Philosophers spend a good deal of time inspecting and analysing processes that are usually – and perhaps must remain – implicit, unconscious, intuitive; in other words, examining the life of the right hemisphere from the standpoint of the left. It is perhaps then not surprising that the glue begins to disintegrate, and there is a nasty cracking noise as the otherwise normally robust sense of the self comes apart, possibly revealing more about the merits (or otherwise) of the process, than the self under scrutiny. Schizophrenics, like philosophers, have a problem with the sense of the self which ordinary individuals, involved with living, lack. As Wittgenstein once remarked: ‘it's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux of appearance, but only when we philosophise. This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a misapplication of our language.’516 Could this be read as the ‘misapplication of language’ – in other words, the faulty procedure of seeking truth by standing in the world of the left hemisphere while looking at the world of the right?

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The right frontal region appears to be essential for the determination of self in other modalities, too, such as voice recognition.520 Damage to the right parietal and medial regions may result in confusions of self with other; damage to the right frontal lobe creates a disturbance of ego boundaries, suggesting ‘that the right hemisphere, particularly the right frontal region, under normal circumstances plays a crucial role in establishing the appropriate relationship between the self and the world’. It is this region that is so obviously not functioning properly in schizophrenia, where subjects not only lack empathy, humour, metaphorical understanding, pragmatics, social skills and theory of mind, but crucially mistake the boundaries of self and other, even at times feeling themselves to melt into other individuals or that other beings are invading or occupying their own body space.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.
However, as I also emphasised at the outset, both hemispheres take part in virtually all ‘functions’ to some extent, and in reality both are always engaged. I do not wish to leave the impression that it might be a good thing if the entire population had a left-hemisphere stroke. I take it for granted that the contributions made by the left hemisphere, to language and systematic thought in particular, are invaluable. Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to do so, and would come off infinitely the poorer.
There are siren voices that call us to do exactly that, certainly to abandon clarity and precision (which, in any case, importantly depend on both hemispheres), and I want to emphasise that I am passionately opposed to them. We need the ability to make fine discriminations, and to use reason appropriately. But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create.

[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

In fact the problem is that the left hemisphere just loves a theory, and often this is not helpful in practice – which is why it gets it wrong. Of attention he writes that the left-dominant hemisphere uses a ‘guided’ or ‘smart’ strategy whereas the right hemisphere does not. This means that the left hemisphere adopts a helpful cognitive strategy in solving the problem whereas the right hemisphere does not possess those extra cognitive skills. But it does not mean that the left hemisphere is always superior to the right hemisphere in attentional orienting.
True enough. In fact, as he knows, since he refers to the fact, the right hemisphere is predominant for attentional orienting, a topic that will be familiar to the reader. What he refers to as a ‘smart’ and ‘helpful’ strategy – ‘those extra cognitive skills’ – are in fact neither smart nor helpful, when compared with the open, undogmatic stance of the right hemisphere. They lead to less accuracy, not more. But you might not know that from the language used.
Just as tedious, of course, is the tendency to see what commonly passes for the ‘left hemisphere’ in pop parlance as wholly without redeeming features. Often, it seems to me, such positions conceal an undercurrent of opposition to reason and the careful use of language, and once words slip their anchors, and reason is discounted – as some quite influential post-modern and feminist critics have advocated – Babel ensues. Doubts about the extent of rationalism, the belief that reason alone can yield all truth, do not make one anti-rational: to decry reason itself is utter folly. Poetry and metaphor, like science, hold no brief for sloppiness, quite the opposite, just as it is reason, not its unfettered disregard, that leads to scepticism about misplaced and excessive rationalism. But language and reason are the children of both hemispheres, not one alone. The work of the left hemisphere needs to be integrated with that of the right hemisphere, that is all. The left hemisphere is the Master's most prized counsellor, his valued emissary.

Cioran, Emile wrote:

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Cioran, Emile wrote:

Lucidity does not extirpate the desire to live – far from it; lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.

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McGilchrist wrote:

If it is even more pronounced than the left petalia, and even more particular to humans, why have we paid so little attention to it? Could that be because we have focussed on the left hemisphere, and
what it does, at the expense of the right, and what it does? Until recently everything about the right hemisphere has been shrouded in darkness. It was, after all, considered to be silent; and to the verbal left-hemisphere way of thinking, that means dumb. Is the right frontal lobe responsible for anything that might compare with the achievements, in terms of grasp and denotative language, of the left hemisphere?
We know that it is the right frontal lobe which enables us to achieve all the rest of which language is capable; which makes empathy, humour, irony possible, and helps us to communicate and express not just facts, but our selves. Here language becomes not a tool of manipulation but a means of reaching out to the ‘Other’. But it is, of course, not just in the realm of language that its significance lies – far from it.

