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The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
In a book of unprecedented scope, Iain McGilchrist presents a fascinating exploration of the differences between the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and how those differences have affected society, history, and culture.
McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent research in neuroscience and psychology to reveal that the difference is profound: the left hemisphere is detail oriented, while the right has greater breadth, flexibility, and generosity. McGilchrist then takes the reader on a journey through the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought and belief of thinkers and artists from Aeschylus to Magritte.
Emisfero destro ed emisfero sinistro: una delle poche cose che tutti sanno è che il nostro cervello è anatomicamente diviso in due metà. Già gli antichi greci speculavano sulla possibile esistenza di un cervello bipartito, ma oggi siamo ormai al luogo comune, che tutti hanno sentito o letto da qualche parte, secondo il quale l'emisfero destro, quello "femminile", sarebbe adibito alla creatività e alla sensibilità, mentre quello sinistro, più "maschile", sarebbe predisposto alla logica e alla praticità: due modi inconciliabili di vedere il mondo. Ma qual è la vera natura di questa dicotomia? Quanto c'è di scientifico e quanto di impreciso o fuorviante? Lo psichiatra, neuroscienziato e studioso di letteratura Iain McGilchrist ha dedicato una vita di studi a questo problema, ricavandone una tesi tanto affascinante e profonda quanto rigorosa e solida, basata su un approccio interdisciplinare che spazia da Platone a Freud, da Shakespeare a Roger Sperry, neuroscienziato vincitore del Nobel per le sue ricerche sulla specializzazione emisferica. Secondo McGilchrist, ciascun emisfero decifra la medesima realtà in un modo coerente, ma incompatibile con quello dell'altro: l'emisfero destro fa esperienza del mondo nella sua interezza e complessità tralasciando i dettagli, mentre l'emisfero sinistro è analitico ma per forza di cose frammentario. Quale delle due modalità guida il nostro comportamento? In Il padrone e il suo emissario, McGilchrist racconta l'inevitabile lotta per il potere di cui i due emisferi sono protagonisti. I segni di questo confronto sono rintracciabili nella storia della nostra civiltà, e ancora ben visibili nei contrasti che animano la cultura occidentale contemporanea. Oggi, in un mondo sempre più disincarnato e dominato dalle tecnologie digitali, sembrerebbe che l'emisfero sinistro stia prendendo pericolosamente il sopravvento su quello destro, forse cambiando per sempre il nostro modo di pensare e di comprendere la realtà in cui viviamo.
McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent research in neuroscience and psychology to reveal that the difference is profound: the left hemisphere is detail oriented, while the right has greater breadth, flexibility, and generosity. McGilchrist then takes the reader on a journey through the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought and belief of thinkers and artists from Aeschylus to Magritte.
Emisfero destro ed emisfero sinistro: una delle poche cose che tutti sanno è che il nostro cervello è anatomicamente diviso in due metà. Già gli antichi greci speculavano sulla possibile esistenza di un cervello bipartito, ma oggi siamo ormai al luogo comune, che tutti hanno sentito o letto da qualche parte, secondo il quale l'emisfero destro, quello "femminile", sarebbe adibito alla creatività e alla sensibilità, mentre quello sinistro, più "maschile", sarebbe predisposto alla logica e alla praticità: due modi inconciliabili di vedere il mondo. Ma qual è la vera natura di questa dicotomia? Quanto c'è di scientifico e quanto di impreciso o fuorviante? Lo psichiatra, neuroscienziato e studioso di letteratura Iain McGilchrist ha dedicato una vita di studi a questo problema, ricavandone una tesi tanto affascinante e profonda quanto rigorosa e solida, basata su un approccio interdisciplinare che spazia da Platone a Freud, da Shakespeare a Roger Sperry, neuroscienziato vincitore del Nobel per le sue ricerche sulla specializzazione emisferica. Secondo McGilchrist, ciascun emisfero decifra la medesima realtà in un modo coerente, ma incompatibile con quello dell'altro: l'emisfero destro fa esperienza del mondo nella sua interezza e complessità tralasciando i dettagli, mentre l'emisfero sinistro è analitico ma per forza di cose frammentario. Quale delle due modalità guida il nostro comportamento? In Il padrone e il suo emissario, McGilchrist racconta l'inevitabile lotta per il potere di cui i due emisferi sono protagonisti. I segni di questo confronto sono rintracciabili nella storia della nostra civiltà, e ancora ben visibili nei contrasti che animano la cultura occidentale contemporanea. Oggi, in un mondo sempre più disincarnato e dominato dalle tecnologie digitali, sembrerebbe che l'emisfero sinistro stia prendendo pericolosamente il sopravvento su quello destro, forse cambiando per sempre il nostro modo di pensare e di comprendere la realtà in cui viviamo.
