Summary

Iain McGilchrist argues that the left brain and right brain do not map onto simplistic pop-science stereotypes, but onto two fundamentally different modes of attending to the world. The right hemisphere sustains breadth, flexibility, empathy, context, embodiment, metaphor, music, lived experience, and the ability to synthesize the whole; the left hemisphere clarifies, abstracts, labels, sequences, grasps, and renders experience into usable representations. The healthy movement is right – left – right: grounded experience is clarified by abstraction, then reintegrated into a living whole.

The cultural thesis is that Western civilization has increasingly elevated left-brain thinking – utility, control, mechanistic models, language, linearity, certainty, and reductionism – at the expense of the right hemisphere’s openness, relationality, intuition, and wisdom. McGilchrist reads this imbalance through philosophy, language, music, the Ancient World, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, industrialization, and modernity, concluding that the modern world reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities: knowledge over wisdom, abstract over concrete, quantity over quality, and permanence over living change.

"Perhaps to feel at all is inevitably to suffer"

"We create the world by attending to it in a particular way"

"The best things in life hide from the full glare of human attention"

Key Takeaways

Notes

Introduction

• Many pop-science misunderstandings of left/right brain asymmetry
• False belief of left > right brain superiority - in fact possibly opposite
• 3 top functional contributions of right brain:
  1. Capacity to read the human face
  2. Capacity to sustain attention
  3. Capacity to empathize
• Core cultural question: why is left brain thinking dominating the way we think - even if “less insightful”?
• Explanations: ↑
  • Left brain associated with utility, materialism, positive feedback
  • Left brain offers simple answers via mechanistic models
  • Left brain has a voice, right brain doesn’t
  • Modern world created reflects left brain’s priorities and vision
• How brain experiences: right brain grounds, left brain clarifies, right brain re-integrates
• Left brain is exclusive, right brain is integrative
• Reductionism is a disease
• 4 main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition, imagination
• Theory: brain’s hemispheric power struggle matches Western cultural power struggle
• Answer: both sides have value and merit
• Left brain is attacking right brain: “excessive misplaced rationalism”
• Brain structure is in some ways a metaphor of the world
• Hemispheric dominance, not absolute
• Don’t false dichotomize
• Fundamental asymmetry of the universe

1: The Divided Brain

1: Asymmetry and the Brain

• Evolutionarily, the bigger the brain the less interconnected it is hemispherically
• Basically, duality refines control
• Forebrain evolved primarily for distance: whether foresight or empathy
• Attention

2: What Do the Two Hemispheres ‘Do’?

• Split brain patient: literally cannot name object shown in left visual field (right hemisphere)
• Breadth + flexibility vs focus + grasp
• Brain increasingly operates through representations (“re presentations”) of the world
• 5 types of attention:
  1. Vigilance
  2. Sustained attention
  3. Alertness
  4. Focused attention
  5. Divided attention
• 2 axes: intensity + selectivity
• Right brain is more flexible, associative
• Right contextualizes, left abstract / labels
• Right deals with personal episodic memory + living individuals, left for non-living things
• Left science, right nature (fuzzy)
• Right brain for theory of mind
• Right brain controls facial expression, inhibits emotional arousal
• Right anxious arousal, left anxious apprehension
• Music expands the range of possible emotion
• Right is temporal, left sequences
• Confabulation: left brain makes up plausible explanation for right brain action
• Right brain deals with incomplete info
  • Metaphor, irony, humor, poetry
• Left brain is unaware of self limitations
  • Right is pessimistic / realistic
  • Being depressed gives you insight, not the other way around
• Sadness and empathy tightly correlated
  • “Perhaps to feel at all is inevitably to suffer”
• Morality is unconscious and intuitive, not utilitarian
• Right brain more associated with sense of self (especially autobiographical)
• Agency associated with right, passivity with left
• Left is “what”, right is “how”
• Left = routine, right = novelty
• We need both left and right brain - left brain alone is “destructive”

3: Language, Truth and Music

• 2 types of “knowing” a person:
  • Kennen: lived experience; empathic; music / art
  • Wissen: factual / abstract
• ↑ “to a man with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail”
• ↑ thought…
  • Related to the Alexander the Great + Indian wiseman parable?
  • What’d life look like to over-optimize for either? Almost feels like wisdom vs agency
• Lateralization of brain happened before language, handedness / tool design
• Language theorized to have evolved from music (musilanguage)
  • “Ultimately, music is the communication of emotion”
  • But controversial. Some argue music is meaningless / junk food
• Music historically played a primal communal role
• Written word probably contributed to the decline
• Referenced Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes
• We falsely perceive of all thought as words + language, when it can even be an impediment (mental imagery)
• Language is not necessary for numeracy, concept formation, etc.
• Language is a continuation of specifically right side motor function
• Language advantages of memorization, precision, and fixity
  • Language… has imperial aspirations
• “Language is the money of thought”
  • Fiat / metaphorical - must eventually be converted back into grounded experience
• Evidence of body origin of even things like complex grammar*
• The body origin of thought and language: ↑
• Despite modern repudiation of embodied being → abstracted cerebralized version of ourselves
• Theory of universal grammar hotly debated
• “Language originates an an embodied expression of emotion” → imitation, harmonization of emotional states
• ↑ … allows us to transcend evolutional utility
• Argues reason and language are poor human differentiators vs other animals
  • Eg. imagination, creativity, art, morality, sense of self (all right brain)
• Theory: there’s a rivalry between left and right hemisphere
  • “Misplaced and excessive rationalism”
• Modern adaptations prevent expansion of right brain, rather than expand left brain (repressed in right, allowed in left)
• Point: the left brain has to blot out the right brain to do its job at all - so not leap forward but deliberate handicapping