McGilchrist wrote:

This pattern of a specific relative right-hemisphere handicap is borne out at the anatomical level.
The planum temporale, as mentioned in the first chapter, is asymmetrical in most human brains, with the left being up to a third bigger than the right. But in cases where, unusually, the two hemispheres develop symmetrically, it's not that the two plana are the same size as the usual right (smaller) planum, but the size of the usual left planum: in other words, they are both large. In normal brains of right-handers, therefore, it's not that the left planum is increased, but that the right planum is decreased, in size. Recent research to find the gene or genes responsible for brain asymmetry in the language region expected to find a gene which operated on the left hemisphere to cause it to expand.
Instead they found genes that acted on the right hemisphere to prevent its expansion: of the 27 genes implicated, most were more highly expressed on the right, and the most important gene was dramatically more so. Christopher Walsh, a professor of neurology at Harvard who led the research, comments: ‘We tend to assume teleologically, because of our focus on language being that most beautiful thing, that it must be endowed by some special mechanism in the left hemisphere … in fact, it may just be normally repressed in the right hemisphere and allowed to take place in the left.’
The ‘normal’ situation, then, is associated with right-hemisphere losses, both anatomical and functional. The mechanisms inducing human cerebral asymmetry operate by reducing the role of the right hemisphere.
Why? Not to be lateralised at all is a disadvantage, as we have seen. This has to be because there are trade-offs associated with the specialisation of the ‘dominant’ hemisphere, the one with control of language and grasping. Isolation of left-hemisphere-type function makes it that bit easier for it to do what it has to. It functions more efficiently if it is not having to deal with the conflicting ‘version’ of the world put forward by the other, so-called ‘minor’, hemisphere. So the non-dominant hemisphere has to be put at a disadvantage. But take the process too far, and the obvious losses occasioned by hobbling the right hemisphere outweigh the advantage to the left. It is an inverted Ushaped curve. Speed in moving pegs on a board with either hand is a measure of the skill of the contralateral hemisphere: strong right-handers are slower than non-right-handers, especially with their left hand. Equally the relatively few strong left-handers, whose brains may mirror those of strong right-handers, are at a disadvantage, too. In fact Annett surmises that the high numbers of left-handers
among mathematicians154 and sports professionals is not so much due to an intrinsic advantage for left-handers as to the absence of strong right-handers (who are at a disadvantage).
Those more likely to have anomalous patterns of lateralisation, such as left-handers, and those with dyslexia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism, for example (together with their relatives, who may, advantageously, carry some, but not all, of the genes for the condition), are the least likely to show what might be called ‘left-hemisphere encapsulation’. In other words, in the normal brain the serial processing that forms the basis of left-hemisphere function is carefully segregated from functions that it might impair, but the corollary of this is that the holistic approach of the right hemisphere is not available to the same extent for language and conceptual thought.

McGilchrist wrote:

TWO WORLDS

If a left-hemisphere process consistently seems to run up against the limits of its own method and needs to transcend them, that is convincing evidence that the reality it is trying to describe is something Other. The fact that in the twentieth century philosophers, like physicists, increasingly arrived at conclusions that are at variance with their own left-hemisphere methodology, and suggest the primacy of the world as the right hemisphere would deliver it, tells us something important.
Returning from the realm of philosophy to the use of language in everyday experience, we may also be aware of another reality, that of the right hemisphere – yet feel that explicitness forces us towards acknowledging only the world of the left hemisphere. We live, in other words, in two different types of world. There should tend, therefore, to be two meanings to most words that we commonly use to describe our relationship with the world. They will not all be like ‘grasp’ – willed, self-serving, unidirectional.

McGilchrist wrote:

Will
Our primary being lies in a disposition towards the world – certainly not in a thought, or a whole panoply of thoughts, about the world, not even in a feeling or feelings about the world as such.
Willing, like believing, with which I think it shares some properties, is thus better thought of as a matter of a disposition towards the world. The left-hemisphere disposition towards the world is that of use. Philosophy being a hyperconscious cognitive process, it may be hard to get away from the left hemisphere's perspective that will is about control, and must lie in the conscious left hemisphere. But if our disposition towards the world, our relationship with it, alters, will has a different meaning. The disposition of the right hemisphere, the nature of its attention to the world, is one of care, rather than control. Its will relates to a desire or longing towards something, something that lies beyond itself, towards the Other.

McGilchrist wrote:

