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The Master and His Emissary
|Author||Iain McGilchrist|
|Language||English|
|Genre||Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, sociocultural evolution|
|Publisher||Yale University Press|
Publication date
|30 October 2009|
|Publication place||United States and United Kingdom|
|Media type||Print (Hardback)|
|Pages||608 pp.|
|ISBN||0-300-14878-X (hardback edition)|
|Followed by||The Matter with Things|
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is a 2009 book written by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist that deals with the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain. The differing world views of the right and left brain (the "Master" and "Emissary" in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.[1] In part, McGilchrist's book, which is the product of twenty years of research,[2] reviews the evidence of previous related research and theories, and based on this and cultural evidence, the author arrives at his own conclusions.
The Master and His Emissary received mixed reviews upon its publication. Some critics praised the book as being a landmark publication that could alter readers' perspective of how they viewed the world. Other critics claimed neurological understanding of hemispheric differences falls short of supporting the sweeping conclusions the book draws about Western culture.
The Master and His Emissary was shortlisted for the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize,[3] and was longlisted for the Royal Society 2010 Prize for Science Books.[4]
Background and influences[edit]
In an interview with Frontier Psychiatrist, McGilchrist cites two main influences on his work: the psychiatrist John Cutting, and the Chicago psychologist David McNeill. McGilchrist states: "What I began to see – and it was John Cutting's work on the right hemisphere that set me thinking – was that the difference lay not in what they [the two hemispheres] do, but how they do it."[5] In the same interview, the author explains: "Some very subtle research by David McNeill, amongst others, confirms that thought originates in the right hemisphere, is processed for expression in speech by the left hemisphere, and the meaning integrated again by the right (which alone understands the overall meaning of a complex utterance, taking everything into account)."[5]
Synopsis[edit]
The 608-page book is about the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain. The differing world views of the right and left brain (the "Master" and "Emissary" in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.[1]
The book is divided into an introduction, two parts and a conclusion. In the introduction, McGilchrist states that "there is, literally, a world of difference between the [brain] hemispheres. Understanding quite what that is has involved a journey through many apparently unrelated areas: not just neurology and psychology, but philosophy, literature and the arts, and even, to some extent, archaeology and anthropology."[6]
Part One: The Divided Brain[edit]
In "The Divided Brain", McGilchrist digests study after study, replacing the popular and superficial notion of the hemispheres as respectively logical and creative in nature with the idea that they pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented. These two modes of perception cascade into wildly different hemispheric personalities, and in fact reflect yet a further asymmetry in their status, that of the right's more immediate relationship with physical bodies (our own as well as others) and external reality as represented by the senses, a relationship that makes it the mediator, the first and last stop, of all experience.
Part Two: How the Brain Has Shaped Our World[edit]
In the second part, "How the Brain Has Shaped Our World", the author describes the evolution of Western culture, as influenced by hemispheric brain functioning, from the ancient world, through the Renaissance and Reformation; the Enlightenment; Romanticism and Industrial Revolution; to the modern and postmodern worlds which, to our detriment, are becoming increasingly dominated by the left brain.
Reception[edit]
The book received mixed reviews in various newspapers and journals. Reviewing The Master and His Emissary in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Jacob Freedman wrote the book “valiantly addresses the effect hemispheric asymmetry has had on Western civilization" and that it chronicled "how the left brain's determined reductionism and the right brain's insightful and holistic approach have shaped music, language, politics, and art."[7] A review by Bryan Appleyard in Times Online described the book as suggesting "we are thinking more and more like machines, and risk losing what makes us human",[8] while David Cox in the Evening Standard wrote that the author "shows convincingly that the degeneracy of the West springs from our failure to manage the binary division of our brains."
