Background → Ways of Attending
Iain McGilchrist
A fantastic book on the how and why our two hemispheres interact—and what happens when the balance tips too far in one direction.
The right hemisphere is able to experience the whole, each part in its full uniqueness. It sees things embedded in context, appreciates living beings in all their particularity, and feels the flow of time as continuous change.
The left hemisphere sees the parts and puts them into categories. It abstracts, schematizes, and generalizes. This is essential for manipulation of the world—for grasping things (literally and conceptually) and making use of them.
The left hemisphere is smart and loud. The right hemisphere is wise.
Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice. This is the right hemisphere's world—always flowing, always changing, where nothing is ever exactly repeated. But we need to find a way of fixing it as it flies, stepping back from immediacy. Hence the brain must attend to the world in two completely different ways.
The left hemisphere is better attuned to tools and whatever is inanimate, mechanical, machine-like. These things are understandable in its own terms because it put them together, piece by piece. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is adapted to dealing with living things—flexible, organic, constantly changing, and not made by us.
Only the right hemisphere can appreciate the organic wholeness of a structure that changes over time, as all living things do. Almost all aspects of time appreciation are in the right hemisphere. The left sees time as a succession of points, flow as a sequence of static moments.
Only the right hemisphere has a whole-body image. The left sees the body as an assemblage of parts, as if it were an object in space alongside other objects rather than a mode of existence.
For the right hemisphere, we live the body. For the left, we live in it—rather as we drive a car.
The left hemisphere is over-optimistic and unrealistically positive in its self-appraisal. It's in denial about its shortcomings, unreasonably certain it understands things of which it has little knowledge, and disinclined to change its mind.
The right hemisphere sees more but is far more inclined to self-doubt, more uncertain of what it knows—and it has no voice, since the motor speech center lies in the left hemisphere.
The left hemisphere has three great advantages. It controls the voice and the means of argument—the three Ls: language, logic, and linearity. It's like being Berlusconi: a political heavyweight who controls the media. Of course we tend to listen more to what it has to say.
Language developed not primarily for communication or even thinking, but to enable a certain type of functional manipulation of the world. Language is like the general's map at HQ: a representation of the world that is no longer present, but literally "re-presented" after the fact. What it delivers is a useful fiction.
Being able to map the world conceptually, substituting tokens for things, enables us to have an overall strategy. But it inhibits us from being there, in the experiential world.
The right hemisphere pays attention to the Other: to whatever exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It's deeply attracted to, and given life by, the betweenness that exists with this Other.
The left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world it has created—self-consistent but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other. This makes it powerful, but also curiously impotent, because it can ultimately only operate on, and know, itself.
What the left hemisphere offers is valuable but intermediate—a process of "unpacking" what is there and handing it back to the right hemisphere, where it can be reintegrated into the experiential whole. Like a pianist who fragments and analyzes a sonata in practice, then reintegrates everything in performance at a level where they're no longer aware of it.
That's how the two should work together: the emissary reporting back to the master, who alone can see the broader picture.
The left hemisphere's vision is not mistaken—but it's necessarily limited. The problem comes with its unawareness of that fact.
What would it look like if the left hemisphere became the sole purveyor of our reality?
So for humans, the need to have both ways of understanding the world—and yet keeping them distinct—is paramount.