It would be even more accurate to say that the left brain sees only the tree that holds the fruit it intends to pluck, and indeed may well see only the individual fruit on the individual tree.Īnother metaphor that suggests itself is that the the left brain is the Catholic Inquisition insisting that the Sun must revolve about the Earth, because to affirm the opposite would be to abandon a venerable model of the cosmos on which much theology had been constructed whereas the right brain is Galileo, muttering E pur si muove ("And yet it moves") as he is ushered out of the theological court. One might say that the right brain sees the forest, and the left brain the trees. Since the left brain is much better at discarding details it considers to be irrelevant in order to avoid unnecessarily complicating the simplicity of its beloved models, it is entirely comfortable simply ignoring facts that are inconsistent with the models. As such, the left brain is rather in love with its models, and indeed seems to ascribe greater reality to the model than to the reality. It specializes in getting rid of extraneous detail in order to build simplified models of reality that can relatively quickly and easily provide useful heuristic predictions. As part of this task, the left brain is a model-builder par excellence. It's the big picture that concerns it: not the parts, but rather the whole that contains them.īy contrast, the left brain's function is to break reality down into its components, in order to more effectively discard that which is irrelevant to a given purpose and focus on that which 'matters'.
At the same time, the right brain doesn't bother itself overmuch about the details of the world.
ZEDENCA BARSOOM UPDATE
The right brain does not prioritize consistency: if new data presents itself that violates the existing model, the right brain will happily accept the novel datum and update the model. Thus, it is the right brain's function to maintain a coherent, large-scale, empirically driven, and accurate model of reality. The requirements of these two imperatives are mutually exclusive, and animal life has solved the seemingly irreconcilable by simply dividing the brain into two, giving each hemisphere primary responsibility for one of the tasks. Ignoring these details can leave one open to lethal threats or blind to life-changing opportunities. At the same time, all those parts of the world that are outside the current attentional focus can contain extremely important information - other sources of food, lurking predators, environmental threats, and potential mates. In other words, animals must sort through the vast array of sensory data collected from the phenomenal world, and identify sources of food, which they then must focus their attention and activity towards acquiring. This is probably due to a fundamental problem every animal has to face: as McGilchrist puts it, one must 'get without being got'.
Essentially every animal with a central nervous system demonstrates some degree of functional differentiation between the two halves of the brain. Hemispheric asymmetry seems to go back all the way to nematode worms. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, known for his earlier work The Master and His Emissary, in which he presented the evidence for a profound cognitive split between the modes of thought and domains of responsibility between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In the meantime, here are some of my thoughts on the subject, less a summary - which would be prohibitively difficult, there’s just too much there - and more riffing off of some of the implications.Ī rather fascinating and extraordinarily long volume recently came to my attention, The Matter With Things by Prof. Perhaps you might be interested to read it too.
ZEDENCA BARSOOM SERIES
Winston Smith over at Escaping Mass Psychosis recently published a piece on McGilchrist’s fascinating work, intended to be the first in a series that I for one, am looking forward to reading. Akshually, this isn’t a very good illustration of the real differences between the hemispheres, which have less to do with creativity vs logic and more to do with part vs whole.
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