In a positive review in The Guardian, philosopher Mary Midgley wrote that the book "points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain,"[9] and that "though neurologists may well not welcome it because it asks them new questions, the rest of us will surely find it splendidly thought-provoking."[9] In another positive review in Standpoint magazine, Professor Adam Zeman wrote that McGilchrist "extends [the] received wisdom with a hugely ambitious, absorbing and questionable thesis: the two hemispheres have radically contrasting personalities; that they live in a state of creative tension, sometimes declining into open war; and that their struggle for supremacy provides the key to understanding the major cultural movements of human history.[10] In the Times Literary Supplement, W. F. Bynum wrote: "McGilchrist's careful analysis of how brains work is a veritable tour de force, gradually and skilfully revealed. I know of no better exposition of the current state of functional brain neuroscience."[11]
In a mixed review in Literary Review, A. C. Grayling wrote that the book was "beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous," but added that "the findings of brain science are nowhere near fine-grained enough yet to support the large psychological and cultural conclusions Iain McGilchrist draws."[2] A negative review in The Economist stated that the book resorted to "generalisations of breathtaking sweep" and that the second part of the book "has plainly become untethered from its moorings in brain science."[12] Likewise, Michael Corballis said of the work, that "Although widely acclaimed, this book goes far beyond the neurological facts."[13]
Owen Flanagan alleged many shortcomings of the book and delivered a dismissive statement: "The fact is, hemispheric differences are not well understood. Neither are patterns over 2,500 years of western history. Trying to explain the ill-understood latter with a caricature of the former does little to illuminate either."[14] McGilchrist wrote scathingly of this review, saying: "But anyone who has read my book and reads that review will realise what a shameful piece of writing it is," picking on what he alleges to be evidence of superficiality and misrepresentation.[15]
The book has inspired a documentary, The Divided Brain, authorised by McGilchrist.[16]
Editions[edit]

• McGilchrist, Iain (2009). The Master and His Emissary. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-14878-7.
  See also[edit]
• Lateralization of brain function
• Modernism
• Philosophy of mind
• Sociocultural evolution
• Bicameral mentality: A related theory by Julian Jaynes based in communication between the brain hemispheres
• The Matter with Things: A follow-on book by Iain McGilchrist (2021)
  Notes[edit]
• ^ a b Staff (14 November 2009). "Two worlds of the left and right brain (audio podcast)". BBC Radio 4 Today. Retrieved 2009-12-24.
• ^ a b Grayling, A.C. (December 2009). "In Two Minds". Literary Review. Retrieved 2009-12-21.
• ^ Staff (2011). "Book Prize". Bristol Festival of Ideas. Archived from the original on 2011-10-07. Retrieved 2011-10-25.
• ^ Staff (16 June 2010). "Royal Society 2010 Prize for Science Books Longlist Announced". The Royal Society. Retrieved 2011-10-25.
• ^ a b Staff (4 February 2010). "Interview with Iain McGilchrist". Frontier Psychiatrist. Retrieved 2010-02-05.
• ^ McGilchrist 2009, p. 2
• ^ Freedman, Jacob (June 2011). "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World". American Journal of Psychiatry. 168 (6). American Psychiatric Association: 655–656. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.11010053. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
• ^ Appleyard, Bryan (29 November 2009). "Divide and rule: man is the new machine". Times Online. Retrieved 2009-12-21.[dead link]
• ^ a b Midgley, Mary (2 January 2010). "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist". The Guardian. Retrieved 2010-01-02.
• ^ Adam Zeman. "A Brain of Two Halves | Standpoint". Standpointmag.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-05-06.
• ^ Bynum, W. F. (2 April 2010). "On the right: Iain McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary – The divided brain". The Times Literary Supplement. News International. p. 12.
• ^ "The human brain: Right and left". The Economist. 26 November 2009. Retrieved 2012-05-14.
• ^ Corballis, 2014. Left Brain, Right Brain: Facts and Fantasies. PLoS One.
• ^ Flanagan, Owen (26 November 2009). "The vast left-brain conspiracy". New Scientist CultureLab blog. Retrieved 2009-12-21.
• ^ Malik, Kenan (24 February 2013). "split brain, split views – debating iain mcgilchrist". Pandaemonium. Kenan Malik. Archived from the original on 10 March 2018. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
• ^ Staff (2018). "The Divided Brain – THE DIVIDED BRAIN documentary based on the book THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY by Iain McGilchrist". Divided Brain Media Inc. Archived from the original on 17 March 2019. Retrieved 17 March 2019.
  Further reading[edit]
  This "Further reading" section may need cleanup. (March 2024)
• Jaynes, Julian (2000). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-05707-2. (Paperback) First published 1976.
• Ornstein, Robert (1998). The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres. Harcourt Brace International. ISBN 978-0-15-600627-9.