PRIMACY OF AFFECT

If the implicit grounds the explicit, it would imply that one's feelings are not a reaction to, or a superposition on, one's cognitive assessment, but the reverse: the affect comes first, the thinking later.
Some fascinating research confirms that affective judgment is not dependent on the outcome of a cognitive process. We do not make choices about whether we like something on the basis of explicit assessment, a balance sheet, weighing up its parts. We make an intuitive assessment of the whole before any cognitive processes come into play, though they will, no doubt, later be used to ‘explain’, and justify, our choice. This has been called ‘the primacy of affect’. We make an assessment of the whole at once, and pieces of information about specific aspects are judged in the light of the whole, rather than the other way round (though these pieces of information, if there are enough that do not cohere with our idea of the whole, can ultimately cause a shift in our sense of the whole). The implication is that our affective judgment and our sense of the whole, dependent on the right hemisphere, occur before cognitive assessment of the parts, the contribution of the left hemisphere. ‘I would anticipate that … at some deep and fundamental affective level, the right hemisphere is more in touch with true inner feelings and less able to lie.’ Panksepp's suspicion would be supported by the research evidence discussed in Chapter 2. While affect is not of course the same as value, like value it is primary, not just derived from cognitive assessment, as the left hemisphere would have us believe when it retrospectively examines the process; and it was this insight that lay behind Max Scheler's important concept of Wertnehmung, pre-cognitive apprehension of the value of something, its meaning for ‘me’.
The disposition towards the world comes first: any cognitions are subsequent to and consequent on that disposition, which is in other words ‘affect’. Affect may too readily be equated with emotion.
Emotions are certainly part of affect, but are only part of it. Something much broader is implied: a way of attending to the world (or not attending to it), a way of relating to the world (or not relating to it), a stance, a disposition, towards the world – ultimately a ‘way of being’ in the world.
But emotion is very important, and it too is closer to the core of our being than cognition. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler’.
Several lines of reasoning from the evidence converge to suggest that the essential core of being is subcortical.32 Perceptual–cognitive awareness would appear to have developed on the back of affective awareness, which was a ‘revolutionary prerequisite’, writes Jaak Panksepp: ‘From such a vantage, Descartes’ faith in his assertion “I think, therefore I am” may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: “I feel, therefore I am.” ‘ He later goes on in a footnote: ‘the bottom-line statement probably should be “I am, therefore I am.”‘
Emotion and the body are at the irreducible core of experience: they are not there merely to help out with cognition. Feeling is not just an add-on, a flavoured coating for thought: it is at the heart of our being, and reason emanates from that central core of the emotions, in an attempt to limit and direct them, rather than the other way about. Feeling came, and comes, first, and reason emerged from it:
‘emotion has taught mankind to reason’, as the eighteenth-century French philosopher Vauvenargues put it. Even the prejudice we have in favour of reason cannot itself be justified by reasoning: the virtues of reason are something we can do no more than intuit. In his influential book Descartes' Error, Damasio points to the primacy of emotion in neurological terms, when he notes that the apparatus of rationality, traditionally presumed to be neocortical, does not seem to work without that of biological regulation, traditionally presumed to be subcortical. Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.
This observation brings me back to the point I made in Chapter 1, that the structure of the brain gives its history, and helps, partly because of that very fact, towards an understanding of the mind.
Nonetheless Damasio does not appear to recognise the phenomenological primacy of emotion or affect: instead he sees emotion as auxiliary, there to play a role in guiding the thinking being that we are, rather than seeing thinking as there to guide the feeling being that we are. ‘Emotions’, he insists, ‘are not a luxury’, as though such an idea could ever have occurred to anyone in the light of experience, let alone of the acknowledged primacy of affect. Emotions are not a luxury, Damasio goes on to reassure us, because they are useful tools: ‘they play a role in communicating meaning to others, and they may also play the cognitive guidance role that I propose …’ Thus emotions are there to serve as handmaiden to reason, playing a useful role in helping us communicate, or possibly in weighing the products of cognition, but not at the irreducible core of the experience of ourselves.
In the process of trying to rehabilitate feelings by showing that they form, after all, a vital part of the cognitive process, Damasio inevitably does so by trying to make them explicit, measurable, quantitative – turning them into speed or an amount of mental associative processes, speed or an amount of motor behaviours – rather than qualitative. He also sees them, as William James did, as an interpretation of bodily ‘data’: in fact he even states that ‘regular feeling comes from a “readout” of the body changes’. The inseparability of the body and emotion (not to mention affect) is interpreted in such a way that emotion ends up derived from the body by a ‘readout’, there to guide the cognition that is doing the reading. Apparently unaware that he is repeating Descartes' error, he writes: ‘I conceptualise the essence of feelings as something you and I can see through a window that opens directly onto a continuously updated image of the structure and state of our body …’ Once you are able to ‘see’ your feelings ‘through a window’ opening onto an ‘image’ of your body, you have clearly far outstripped Descartes at his own game.
I think part of the difficulty here, which I will return to throughout this book, is that in the context of intellectual discourse we are always obliged to ‘look at’ the relationship of cognition to affect from the cognitive point of view. Quite what it would mean to treat it from the point of view of affect is less easily said, not easily even imagined: there is no question about it, if we want to know about this relationship, rather than be satisfied with intuition, then we are obliged to treat cognition as the path to knowledge. Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking an astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world whether, in his opinion, the sun moved round the earth or the earth round the sun. To ask the question alone would be enough to label one as mad. But notice what the metaphor reveals: for in time the observation of tiny discrepancies in the model became significant enough to cause a bouleversement of the entire known universe. And so cognition eventually did find its own path to its kind of truth: the primacy of affect.