608 pages, Hardcover
First published October 30, 2009
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November 17, 2013
This will be a lengthy review, but no less than is deserved. You may even feel, after this review, that you have no need to read the book! This would be a mistake - all I am doing here is summarising in very broad terms, and giving some of my own thoughts on McGilchrist's opus.
This is certainly the most remarkable non-fiction book I have read this century. You know the 'diamond bullet' quote from Apocalypse Now? This book was like a machine gun firing diamond bullets, straight into my skull, thud-thud-thud. Though it is not without a few problems, which I will address a little further on.
Iain McGilchrist's thesis is that there are two fundamentally different ways of regarding the world, which have jostled for cultural domination throughout mankind's history; two 'ways of being' that correspond to two different types of attention that we give the world with our minds - and by a coincidence that he feels is too unlikely to be mere happenstance, the brains of complex organisms are divided into two halves, bridged by the corpus callosum, for no biologically useful reason that is immediately obvious - an argument might be made for redundancy, except that the experiences of stroke victims tell us otherwise.
McGilchrist offers a wealth of neuroscientific evidence that the evolutionary advantage of this divide is to maintain the separation between these two types of attention, and thereby enhance the extent to which they are separately empowered by their inability to interfere with each other; thereby giving us two ways of looking at the world, the interplay of which gives rise to our incredible creative power. He is well qualified to talk about this - as well as having taught English and Philosophy at Oxford University, he is also a former researcher in neuroimaging, consultant psychiatrist and clinical director, and the chapter on brain function - the lengthiest in the book - is backed by over 500 references to published research.
The two fundamentally different ways of regarding the world are not, as some people might initially assume, the socialism - capitalism divide, the mutual antipathy of which is described very aptly as "little more than a farmyard scrap between two dogs over a bone." McGilchrist sees the extremes of different types of economic organisation as all manifestations of the same way of looking at the world - that of the focussed attention of the left hemisphere, the model-builder, the manipulator, the game-player, which sees the world as an assemblage of parts that operate according to a set of rules.
The right hemisphere, by contrast, gives open, broad attention to the world, seeing it as a unified, living whole. It doesn't chop the experience of the senses into categories for processing - this is the job of the left hemisphere - but rather, remains unfocused and more aware of the whole rather than its components. To state McGilchrist's assertion in the most horribly over-simplified and reductive way that does no justice to the splendour of his book, you might say it appreciates beauty and intuition rather than message and process.
The Master and his Emissary is a polemical work. McGilchrist believes it is fairly evident that the culture of the western developed world is dominated to an undesirable degree by the left hemisphere, and that we have entered a phase of positive feedback in which this imbalance will continue to increase, to our detriment. The utilitarian (left-hemisphere) argument would point to things like mental health statistics, social breakdown, resource mismanagement and biodiversity loss that may adversely affect our own economic wellbeing. The right hemisphere would say - 'Anyone can see that this is just plain ugly'. The author clearly feels that right-hemisphere 'ways of being' need to be brought back into our world to a greater extent. As such this book may be seen by some readers - who choose to ignore McGilchrist's frequent reminders to the contrary - as a giant attack on rationality. But the fact that this book fights the case for more right-hemispheric intuition, empathy and sensitivity does not mean, as one review I have read rather snidely remarked, that McGilchrist wants us all to go back to living as simple-but-happy peasant subsistence farmers ruled over by slightly more left-hemispheric feudal overlords - which made me suspect the reviewer had skim-read the book or was being deliberately disingenuous.
The author himself admits that there is a gap between the reductionist scientific evidence he brings to the table regarding the function of the hemispheres, and the conclusions we might draw about the way they have influenced cultural development, and the implications for society. He freely admits that his conclusions are intuitive, requiring 'necessary distance' and 'unfocussed attention' to see them rather than a reductionist proof. He likens the process to looking at a piece of paper covered in dots, embedded in which is a picture of a dalmation - if you can see it, you know it is there, even though its form isn't clearly delimited. And if you simply focus on the individual dots you won't see it at all. My own take on this, is that where we are debating what's best for society, the individuals that comprise it, and the world we live in, we don't have the luxury of controlled double-blind trials. We don't have a spare planet and the luxury of a few centuries to try out different models of society, and we can't control all the variables. Imperfect evidence and a healthy dose of intuition are our only guides here.