4: The Nature of the Two Worlds

• “We create the world by attending to it in a particular way”
• Perception + world model are co-crested and inherently relational
  • Eg. music from piano and player
• “Neuropsychology is inexplicably bound up with philosophy”
• Philosophy is generally a left-brain process: define / pin down
• Despite science + math proven uncertainty, incompleteness, paradox etc.
  • Over-insistence on the certainty obtained by rules
• Game theory*
  • Reputation, infinite games
• Body and nature of human consciousness profoundly intertwined
• Deep down the philosophical rabbit hole*
  • Philosophy must work against itself: Context > rules, practice > theory
  • Can be used for intellectual myth-making
• Science dangers: reductionism, deceptive clarity of models
• Hidegar: the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture: narrow, decontextualized
• ↑ led to communism and capitalism, both of which are exploitations of natural resources
• Reiterated importance of context and the whole
  • Eg. we judge people on their whole character, not individual actions (unless overwhelming)
• Follies of utility vs morality*
• The grand illusion: our attention so deeply biased and warps our perspective on the world it’s surprising we can ever come to experience anything truly new
  • “Hall of mirrors”
• ↑ solution: must expect the unexpected
• Science tries to separate the observed from the observer
• Study: information environment / diet / assumed persona affects performance
  • Eg. elderly → worse memory
• Left + right brain differences in…
  • Knowledge (chapter 3)
  • Truth (w/o context; chapter 4)
  • Belief
• ↑ belief:
  • Left: uncertainty; right: care
  • Eg. religion, materialism

5: The Primacy of the Right Hemisphere

• If R + L generate two world models, which is primary?
• Argument: right has precedence since it underwrites the knowledge of the left and is alone able to synthesize into a usable whole
  • “Reality has a roundness, rather than rectilinearity” (matching RLR vs simple L thinking)
• Detached vs engaged kind of attention
• “Philosophy begins and ends with wondering”
• Spiral-like progress
• “The best things in life hide from the full glare of human attention”
  • Eg. music, art spoiled by too much self awareness / attention
• The primacy effect: confabulation: rational mind justifies intuitive judgement
  • I feel therefore I am (not think)
• Only 1-5% of brain activity is conscious
• 3 principle meanings of consciousness:
  • Consciousness as a waking state
  • Consciousness as experience
  • Consciousness of mind
• Meaning in right, interpretation in left
• Study: when there is a mismatch in speech and gesture, gesture carries the day in 100% of cases
• Our brain is reverberative: receptive + generative: receiving + perceiving + in the process giving back and creating whatever exists apart from ourselves but includes ourselves

6: The Triumph of the Left Hemisphere

• Corpus Colosseum is largely inhibitive
  • Encourages difference (good) (eg. piano player hands)
• Split brain patients prove ↑ but also how left is more often undesirable than right
• CC more for differentiation than integration
• Eg. 2 founders with differing skillsets - must have respect, else dysfunctional
  • Rivalry inhibits performance
• R → L transfer faster than L → R
• Sense of self below CC, so even split brain patients don’t often act up
• Self-consciousness arises from left inspecting right
• 3 ontological asymmetries favoring left (but should be right):
  1. Asymmetry of function
  2. Asymmetry of means: most available - next to attention, self awareness
     • 3 arguments - language, logic, linearity - all in L
  3. Asymmetry of structure: thought dependent on language and reason automatically devalues what cannot be expressed in “” (intuition)
     • Discounts “leaps of faith”
     • Language simply intends to sequence + structure intuition
  4. Asymmetry of interaction: L should hand back to R but doesn’t have to
     • L is conformist: insensitive to discrepancies, blindness to evidence in favor of theory
• L sequential, R parallel
• Dissociation = R brain dysfunction

2: How the Brain Has Shaped Our World

7: Imitation and the Evolution of Culture

• Imbalanced shift to L in Western culture
• Epigenetics, brain molded by world
• Memetics
• “Imitation is the brain’s arguably most important skill”
• Gene for imitation is strongly selected for since it allows for imitating other favorable genetic adaptations (general purpose)
• Theory: skills downgraded in the modern world, we’re “bust imitating machines”