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MacGilchrist wrote:

Asymmetry of means
The left hemisphere point of view inevitably dominates, because it is most accessible: closest to the self-aware, self-inspecting intellect. Conscious experience is at the focus of our attention, usually therefore dominated by the left hemisphere. It benefits from an asymmetry of means. The means of argument – the three Ls, language, logic and linearity – are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control, so that the cards are heavily stacked in favour of our conscious discourse enforcing the world view re-presented in the hemisphere which speaks, the left hemisphere, rather than the world that is present to the right hemisphere. Its point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic; the difficulty lies with those who are aware that this does not exhaust the possibilities, and have nonetheless to use analytic methods to transcend analysis. It is also most easily expressible, because of language's lying in the left hemisphere: it has a voice. But the laws of non-contradiction, and of the excluded middle, which have to rule in the left hemisphere because of the way it construes the nature of the world, do not hold sway in the right hemisphere, which construes the world as inherently giving rise to what the left hemisphere calls paradox and ambiguity. This is much like the problem of the analytic versus holistic understanding of what a metaphor is: to one hemisphere a perhaps beautiful, but ultimately irrelevant, lie; to the other the only path to truth.
But even that fact, significant as it is, does not convey the true scale of the distinction, which concerns not just the functional differences at a moment in time, but what happens over much longer periods in the ordinary human brain. The left hemisphere builds systems, where the right does not. It therefore allows elaboration of its own workings over time into systematic thought which gives it permanence and solidity, and I believe these have even become instantiated in the external world around us, inevitably giving it a massive advantage (see Chapter 12). There is something very suggestive about the fact that the predominance of the left hemisphere may result from there being – possibly there having been engineered? – a deficit in the right hemisphere.
Let's look first at the way in which the two hemispheres try to know, to get a grasp on the world.
Using the familiar information-processing terminology, the left hemisphere favours analytic, sequential ‘processing’, where the right hemisphere favours parallel ‘processing’ of different streams of ‘information’ simultaneously. This is what I have expressed as the left hemisphere's way of building up a picture slowly but surely, piece by piece, brick on brick. One thing is established as (apparently) certain; that forms a platform for adding the next little bit of (apparent) certainty. And so on. The right hemisphere meanwhile tries to take in all the various aspects of what it approaches at once. No part in itself precedes any other: it is more like the way a picture comes into focus – there is an ‘aha!’ moment when the whole suddenly breaks free and comes to life before us. For it, though, knowledge comes through a relationship, a betweenness, a back and forth reverberative process between itself and the Other, and is therefore never finished, never certain.
There is a huge disadvantage for the right hemisphere here. If this knowledge has to be conveyed to someone else, it is in fact essential to be able to offer (apparent) certainties: to be able to repeat the process for the other person, build it up from the bits. That kind of knowledge can be handed on, because it is not ‘my’ knowledge. It is knowledge (Wissenschaft), not knowledge (Erkenntnis). By contrast, passing on what the right hemisphere knows requires the other party already to have an understanding of it, which can be awakened in them; if they have no such knowledge, they will be easily seduced into thinking that the left hemisphere's kind of knowledge is a substitute.
Sequential analytic ‘processing’ also makes the left hemisphere the hemisphere par excellence of sequential discourse, and that gives it the most extraordinary advantage in being heard. It is like being the Berlusconi of the brain, a political heavyweight who has control of the media. Speech is possible from the right hemisphere, but it is usually very limited. We have seen that thought probably originates in the right hemisphere, but the left hemisphere has most syntax and most of the lexicon, which makes it very much the controller of the ‘word’ in general. Coupled with its preference for classification, analysis and sequential thinking, this makes it very powerful in constructing an argument. By contrast it is hard for the right hemisphere to be heard at all: what it knows is too complex, hasn't the advantage of having been carved up into pieces that can be neatly strung together, and it hasn't got a voice anyway.