I have in recent years read a number of books that illuminate and discuss the problems of modern society; but none that made sense of them as a unified whole in such a clear way as this book. It is a tremendously exciting read and one that caused me to experience many 'Yes!' moments of agreement and 'Aha!' moments of revelation. There is a danger, here, in that McGilchrist's model of hemispherically-based 'ways of being' is so seductive that it's tempting to start interpreting all sorts of spurious everyday events and experiences, and the behaviours of those around us, in terms of this model - "He/She's so left-hemispheric" could become a new insult in the mouths of people who subscribe to McGilchrist's thesis. Which isn't really what the author is aiming for, as this kind of 'dividing the world into two kinds of people' is exactly the sort of left-hemispheric behaviour he feels there's more than a bit too much of.
Now, on to the more problematic elements of his work, which I mentioned at the beginning. I want here to pre-empt some fairly obvious criticisms that I think people will have of this book.
First, religion. McGilchrist is manifestly not an unalloyed materialist in his personal philosophical approach to the world - he freely admits that he sees the purely mechanistic model of the world as a faith-based position like all other philosophies, and not a very appealing one at that. Anyone acquainted with scientific method, and possessing a modicum of philosophical sophistication, and who is honest with themselves, knows that try to reduce things as you may there always comes a point somewhere in your view of the world where you take things on trust, or faith, or belief - call it what you will. The only alternative is solipsism - denial that anything exists at all. So, the author feels that there is a place for reverence, awe and spirituality in our lives as a better alternative to cold, dead materialism devoid of meaning, even if we might not want to take an explicitly theist stance. With the current fashion in militant atheism, largely a counter-reaction to creationism and the I.D. movement in the U.S., this will make for uncomfortable reading and provoke more than a few knee-jerk reactions in people who would be the natural audience for this book. The writer points out that organised systems of religion with their rules and rituals are themselves constructions of the left hemisphere; but in the lengthy section of the book that deal with the cultural history of the west, scientific materialism (as a philosophical viewpoint, not scientific method, knowledge and application) takes a bit of a kicking, while religion seems to come off a bit lightly in comparison. Pretty much the only bad thing to have happened in the religious life of the west was the Reformation, it seems. Or at least, this is how it comes across - an apology for religion, if you will. I suspect McGilchrist would say that atrocities committed in the name of debased religion are no different to those committed in the name of anything else - and to be fair he doesn't harp on about how many millions were killed by atheist dictators either; his focus is solely on cultural contributions of the hemispheres. And he fastidiously avoids making personal statements of religious belief - one strongly suspects that he has religious or at least spiritual convictions, but he's not telling. Nonetheless, some people will fixate on this willingness to accept religion as a valid part of life and see it as throwing the entire edifice of his work into doubt. Such people could do with reminding that many scientists and thinkers of the past, whose work underpins our technologically advanced society, themselves held religious convictions, but that doesn't stop your light bulbs from working when you flick the switch.
Next, the mystique of the Orient. McGilchrist says at the outset that he does not intend to examine the cultural history of the orient due to a lack of familiarity, but towards the end of the book he expresses a belief that east asian cultures may have something to teach the West in terms of getting back in touch with our right hemispheres. His evidence for this seems a bit more specious than for the other 'science bits' of the book, and revolves around the greater ability of east asians to work together as a team, and their greater willingness to conform to the needs of their family, peer group or working unit - in other words, a less individualistic approach. They also exhibit a better ability than westerners to look at a picture and grasp the relationships between parts of the scene, whereas westerners tend to fixate on details of the 'subject' of the picture and tend not to remember what was happening in the background. I have read of similar research results elsewhere. But does this really mean they are more in touch with their right-hemispheres? I can't help thinking of the immense bureaucracy of medieval China, the rigid doctrines of Confuscianism, the closing of the Silk Road, and no shortage of totalitarian regimes or inhuman cruelty arising from a lack of empathy - all control-freak behaviours that McGilchrist has identified with an unchecked left-hemisphere. Might it not be the case that what the author has taken as evidence of greater right-hemisphere awareness is in fact evidence of greater left-hemisphere cultural priming for the acceptance of a more collective, socialist society rather than the west's greater emphasis on individualism? But no less mechanistic, materialist and rules-based?