• Dreher, Rod (16 January 2023). "Maybe Our Culture Is Literally Crazy". The American Conservative. Archived from the original on 20 January 2023. Retrieved 20 January 2023.
  Essays[edit]
• McGilchrist, Iain (2 January 2010). "The Battle of the Brain: The mind's great conflict spills over onto the world stage". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2010-01-03.
  Interviews[edit]
• Vedantam, Shankar (4 Feb 2019). "One Head, Two Brains: How The Brain's Hemispheres Shape The World We See" (Audio podcast). NPR Hidden Brain. Retrieved 2019-02-08. A transcript is also available.
• Mitchell, Natasha (19 June 2010). "The Master and his Emissary: the divided brain and the reshaping of Western civilisation" (Audio podcast). ABC Radio National All in the Mind. Retrieved 2010-06-23. A transcript is also available.
• Staff (4 February 2010). "Interview with Iain McGilchrist". Frontier Psychiatrist. Retrieved 2010-02-05.
• Crispin, Jessa (3 February 2010). "An Interview with Iain McGilchrist". Bookslut. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
• Staff (14 November 2009). "Two worlds of the left and right brain" (Audio podcast). BBC Radio 4 Today. Retrieved 2009-12-24.
  Lectures[edit]
• McGilchrist, Iain (17 Nov 2010). "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" (Video). The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA). Retrieved 2011-01-26.
  Parts of this lecture were republished by the RSA in October 2011 as one of a series of "RSA Animates" with cartoonist Andrew Park's illustrations.[L 1] The twelve-minute animation accompanying McGilchrist's talk took Park two months to complete.[L 2]
• McGilchrist, Iain (May 2011). "Things Are Not What They Seem" (Video). Schumacher College. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
• McGilchrist, Iain (4 May 2012). "Big Ideas: Dr. Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain: Our Mind at War" (Video). TVOntario. Retrieved 2015-12-21.
• McGilchrist, Iain (26 October 2012). "Iain McGilchrist on the divided brain's impact on our world" (Video). TVOntario. Retrieved 2015-12-21.
• ^ McGilchrist, Iain (24 Oct 2011). "RSA Animate: The Divided Brain" (Video). The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA). Retrieved 2011-10-25.
• ^ Halliday, Josh (21 October 2011). "Internet users get animated about RSA short film series". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
  Documentaries[edit]
• The Divided Brain documentary (2019)
  Other reviews[edit]
• Crispin, Jessa (21 December 2009). "Half and Half". The Smart Set. The Pennoni Honors College, Drexel University. Retrieved 2010-01-04.
• Flanagan, Owen (21 December 2009). "The vast left-brain conspiracy". New Scientist CultureLab blog. Retrieved 2009-12-21.
• Iana, Cristina (27 November 2009). "Studiu: Emisferele cerebrale dreaptă şi stângă au personalităţi opuse" [Study: right and left cerebral hemispheres have opposite personalities] (in Romanian). adevarul.ro international. Retrieved 2009-12-24.
• Vernon, Mark (22 January 2010). "What the other half doesn't know". Philosophy and Life Blog. Retrieved 2010-01-28. Vernon, a writer, journalist and columnist with The Guardian, writes: "At last! A book on neuroscience that is a thrilling read, philosophically astute and with wonderful science."
• Williams, Ray. B. (22 February 2010). "Why we need to use both sides of our brain". National Post (blog). Retrieved 2010-02-22.
• Kingerlee, Roger; Testa, Rita (2011). "Review of The Master and his Emissary". Neuropsychoanalysis. 12 (2). Karnac Books for the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society: 222–226.
• Ellis, Robert M. (10 January 2012). "'The Master and his Emissary' by Iain McGilchrist: An Extended Review". Middle Way Society. Retrieved 2015-08-12.
• Gare, Arran (2012). "Review of 'The Master and his Emissary' by Iain McGilchrist". Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 8, No 1 (2012). 8 (1): 412–449.