Asymmetry of structure
And then there is an asymmetry of structure. There is an asymmetry inherent in this system building, namely the difficulty of escape from a self-enclosed system. The system itself closes off any possible escape mechanisms. The existence of a system of thought dependent on language automatically devalues whatever cannot be expressed in language; the process of reasoning discounts whatever cannot be reached by reasoning. In everyday life we may be willing to accept the existence of a reality beyond language or rationality, but we do so because our mind as a whole can intuit that aspects of our experience lie beyond either of these closed systems. But in its own terms there is no way that language can break out of the world language creates – except by allowing language to go beyond itself in poetry; just as in its own terms rationality cannot break out of rationality, to an awareness of the necessity of something else, something other than itself, to underwrite its existence – except by following Gödel's logic to its conclusion. Language in itself (to this extent the post-modern position is correct) can only refer to itself, and reason can only elaborate, ‘unpack’ the premises it starts with. But there can be no evidence within reason that yields the premises from which reason must begin, or that validates the process of reasoning itself – those premises, and the leap of faith in favour of reason, have to come from behind and beyond, from intuition or experience.
Once the system is set up it operates like a hall of mirrors in which we are reflexively imprisoned.
Leaps of faith from now on are strictly out of bounds. Yet it is only whatever can ‘leap’ beyond the world of language and reason that can break out of the imprisoning hall of mirrors and reconnect us with the lived world. And the evidence is that this unwillingness to allow escape is not just a passive process, an ‘involuntary’ feature of the system, but one that appears willed by the left hemisphere. The history of the last 100 years particularly, as I shall attempt to convey in Part II, contains many examples of the left hemisphere's intemperate attacks on nature, art, religion and the body, the main routes to something beyond its power. In other words its behaviour looks suspiciously tyrannical – the Master's emissary become a tyrant.
The left hemisphere, with its rational system-building, makes possible the will to action; it believes it is the one that makes things happen, even makes things live. But nothing in us, actively or positively, make things live – all we can do is permit, or not permit, life, which already exists. It may still seem difficult to understand how a set of relations that are predicated, as I would agree with Scheler (and for that matter with Heidegger) that they are, on negation – the power to say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’ – can prove to have life and be creative. It seems obvious to the left hemisphere, which is all that we have to ‘think’ (reason) with, and which remains ignorant of what the right hemisphere knows, that creation must be the result of something positive it does. It makes things, as it makes things happen, and it thinks it gives life to them. In this it is like a cat pushing a dead mouse about the floor in order to see it move. But we do not have the power to make things live: like the cat, we can only either permit life, or not permit it.
This idea is not as strange, however – or as unusual in the history of philosophy – as it may seem.
The act of creation may be one of invention, not in the modern sense of the word, but in its older sense: one of discovery, of finding something that was there, but required liberation into being. The word invention used to mean discovery (Latin invenire, to find), and it is only since the seventeenth century that the word has come to take on the grandiose sense of something we make, rather than something we uncover. Un-covering, or ‘dis-covering’, has built into the very word the act of negation, of saying ‘no’ to something that conceals. It was Spinoza who first made the point that omnis determinatio est negatio – ‘all determination [in the sense of the bringing into sharper focus of anything] is negation’. And Hegel, who is here, as so often, in the forefront of modern philosophy, emphasised the creative importance of negation. But the idea is familiar to mainstream science. The Popperian criteria for truth incorporate the notion that we can never prove something to be true; all we can do is prove that the alternatives are untrue.
The feeling we have of experience happening – that even if we stop doing anything and just sit and stare, time is still passing, our bodies are changing, our senses are picking up sights and sounds, smells and tactile sensations, and so on – is an expression of the fact that life comes to us. Whatever it is out there that exists apart from us comes into contact with us as the water falls on a particular landscape. The water falls and the landscape resists. One can see a river as restlessly searching out its path across the landscape, but in fact no activity is taking place in the sense that there is no will involved. One can see the landscape as blocking the path of the water so that it has to turn another way, but again the water just falls in the way that water has to, and the landscape resists its path, in the way it has to. The result of the amorphous water and the form of the landscape is a river.
The river is not only passing across the landscape, but entering into it and changing it too, as the landscape has ‘changed’ and yet not changed the water. The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put a river together. It does not even say ‘yes’ to the river. It merely says ‘no’ to the water – or does not say ‘no’ to the water, and, by its not saying ‘no’ to the water, wherever it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being. The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into being in the process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’. Similarly there is ‘whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves’, but ‘whatever it is that exists’ only comes to be what it is as it finds out in the encounter with ourselves what it is, and we only find out and make ourselves what we are in our encounter with ‘whatever it is that exists’.
A problem of time emerges. There is in all descriptions, that are, after all, re-presentations, the problem that they begin with something known. They then build on what is known with something else that is known. These could be words or mental images (like photographs, what the French call clichés – fixed, fragmented, twodimensional). Thus it is that we have the illusion of something being brought into being by being put together. All language is inevitably like this: it substitutes for the experienced ambiguity and uncertainty of the original encounter with something in the process of coming into being, a sequence of apparently fixed, certain pieces of information. Information is by definition something fixed, a bunch of facts as we put it. But all the conscious mind can do when it has a bunch of pieces is put the pieces together to try to make something. However, this is no more a way of actually re-enabling the experience itself than living beings are made by stitching together the limbs.
Thus the apparent sequence of things causing one another in time is an artefact of the left-hemisphere way of viewing the world. In creation we are not actively putting together something we already know, but finding something which is coming into being through our knowing, at the same time that our knowing depends on its coming into being; as Pushkin says of Evgeny Onegin, in the middle of the work itself, that he did not know where it was going, it was an unfinished path, a journey, an exploration, of whatever it was that was coming into being between himself and the imaginative world.