For the record, I agree with McGilchrist that the West might learn something from the East, but in terms of getting the balance right between collective and individualist behaviour, which isn't necessarily the same thing as increased right hemispheric behaviour. However, it also seems to me that deciding where the best balance lies between these - which itself may vary dependant on the specifics of the moment - is an exercise for right-hemispheric intuition to resolve, so in a roundabout way maybe he's still correct.
Third - Africa. This is a book written from the perspective of a white European, and someone who takes pains not to express strong opinions on things he feels he knows nothing about; a commendable characteristic. But the lack of any comment whatsoever on native african and african american culture and its influence on the cultural history of the West will not go unnoticed in some quarters. In this, McGilchrist is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't, and he probably knows it. His dialogue is in terms of broad cultural epochs, not race; so it may not have occurred to him to go out of his way to discuss the impact of black culture. But even the fact that he might not feel it especially relevant is bound to upset someone. It could be worse, though - he may even be in the uncomfortable position of having nothing very flattering to say - he's clearly no cultural relativist - and this may wrongly be construed as racism. On a related note, he explicitly skirts the issue of gender differences in hemisphere function.
These difficulties aside, I think this is a truly marvellous book and definitely a book for our times, and deserves to be widely read and discussed. Read it, and you will, even if you disagree with the author's central thesis, be treated to some fascinating revelations from the world of neuroscience, and a lovely stroll through the history of language, art and philosophical thought. It will be roundly criticised by those of a strongly materialist bent, or those with dogmatically utilitarian political beliefs, who will deny the dalmation is there amidst the spots, or will simply declare, in their usual self-referential abdication of responsibility, that if the hemisphere correlation is true, then the left hemisphere has clearly already demonstrated its evolutionary superiority to the right. It will also, unfortunately, be used as a prop by all manner of charlatans peddling snake-oil, underwriting their product's efficacy by claiming that it 'taps into the latent power of the right hemisphere'. Or somesuch. But for some of us, at least, it will answer in a very lucid and convincing fashion, what is surely one of the most-asked questions of the 21st century: "Is it just me or is everything shit?" And more than this, it will offer an insight into what might be done about it.
This is certainly the most remarkable non-fiction book I have read this century. You know the 'diamond bullet' quote from Apocalypse Now? This book was like a machine gun firing diamond bullets, straight into my skull, thud-thud-thud. Though it is not without a few problems, which I will address a little further on.
Iain McGilchrist's thesis is that there are two fundamentally different ways of regarding the world, which have jostled for cultural domination throughout mankind's history; two 'ways of being' that correspond to two different types of attention that we give the world with our minds - and by a coincidence that he feels is too unlikely to be mere happenstance, the brains of complex organisms are divided into two halves, bridged by the corpus callosum, for no biologically useful reason that is immediately obvious - an argument might be made for redundancy, except that the experiences of stroke victims tell us otherwise.
McGilchrist offers a wealth of neuroscientific evidence that the evolutionary advantage of this divide is to maintain the separation between these two types of attention, and thereby enhance the extent to which they are separately empowered by their inability to interfere with each other; thereby giving us two ways of looking at the world, the interplay of which gives rise to our incredible creative power. He is well qualified to talk about this - as well as having taught English and Philosophy at Oxford University, he is also a former researcher in neuroimaging, consultant psychiatrist and clinical director, and the chapter on brain function - the lengthiest in the book - is backed by over 500 references to published research.
The two fundamentally different ways of regarding the world are not, as some people might initially assume, the socialism - capitalism divide, the mutual antipathy of which is described very aptly as "little more than a farmyard scrap between two dogs over a bone." McGilchrist sees the extremes of different types of economic organisation as all manifestations of the same way of looking at the world - that of the focussed attention of the left hemisphere, the model-builder, the manipulator, the game-player, which sees the world as an assemblage of parts that operate according to a set of rules.
The right hemisphere, by contrast, gives open, broad attention to the world, seeing it as a unified, living whole. It doesn't chop the experience of the senses into categories for processing - this is the job of the left hemisphere - but rather, remains unfocused and more aware of the whole rather than its components. To state McGilchrist's assertion in the most horribly over-simplified and reductive way that does no justice to the splendour of his book, you might say it appreciates beauty and intuition rather than message and process.