  External links[edit]
• Brain Matters: The divided mind. Has our civilisation suffered from a failure to manage the binary division of our brains? Talk given by McGilchrist at the Wellcome Collection in April 2012
• Author's profile at All Souls College, University of Oxford
• The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. RSA Keynote by Iain McGilchrist

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Insights from ‘The Matter With Things’
by Tom Morgan
(Director of Communications and Content at the KCP Group)
The LH treats the world like a predator would; it locks onto something to chase it down and kill it. The primary tool we now use to manipulate the world is language, so that’s where it dominates.
The left hemisphere has a much more extensive vocabulary than the right, and more subtle and complex syntax. It extends vastly our power to map the world and to explore the complexities of the causal relationships between things. This is surely its raison d’être, and it is valuable to a predator, at least in simple circumstances, where there are not many factors, as there almost always are once one starts taking the broader view.
Like a child pulling the wings off a butterfly, the LH reduces things down to ingredients, so as to understand them and manipulate them, but it often kills what it touches. A joke isn’t funny when it’s explained. The world loses its magic when reduced to atoms. But most critically, mechanistic analysis of lines on spreadsheets fails to account for the way the whole system flows together. As I’ve written ad nauseam, this is a massive failing of reductionism and our analytical approach to inherently complex systems.
In a formulation which is staggeringly consistent throughout the book, the ideal is a Right => Left => Right transition. McGilchrist talks about the need for real world experience to originate in the right hemisphere, to be moved to the left for processing, but then returned to the right for synthesis into its global context. The musician hears a piece of beautiful music, deconstructs it into notes and learns it painstakingly, then eventually performs it intuitively. Problems emerge when we fail to do the essential final stage of putting the pieces back together.
The critical imbalance: The central idea of McGilchrist’s work is that of an imbalance between the hemispheres: the left should be the servant of the right, but it is now too often the master. McGilchrist illustrates why this is radically problematic. The LH has access to infinitely less information, yet tends to lie when faced with its own limitations.
Some LH stroke victims get the right side of their body knocked offline, and they are aware of the paralysis in their right arm. But if their RH gets knocked out, the remaining left hemisphere will categorically deny anything is wrong with their right side:
They will deny completely that they have a paralyzed arm and if forced to move it, they will say “there, I just moved it,” while nothing moved. And if you bring the hand round in front of them and say “no, move that” they say, “Oh, that’s not my arm that belongs to that man in the next bed” …. the left hemisphere has a very high opinion of itself, and the right hemisphere has a much more modest opinion of itself, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that the right hemisphere is more intelligent, not just emotionally and socially more intelligent, but more cognitively intelligent than the left hemisphere.
The left hemisphere is more competitive, but also less able to admit when it’s wrong.
“It should be stressed that the right-hemisphere [deficit] patients virtually never respond ‘I don’t know’ to an open-ended question. Instead, they generally contrive an answer – confabulating if necessary – in seeming indifference to the inappropriateness of the response.” – Penelope Myers.
“In my opinion, it is the most stunning result from split-brain research … The right hemisphere does not do this. It is totally truthful.” – Michael Gazzaniga
A central problem is that the RH is comparatively mute. The LH, as its goal is power and control over the world, has greater usage of language, linearity, and logic. It is great at “grasping” things, breaking them down and working out how to use them, but it consistently misses the importance of the whole. Just because something is logical, consistent. and articulately expressed doesn’t make it true.
What does the hemisphere hypothesis tell us about thinking better? It’s pretty nuanced, but McGilchrist’s general take is easily anticipated: we have overemphasized reductive reasoning at the significant cost of intuition. I have read many, many books on how to use the LH to be more rational, use mental models, reduce cognitive biases, etc., but have seen relatively few on how to use the RH. The idea is to better see what lies beyond reason.
Pascal, one of the greatest philosopher-mathematicians that ever lived, nonetheless said that ‘the ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can’t get as far as understanding that.’
In The Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist talks about using reason to achieve a still higher “suprarationality” where it transcends its own limitations. Music is one such example:
One might make a distinction between what is irrational (against reason) and what is ‘suprarational’ (beyond reason). Music might act as an everyday example of something very real, possessed of deep meaning, and not irrational, but suprarational.
A sensitivity for the implicit, music, creativity, and the ability to recombine parts to see the whole is the specialty of the RH. Throughout Part 2, McGilchrist persuasively argues that:
The right hemisphere is responsible for, in every case, the more important part of our ability to come to an understanding of the world, whether that be via intuition and imagination, or, no less, via science and reason.
