The Divided Brain – TED Talk [12 min]:
In or Out
- Out: Old popular science said “left brain is logical, and right brain is creative & emotional” – this has been shown to not be the case.
- In: The brain halves differ in how they pay attention to the world.
Left Brain: narrow field focus, good in bursts. Good at manipulating, that is, grasping, grabbing, acquiring, controlling – good for keeping focus on food or building shelter. And it speaks to us in our language (your inner voice or monologue). But it only sees isolated objects, and views them as mechanical and lifeless; it’s keen to reduce things into abstractions, place things into categories, and discard any nuance.
Right Brain: wide field focus, sustained alertness. Good for being ready for fleeing from predators, or finding mates. Good at understanding the whole of things and their context, and their interconnectedness. But does not speak to us in language.
Left brain without the right brain is in fact the deluded and emotional (often angry) brain.
More details from his work below, but first, let’s draw a few connections to DRRS
Divided Brain connections to DRRS
The Crisis of Separation / Perception
In MOOC 1.3-3-1 Eastern philosophies and the inner self, the illusion of self and the “split-brain” experiments are discussed. I wrote in my CAS1 term paper (before I ran across this Divided Brain work):
The Unreliable Narrator is what I call the thinker / inner voice in my head, as we learned in the MOOC that our cognition is constantly building a narrative to make sense of the world in real time (as evidenced by those split-brain hemispheres experiments), but there’s no guarantee that narrative is ‘true’. Our Unreliable Narrator is often useful and correct, but not always. The goal is not to always doubt that voice, but understand its limitations, when to listen, when not to, and allow other forms of guidance (e.g., gut feelings, intuition) come through.
In a couple MOOC modules, they discuss that part of the metacrisis is the crisis of separation and/or the crisis of perception. The left brain inherently takes on a separating view of the world, and seems to dominate the modern, preferred way of perceiving the world. From Dr McGilchrist’s work, we can say part of the crisis of separation/perception is in fact neurological & psychological and is reinforced culturally & via modern left-brain-centric education, but that’s not to say it’s hardwired or written in stone. The brain is plastic and can be adapted by using left-brain mode thinking less and right-brain mode thinking more. He likens our overuse of the left brain to having a radio but only listening to one frequency despite the many other perfectly acceptable frequencies we could tune into.
Weaving
DRRS aims to nurture us into transforming ourselves into bioregional Weavers – transdisciplinary cultivators building layered relationships between each other and nature. But did you know basket weaving was a traditional method for helping schizophrenics? This is the genesis of ‘basket case’ – an old derogatory term for someone who was crazy.
Quote from the ‘Is Modern Society Schizophrenic?’ video below: “if you wanted to create somebody who behaved like somebody was had schizophrenia, you take an ordinary person and put lots of holes in their right hemisphere.”
Link this idea to MOOC 1.6 Mind & Movement: engaging in weaving, that is, engaging with our bodies helps restore balance & heal in situations of left brain dominance and/or right brain deficit. Also, from The Divided Brain documentary below [@minute 44]:
“Well, there’s been a revolution in psychology. It’s now clear that everything is embodied in movement. Movement and time have been neglected by people concentrating on information. The difference between that and formal schooling is that formal schooling assumes that they have a lot of knowledge to learn, and they have to be taught by skilled adults.”
-Dr. Colwyn Trevarthen, Professor of Child Psychology, University of Edinburgh
Overall, there’s feels to be a rough alignment of the right brain being proficient in working with holistic complexity while the left brain is simply not adapted to that task.
I would posit the body is like the “third” hemisphere, working in concert with the left & right hemisphere. Some questions for my QUEST: what kinds of consciousness does a body have, and how does it pay attention to the world (aka how does the body dispose/direct its consciousness to the world)?
Diving Deeper into the Divided Brain
The Divided Brain documentary
I found this to be a really good and accessible documentary. It has a whole bit with John Cleese talking about how at a Monty Python gathering, Terry Gilliam could not stop talking about this divided brain business.
Perspectives on the Nature of Reality to Inform Systemic Change at CERN
Excerpted stills below:
What would the world look like if designed by only the left hemisphere?
A Revolution in Thought? How hemisphere theory helps us understand the metacrisis
With Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman wrote one of my favorite series His Dark Materials (Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), and I was wonderfully surprised at what he say:
The book I discovered later in life:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/23/philip-pullman-i-had-to-grow-up-before-i-could-cope-with-middlemarch
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. In this and his later book, The Matter With Things, McGilchrist investigates the extraordinary difference between the characteristic modes of perception, cognition and response of the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s like coming across an entirely new colour.
The two even did a podcast together: Philip Pullman Meets Iain McGilchrist – The Meaning of Life https://howtoacademy.com/podcasts/philip-pullman-meets-iain-mcgilchrist-the-matter-with-things/
Further Reading
If you prefer reading, here’s a review of some of his work: Iain McGilchrist and the battle over the left-brain, right-brain theory
An aside on schizophrenia
This was the first time I heard about the “schizo-autistic spectrum”:
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) have a strong historic connection. In 1911, Eugen Bleuler coined the term “autism” to describe the apparent withdrawal from the outside world that he observed in schizophrenia patients (Kuhn & Cahn, 2004). By the 1940s, Leo Kanner had reappropriated “autism” to describe a childhood behavioral disorder that he speculated could be an early-onset form of schizophrenia (Kanner, 1949).
Jutla, et al., Autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia: an updated conceptual review (2022) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8931527/
More on schizophrenia
Dr. McGilchrist in the London Book Review, reviews two books by Louis Sass:
The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind
by Louis Sass.
Cornell, 177 pp., £23.50, June 1995, 0 8014 9899 6
Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought
by Louis Sass.
Basic Books, 593 pp., £18.99, November 1993, 0 465 04312 7
About Dr. Iain McGilchrist and his divided brain work
- The Master and His Emissary (2009) – 600 pages, I estimate 2500+ citations
- The Matter with Things, Volumes I & II (2021) – 1500 pages, over 5000 citations
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva 2021).