Asymmetry of interaction
Finally there is an asymmetry of interaction. It seems to me that the overall way in which the hemispheres relate has critically shifted from a form of what might be called stable dynamic equilibrium to an inequilibrium. When there are two necessary but mutually opposed entities in operation together, an imbalance in favour of one can, and often will, be corrected by a shift in favour of the other – a swing of the pendulum. But negative feedback can become positive feedback, and in the left hemisphere there is an inbuilt tendency for it to do so.63 To return to the image of the pendulum, it would be as if a violent swing of the pendulum shifted the whole clock, which then overbalanced.
I believe that we have entered a phase of cultural history in which negative feedback between the products of action of the two hemispheres has given way to positive feedback in favour of the left hemisphere. Despite the primacy of the right hemisphere, it is the left hemisphere that has all the cards and, from this standpoint, looks set to win the game. That is the subject of Part II.
What light does Heidegger cast on the interaction of the hemispheres? According to Heidegger, what were anciently seen as the Apollonian, more rationalistic, and Dionysian, more intuitive, aspects of our being have become grossly unbalanced. Nietzsche claimed that the constant opposition between these two very different tendencies led to a fruitful incitement to further and ever higher levels of life and creativity (which accords with the evidence of the relationship between the two hemispheres at its best). War, as Heraclitus said, is the father of all things. But the war between these tendencies has become, according to Heidegger, no longer creative but merely destructive. We have become ‘pre-eminently endowed with the ability to grasp and delimit’: the Apollonian has triumphed at the expense of the Dionysian. We are caught up, he believed, in a frenzy of ‘forming projects, enclosures, frameworks, division and structuring’, destroying ourselves and our environment and turning all into ‘resource’, something to be merely exploited, Nature turned into ‘one gigantic filling station’, as he once graphically put it. This is the opposite of the problem the Greeks confronted, for whom the balance lay more towards the Dionysian, and who therefore strove, and needed to strive, towards the Apollonian.
However, from within Heidegger's own philosophy there emerge grounds to suppose that the situation is not beyond remedy. He quoted with approval Hölderlin's lines: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch (‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’). How I understand this in relation to the brain is this.
At the first level, it tells us something about the constant, relatively stable, interrelation of the hemispheres at their best. In a way it is Nietzsche's point about the fruitful relation of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Within the realm of the left hemisphere (‘where there is danger’) there is also the possibility of an ‘unfolding’ of what is implicit, which, if returned to the right hemisphere, will lead to something greater and better coming forward (‘that which will save us’). This sounds very abstract, but I think it can be made clearer by an example. If we subject a work of art, say, or even the human body, to detached, analytic attention, we lose the sense of the thing itself, and its being in all its wholeness and otherness recedes. But the result of such attention, provided it is then relinquished, so that we stand in a state of openness and receptivity before the thing once again, may be a deeper and richer ‘presencing’. The work of the left hemisphere done, the thing ‘returns’ to the right hemisphere positively enriched. The best criticism of works of art produces just this result, and the study of medicine at its best achieves it, too, in relation to the human body. Again it is the analogy of the necessary analysis carried out by the pianist in learning a piece, an analysis that must be forgotten during performance. The ‘danger’ inherent in the process is the potential arrogance of the left hemisphere, which may not allow the return: it may come to think of itself as all in all.
The left hemisphere can play a vital, irreplaceable role if only it can be restored to its rightful place, and allow itself to be readopted by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is a crucial part of the creative process – the unfolding of potential. Becoming is potential, and for Being to emerge from Becoming, it needs to be ‘collapsed’ into the present, as the wave function ‘collapses’ under observation, and Schrödinger's cat becomes either dead or alive – the terms on which we exist. But it needs nonetheless to hand its work back to the right hemisphere. It is only out of the unity of division and unity that a new unity comes: so unity melds with its opposite and yet becomes more itself. (It is not, per contra, true that out of the unity of division and unity a new division comes, nor is it true that out of the division of unity and division a new division comes: by remaining divided nothing new comes at all.)
At the second level, it has something to say about the particular danger of the modern world view, in which the hemispheres are, I believe, out of kilter. A state of fallenness, which Heidegger called Verfallen, is according to him an inevitable part of existence. But there is a sense in which, as Heidegger believed, this has its positive too, since the very existence of Verfallen prompts Dasein to awareness of the loss of its authentic self, and to strive harder towards what is authentic. This process is inevitably one of cycles or alternations of direction. The sense of longing and striving for something beyond, which otherwise we could not achieve, is an idea I will return to in Part II, where I will consider the influence of the divided brain on Western culture. In the unfolding story I tell, the left hemisphere comes to be more and more powerful: at the same time problems grow.

McGilchrist wrote:

CODA: SLEEPWALKING INTO THE ABYSS
Right from his twenties until his death, in the year 1832, at the age of eighty-two, Goethe was obsessed with the legend of Faustus, and worked on what was to become his ultimate epic masterpiece, the long dramatic poem Faust, all his life. The legend of Faustus, the learned doctor who, frustrated by the bounds of his knowledge and power, makes a pact with the devil to increase them without limit while he lives, the price of which is his immortal soul, lies deep in the German
psyche, and versions of the story go back to the Middle Ages. The myth is clearly a warning against hubris. In Goethe's version of the story, Faust is an essentially good man, who has already done much for others through his skills as a physician, before his lust for power and knowledge lead him to do many destructive things. Yet, although Faust comes in the end to realise that there are indeed limits to what humanity can understand or achieve, he is brought back, through his own pain and remorse, to an awareness of the good his knowledge can bring to others: his ultimate moment of happiness, the purpose of his bargain with Mephistopheles, comes through his realisation of what he can do for humanity, not for himself. At the end of the work, God, not the devil, takes his soul; in doing so he acknowledges the truly great value of Faust's endless striving. In this version of the myth, it seems to me, the right hemisphere's desire for understanding something further and beyond and the left hemisphere's means for helping achieve that end – the Master and his emissary working in concert – are seen as ultimately redeemed and redeeming.65 More explicitly Goethe wrote in midlife a poem, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice), the story of which is familiar to most people from Disney's Fantasia, but in which the returning sorcerer – to whom Goethe refers as der alte Meister, the old master – is not angry with the foolish apprentice who thought he could do on his own what his master did, but merely bids him understand that he, the Master, alone can conjure spirits safely. If the left hemisphere is hot-headed and rivalrous, the right hemisphere is not: it has an accurate appreciation of what its companion can offer.
But in either story – that of Faust or of the apprentice – there is a saving awareness that things have gone badly wrong. In the story I am to tell, the left hemisphere acts like a sorcerer's apprentice that is blithely unaware that he is about to drown, a Faust that has no insight into his errors and the
destruction they have brought about.
Let us remind ourselves of the neurological literature for a moment. Although the left hemisphere does not see and cannot understand what the right hemisphere understands, it is expert at pretending that it does, at finding quite plausible, but bogus, explanations for the evidence that does not fit its version of events. It will be remembered from the experiments of Deglin and Kinsbourne that the left hemisphere would rather believe authority, ‘what it says on this piece of paper’, than the evidence of its own senses. And remember how it is willing to deny a paralysed limb, even when it is confronted with indisputable evidence? Ramachandran puts the problem with his customary vividness:
In the most extreme cases, a patient will not only deny that the arm (or leg) is paralysed, but assert
that the arm lying in the bed next to him, his own paralysed arm, doesn't belong to him! There's an
unbridled willingness to accept absurd ideas.
But when the damage is to the left hemisphere (and the sufferer is therefore depending on the right
hemisphere), with paralysis on the body's right side,
they almost never experience denial. Why not? They are as disabled and frustrated as people with
right hemisphere damage, and presumably there is as much ‘need’ for psychological defence, but in
fact they are not only aware of the paralysis, but constantly talk about it …It is the vehemence of the
denial – not a mere indifference to paralysis – that cries out for an explanation.66

Again Nietzsche had the measure of it: ‘“I have done that”, says my [veridical episodic righthemisphere] memory. “I cannot have done that”—says my pride [theory-driven, denial-prone lefthemisphere], and remains adamant. At last—memory yields.’67
The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility. If the defect might reflect on the self, it does not like to accept it. But if something or someone else can be made to take responsibility – if it is a ‘victim’ of someone else's wrongdoing, in other words – it is prepared to do so. Ramachandran carried out an experiment in which a patient with denial of a left arm paralysis received an injection of harmless salt water that she was told would ‘paralyse’ her (in reality already paralysed) left arm.
Once her left hemisphere had someone else to blame for it, it was prepared to accept the existence of the paralysis.68
Ramachandran again: ‘The left hemisphere is a conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies, whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation.’69
Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, a blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary Western life.
A sort of stuffing of the ears with sealing wax appears to be part of the normal left-hemisphere mode. It does not want to hear what it takes to be the siren songs of the right hemisphere, recalling it to what has every right – indeed, a greater right, as I have argued – to be called reality. It is as though, blindly, the left hemisphere pushes on, always along the same track. Evidence of failure does not mean that we are going in the wrong direction, only that we have not gone far enough in the direction we are already headed.