Again, there’s a necessary tension, but with the RH having overarching control and ideally the final say. The right can incorporate insights from the left, but the left can’t see what the right sees. Again- it’s Right/Left/Right in process:
“Reason alone will not serve. Intuition alone can be improved by reason, but reason alone without intuition can easily lead the wrong way. They both are necessary. The way I like to put it is that when I have an intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department. Then after I’ve checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department to make sure that it’s still all right.” – Jonas Salk
As both sides can do a little of everything, it’s not only the LH that uses science and reason. But, as the two hemispheres do the same things in different ways, there’s a practical application to knowing when to use each side.
Where the circumstances are familiar, the problem is determinate and explicit, the situation is congruent with one’s belief bias, and the presentation is lexical, there is a clear left hemisphere advantage in reasoning. But where the circumstances are unfamiliar, indeterminate or implicit, challenge one’s bias, or are not expressed in primarily lexical terms – or require interpretation in the light of context – there will be a critical role for the right hemisphere.
Impact on civilization: It originally seemed implausible to me that an “internal” imbalance in our brains could influence and reflect our “external” world.
Now I see it literally everywhere I look. I clearly observe limited LH thought in myself and in people around me, as well as the way our modern world is shaped and treated. Cultures across time have myths that warn about the dangers of exactly the hemispheric imbalance we are currently experiencing. In both ancient Greece and Rome, it heralded the collapse of their civilizations. John Glubb’s theory of civilizations found that they last on average two hundred and fifty years, and the “age of intellect” typically arrives just before a collapse. The period of most separation and disengagement from our environment also makes us the most fragile. McGilchrist thinks we’re now at urgent risk of it happening again.
McGilchrist is particularly taken with an ancient Iroquois myth, but a familiar contemporary example is Disney’s The Lion King. The overtly intellectual brother Scar overthrows the king Mufasa, and the result is the deterioration of the entire environment; Pride Rock becomes a barren wasteland.
Perhaps most worryingly, McGilchrist draws a very convincing parallel between modern society and the symptoms of autism and schizophrenia. Both of which seem to be relatively recent conditions, emerging post industrialization.
Excessive abstraction has been described as ‘probably at the source of cognitive deficit in schizophrenia’ – living in the map, not the world: words that refer only to other words; abstractions that become more real than actualities; symbols that usurp the power of what they symbolise: the triumph of theory over embodied experience. I believe there are resonances here with academic trends in the humanities, with scientism, and even with the world-picture of the average Western citizen.
This observation seems to have a lot of common-sense evidence going for it. It’s curiously reflected in the structure of the world we inhabit. Modernity is filled with grids and straight lines, features totally absent in nature. We exist separated from our immediate environment, with our lives increasingly mediated by screens and digital abstractions. Everything we value; intimacy, friendship, community is now provided in digital form, but with all the nourishment removed. We are already living in a simulation. Our focus is on safety, power, and control, yet we’ve never felt so disconnected. If the LH could invent a world, it would surely look a lot like this.
Why is any of this important to us as individuals? Carl Jung believed personal transition back from “ego” (LH) to “self” (RH) was the meaning of life. Yet again we see the Right/Left/Right formulation: we go from naïve children in the flow, to powerful but disconnected adults, ideally back to the flow again. But this time with an increased appreciation for the whole.
The “hero’s journey” that is the dominant story of almost every human culture alludes to this transition as the path to individual and societal renewal. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered arguably the world’s most famous left-hemisphere stroke. Her original viral TED talk describes the bliss and oneness she experienced as her left-hemisphere was knocked offline. She explicitly agrees with the hero’s journey parallel in her recent book Whole Brained Living:
In the language of the brain, the hero must step out of his own ego-based left-brain consciousness into the realm of his right brain’s unconsciousness. At this point the hero feels connected to all that is, and is enveloped by a sense of deep inner peace.
The link between the individual and society is slightly clearer in this context; correcting the imbalance is our brains restores our harmonious relationship with the flow of life.
In fact, as the book unfolds, McGilchrist makes a surprisingly persuasive case that the RH is in relationship with values, truth, reality, life, flow, and everything of ultimate value. But, perhaps even more usefully, allows you to identify the kind of LH thinking that hinders you from directly experiencing it.