8: The Ancient World

• R shift during renaissance, L during modern world - evidenced by art portraits*
• Controversial theory: consciousness first arose in Ancient Greece with “hearing voices of the gods” - actually self and intuitive / R thought
• His theory: ↑ actually due to separation of R and L so intuitive voice feels more distant
• Iliad and The Odyssey show thoughts assumed bodily, inseparable
• pre-Homer had no notion of human will
• Separating thought and experience
• Notions of deep thought
• 4 steps in history of writing:
  1. Pictograms → fernograms
  2. “” → syllabic alphabet
  3. Vowel signs
  4. Direction of writing
• ↑ all more left (context → sequence-based processing)
• Individuality + art focus on face
• Definite article (eg. “The beautiful”) in Greek favors abstraction and idealization
  • Abstraction becomes the representation
• ↑ discounts what is implicit or intuitive
• “The metaphor is a lie” denotation > connotation
• Plato first to put this forward
• Decentralized gov’t → hierarchical
• Standardization, simplification

9: The Renaissance and the Reformation

• Art with perspective → detachment
• Melancholy of the period due to right hemisphere dominance
• Art as reaching out to something beyond ourselves
• Intuitive / inspiration-based view of artistry (rather than learning rules)
• Nature as a teacher
• Renaissance man
• Protestantism + capitalism + the will to power all linked with left brain
• Orderly seating of reformed church
• Knowledge is power (Bacon)
• Overall:
  • Fruitful balance in hemispheres
  • Perspective: spatial depth, time, individual
  • Though primarily R: personal experience + opinion
  • Interconnectedness (soul)
  • Rekindling of empathy
  • Self and interconnectedness with society
  • The Renaissance man

10: The Enlightenment

• Rationality vs reason
  • Reason → rationality → reason
• Excess rationality = schizophrenia(?)
• Foundations of enlightenment thinking:
  1. All genuine questions can be answered. If not, it’s not a question
  2. All answers are knowable, can be discovered and taught to others
  3. All answers must be compatible with one another
• Self-reflection, picturesque
• Music + architecture art forms dominated due to unanimousness
• “Expression is the dressing of thought” - not vice versa
• Symmetry was perhaps “the ultimate guiding principle” in Enlightenment thought and art - argues unnatural
• L brain direct pursuit of liberty, fraternity, equality perverts goal (in contrast to indirect of R brain)
• Uncanny: reality altered in a way that’s indescribable and vaguely threatening (schizophrenia)
  • L rejects anything beyond what we can describe and control

11: Romanticism & Industrial Revolution

• Argument: romanticism is a manifestation of R dominance in way of looking at world
• Don’t get too carried away with abstraction
• No simple fact of the matter
• Depth = distance = passing of time
• The essential interconnect was of things
• Intuition requires “a wise passiveness”
• Materialism: science is the only basis for knowing and understanding the world
• Industrial revolution: L brain creating the world in its likeness

12: The Modern and Post-Modern Worlds

• Erosion of society: collection of atomized individuals
• The disenchanted world: scientific materialism + bureaucracy → capitalism, consumerism, utility + greed + competition (replacing felt connection, cultural continuity)
• Globalism
• Media: promote fragmentation, distance
• Bowling Alone
• Over-awareness: detached “only I am real”
• Viewing others as NPCs
• Hyper-consciousness → paralysis
• Either no self or everything is self
• Post-modernism is ↑
• Disruption of narrative
• Loss of meaning
• Rising reports of boredom
• Schizophrenia strongly correlated with urban industrialized environments
• Dissociation, fragmentation of self
• Science, tech, admin self-reinforcing selection of L-dominant psyches
• “Naziism is the very epitome of modernism”
• Less rhythm in modern art, music
• Reductionism: adopted unreflectedly ad the philosophy of our age
• Encourages mechanistic view of humans
• Scientific materialism / realism: everyone else taken in by illusions that everyone in the know have the explanation
• Rebuttal: wise skepticism about the absolute power of human understanding
• R brain is tentative: always reaching towards something which it knows is beyond itself
• L brain, once convinced of its own importance, no longer cares about ↑, instead “I know that there is nothing to know”

Conclusion

• Knowledge > wisdom, abstract > concrete, quantity > quality
• Inflexibility
• Impersonal
• Uniformity, equality, identity politics
• Play down individual responsibility
• Resentment, undercutting of awe
• The word and idea come to dominate
• No relationship between happiness and economic growth
• Hedonic treadmill
• Greatest correlation with happiness: breadth + depth of human relationships
• Body viewed as object
• We overvalue permanence > embracing ever-changing nature
• Eastern vs Western culture:
  • Wholistic vs analytical
  • W is black and white
• Focus on self-esteem is a relatively recent Western phenomenon
• Obvious emphasis on R brain (or balanced) in Eastern, L brain in Western
• Music may regenerate commonality
• Our brain / intellect reflects the structure of the universe: mutual molding
• A leap of faith is required, even in science
• Reality fades away into indeterminacy- reductionist models are dangerous