The left hemisphere as a sleepwalker
The popular assumption, aided by the reflections of some respectable neuroscientists, is that the right hemisphere might be something like a zombie, or a sleepwalker. It seems to be supposed naïvely that the defining quality of the zombie, that quintessentially uncanny phenomenon, is the lack of the verbalising and rationalising intelligence exemplified by the left hemisphere.
In Chapter 10 I will deal with the phenomenon of the uncanny, of the zombie and its like, phenomena that started to figure in literature, oddly but significantly enough, in the Enlightenment. I will suggest that the uncanny looks extraordinarily like certain aspects of the world according to the left hemisphere, in which vitality is absent, and the human is forced to approximate to the mechanical.
Zombies have much in common with Frankenstein's monster, after all. They perform like computer simulations of the human. There is no life in their eyes. And Giovanni Stanghellini has explored with subtlety, in his book Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies, the way in which the ‘zombie’ state is mimicked by schizophrenia, a largely right-hemisphere-deficit condition.70
So-called ‘zombie’ states are characterised by dissociation, in which the conscious mind appears cut off from the body and from feeling. That in itself suggests a relative hypofunction of the right hemisphere. Dissociation is, furthermore, the fragmentation of what should be experienced as a whole – the mental separation of components of experience that would ordinarily be processed together, again suggesting a right-hemisphere problem. Core features of dissociation include amnesia for
autobiographical information, identity disturbances, depersonalisation and derealisation (lack of the sense of the reality of the phenomenal world, which appears to be a two-dimensional projection). On first principles one would therefore expect this to be a right-hemisphere-deficit condition. And subjects with right-hemisphere damage do in fact report exactly this – a change in, and a foreignness of, the self, which is disconnected from the world, a loss of feeling of belonging in the world. At times they report having become insensible automata, puppets, or mere spectators, devoid of feelings and cut off from the surrounding world (one even reported that her head has been turned into a cone, but with the front part missing; other patients reported feeling themselves to be just a casing, or cover, their ‘I’ having been separated from them, located outside the body, somewhere nearby and to the left). Subjects almost invariably speak of ‘going to another space or place’.71
Given all this, it would be extraordinary if dissociation in ‘normal’ subjects did not involve a disconnection from the right hemisphere, and an interhemispheric imbalance in favour of the left. And this is just what the empirical evidence shows.72 In fact in dissociation, the hemispheres are more than usually disengaged, with an effective ‘functional commissurotomy’, or disruption of functioning in the corpus callosum.73 Activation of the left hemisphere in subjects especially prone to
dissociation results in faster than usual inhibition of the right hemisphere, whereas those not prone to dissociation exhibit a balanced interhemispheric inhibition, corroborating the idea that dissociation involves a functional superiority of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere.74
The ultimately dissociative state is hypnosis. Despite popular prejudice that hypnosis is likely to involve the ‘release’ of the right hemisphere, it has none of the features that one would expect if it really were a state of right-hemisphere predominance. And indeed many imaging studies have now confirmed that there appears to be a predominance of left-sided activation during hypnosis.75 Being asked to imagine that a brightly coloured picture is black and white, and being hypnotised, so that we really come to believe that the picture is black and white, involve different brain states; and the difference is that, in the hypnotic state, there is abnormally increased activation in the left hemisphere.76 In hypnosis the right hemisphere is not activated, even during a typically ‘righthemisphere’
task, using overall EEG power as the criterion.77 In a neuroimaging study exploring the neural correlates of hypnosis, activity decreases in the precuneus, posterior cingulate and right inferior parietal lobule,78 which is coherent, since as we saw earlier, in Chapter 2, these areas are known to be associated with the sense of individual agency.79 Furthermore, hypnosis produces an enhancement in focal concentration, together with a relative suspension of peripheral awareness, a mode of attention typical of the left hemisphere. It is, according to one source, ‘analogous to macular vision: intense and detailed, but restricted’, a perfect description of the left hemisphere field of vision.80 And in keeping with the left-hemisphere hypothesis, more hypnotisable subjects display
higher levels of dopaminergic activity (dopamine transmission is more extensive in the left hemisphere).81
So if I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.
I now want to turn to the influence of the divided brain on Western culture.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

I believe Jaynes was near to making a breakthrough – did in fact make one – but that, perhaps derailed by the view of schizophrenia outlined above, his conclusion was diametrically opposed to the one he should have drawn. His insight that there was a connection between the voices of the gods and changes in the mental world of those who heard them, that this might have something to do with the brain, and indeed that it concerned the relationship between the hemispheres, remains, in my view, fundamentally correct. However, I believe he got one important aspect of the story back to front. His contention that the phenomena he describes came about because of a breakdown of the ‘bicameral’ mind – so that the two hemispheres, previously separate, now merged – is the precise inverse of what happened. The phenomena came about because of a relative separation of the two chambers, the two hemispheres. Phenomena that were previously uncomplicatedly experienced as part of a relatively unified consciousness now became alien. Intuitions, no longer acted on unselfconsciously, no longer ‘transparent’, no longer simply subsumed into action without the necessity of deliberation, became objects of consciousness, brought into the plane of attention, opaque, objectified. Where there had been previously no question of whether the workings of the mind were ‘mine’, since the question would have had no meaning – there being no cut off between the mind and the world around, no possibility of standing back from one's own thought processes to ascribe them to oneself or anyone or anything else – there was now a degree of detachment which enabled the question to arise, and led to the intuitive, less explicit, thought processes being objectified as voices (as they are in schizophrenia), viewed as coming from ‘somewhere else’. This interpretation, moreover, has the advantage that it fits with what we know about the tendency in schizophrenia to bring into conscious awareness processes normally left unconscious and intuitive.[

The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

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McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Putting it at its simplest, where Jaynes interprets the voices of the gods as being due to the disconcerting effects of the opening of a door between the hemispheres, so that the voices could for the first time be heard, I see them as being due to the closing of the door, so that the voices of intuition now appear distant, ‘other'; familiar but alien, wise but uncanny – in a word, divine.
My thesis is that the separation of the hemispheres brought with it both advantages and
disadvantages. It made possible a standing outside of the ‘natural’ frame of reference, the common-sense everyday way in which we see the world. In doing so it enabled us to build on that ‘necessary distance’ from the world and from ourselves, achieved originally by the frontal lobes, and gave us insight into things that otherwise we could not have seen, even making it possible for us to form deeper empathic connections with one another and with the world at large. The best example of this is the fascinating rise of drama in the Greek world, in which the thoughts and feelings of our selves and of others are apparently objectified, and yet returned to us as our own. A special sort of seeing arises, in which both distance and empathy are crucial.
But the separation also sowed the seeds of left-hemisphere isolationism, allowing the left hemisphere to work unchecked. At this stage in cultural history, the two hemispheres were still working largely together, and so the benefits outweighed by a long way the disadvantages, but the disadvantages became more apparent over time.

The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World