All that matters most to us can be understood only by the indirect path: music, art, humour, poems, love, metaphors, myths, and religious meaning, are all nullified by the attempt to make them explicit.
McGilchrist relates this back to what the Navajo called “seeing with soft eyes.” The analogy I always think of is one of those “magic eye” pictures where you could only see the whole image by relaxing your eyes. Then when you re-focused it would disappear again.
The somewhat practical personal takeaway for me is the importance of subtle attention. If narrow LH attention sees and knows little, lies, and doesn’t even know what it doesn’t know, we certainly shouldn’t be using it to direct our lives. Instead we need to use the RH for our exploratory growth.
Thus you’re left with the paradox what we can’t pursue anything we love too directly. Instead let go of the tiller and follow our bliss. That way we have a chance of participating in the flow of unfolding that the RH is directly in relationship with. I recently outlined a quick rundown of this concept in the opening minutes of my last podcast with Jim O’Shaughnessy.
Finally- eight ideas that stood out.
Again, this isn’t a summary, just some resonant ideas and illustrations.

• Anger. This is one of the most strongly lateralised of all emotions, and it lateralises to the LH. “What is striking is that anger, irritability, and disgust stand out as the exceptions to right hemisphere dominance, fairly dependably lateralising to the left hemisphere.” Hence whenever I get angry, or see others getting angry, I almost invariably notice it’s a reaction to a threat to the individual ego. It is now a staggeringly useful tool for self-knowledge.
• Intuition and pattern recognition. Expert intuition can be incredibly powerful. After only a couple of seconds, chess Grandmasters can nearly perfectly memorize the location of pieces on board. But their advantage over non-experts disappears if the board layout is random and has no relationship to an actual game of chess. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow has always felt subtly wrong, so there’s a very satisfying critique in the book: “As far as ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinking goes, jumping to conclusions (LH) is fast, but so is flawless intuition (RH); following algorithms is slow (LH), but so, at least relatively speaking, is acting as devil’s advocate (RH).”
• Paradox. Often a paradox is a way of directly illustrating the tension between the two ways our brains view the world. As I tried to articulate in The Ship of Theseus, the idea is that seeing only the parts can blind you to a common sense appreciation of the whole.
• Cooperation and competition. The LH provides competition, the RH cooperation. “the right hemisphere is engaged in social bonding and empathy, the left hemisphere in social rivalry and self-regard.” That resistance is necessary for there to be creativity. “Resistance in nature is the cause of suffering, but, by the very same token, of creativity. According to Paul Cilliers, a philosopher of complex systems, ‘for self-organisation to take place, some form of competition is a requirement.’” Hence we need the resistance provided by the LH. The nuance, yet again, is the fact that competition works locally but cooperation works globally. It’s Right, Left, Right again.
• The immense power of myth, imagination and metaphor. McGilchrist repeatedly and adamantly emphasizes the power of implicit myth, metaphor, and imagination. It reaches back from abstract language to the world; it bridges the hemispheres. “It is metaphor alone (the word itself is a metaphor: it means one that ‘carries across’) that can carry us across the apparent gap between language and the real lived world. ‘The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor [a combiner of ideas]. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars’.- Aristotle”
• The dangers of following scientific orthodoxy. Well into the 1980s, human infants were operated on without anaesthetic. The scientific consensus was that they couldn’t feel pain because they couldn’t verbalize it. “Their screams were just the creakings of a machine.” We might be committing the same atrocity with other species due to a related flawed logic.
• Flow and boredom. In the LH existence, especially for schizophrenics, time gets sliced and loses its flow. One likened the experience to the movie Groundhog Day. As McGilchrist puts it “Life becomes lifeless – boring: a very modern concept (the word arose only in the eighteenth century, and is associated with a disengagement from the world which began with the Enlightenment). …. In contrast, in full RH engagement, “When you are properly in the flow you do not experience time passing because you are flowing with it. But it is there all the same in the flow.”
• Embodiment: As you may have read in my recent piece, embodiment seems like a critical missing piece for the rediscovery of our connection. It will not be surprising that it’s a RH trait. “It is widely accepted in clinical neurology that the right hemisphere is specialised for perception of the body… A meta-analysis shows that it is the right hemisphere that predominates in receivi