The Master and his Emissary is a polemical work. McGilchrist believes it is fairly evident that the culture of the western developed world is dominated to an undesirable degree by the left hemisphere, and that we have entered a phase of positive feedback in which this imbalance will continue to increase, to our detriment. The utilitarian (left-hemisphere) argument would point to things like mental health statistics, social breakdown, resource mismanagement and biodiversity loss that may adversely affect our own economic wellbeing. The right hemisphere would say - 'Anyone can see that this is just plain ugly'. The author clearly feels that right-hemisphere 'ways of being' need to be brought back into our world to a greater extent. As such this book may be seen by some readers - who choose to ignore McGilchrist's frequent reminders to the contrary - as a giant attack on rationality. But the fact that this book fights the case for more right-hemispheric intuition, empathy and sensitivity does not mean, as one review I have read rather snidely remarked, that McGilchrist wants us all to go back to living as simple-but-happy peasant subsistence farmers ruled over by slightly more left-hemispheric feudal overlords - which made me suspect the reviewer had skim-read the book or was being deliberately disingenuous.
The author himself admits that there is a gap between the reductionist scientific evidence he brings to the table regarding the function of the hemispheres, and the conclusions we might draw about the way they have influenced cultural development, and the implications for society. He freely admits that his conclusions are intuitive, requiring 'necessary distance' and 'unfocussed attention' to see them rather than a reductionist proof. He likens the process to looking at a piece of paper covered in dots, embedded in which is a picture of a dalmation - if you can see it, you know it is there, even though its form isn't clearly delimited. And if you simply focus on the individual dots you won't see it at all. My own take on this, is that where we are debating what's best for society, the individuals that comprise it, and the world we live in, we don't have the luxury of controlled double-blind trials. We don't have a spare planet and the luxury of a few centuries to try out different models of society, and we can't control all the variables. Imperfect evidence and a healthy dose of intuition are our only guides here.
I have in recent years read a number of books that illuminate and discuss the problems of modern society; but none that made sense of them as a unified whole in such a clear way as this book. It is a tremendously exciting read and one that caused me to experience many 'Yes!' moments of agreement and 'Aha!' moments of revelation. There is a danger, here, in that McGilchrist's model of hemispherically-based 'ways of being' is so seductive that it's tempting to start interpreting all sorts of spurious everyday events and experiences, and the behaviours of those around us, in terms of this model - "He/She's so left-hemispheric" could become a new insult in the mouths of people who subscribe to McGilchrist's thesis. Which isn't really what the author is aiming for, as this kind of 'dividing the world into two kinds of people' is exactly the sort of left-hemispheric behaviour he feels there's more than a bit too much of.
Now, on to the more problematic elements of his work, which I mentioned at the beginning. I want here to pre-empt some fairly obvious criticisms that I think people will have of this book.
First, religion. McGilchrist is manifestly not an unalloyed materialist in his personal philosophical approach to the world - he freely admits that he sees the purely mechanistic model of the world as a faith-based position like all other philosophies, and not a very appealing one at that. Anyone acquainted with scientific method, and possessing a modicum of philosophical sophistication, and who is honest with themselves, knows that try to reduce things as you may there always comes a point somewhere in your view of the world where you take things on trust, or faith, or belief - call it what you will. The only alternative is solipsism - denial that anything exists at all. So, the author feels that there is a place for reverence, awe and spirituality in our lives as a better alternative to cold, dead materialism devoid of meaning, even if we might not want to take an explicitly theist stance. With the current fashion in militant atheism, largely a counter-reaction to creationism and the I.D. movement in the U.S., this will make for uncomfortable reading and provoke more than a few knee-jerk reactions in people who would be the natural audience for this book. The writer points out that organised systems of religion with their rules and rituals are themselves constructions of the left hemisphere; but in the lengthy section of the book that deal with the cultural history of the west, scientific materialism (as a philosophical viewpoint, not scientific method, knowledge and application) takes a bit of a kicking, while religion seems to come off a bit lightly in comparison. Pretty much the only bad thing to have happened in the religious life of the west was the Reformation, it seems. Or at least, this is how it comes across - an apology for religion, if you will. I suspect McGilchrist would say that atrocities committed in the name of debased religion are no different to those committed in the name of anything else - and to be fair he doesn't harp on about how many millions were killed by atheist dictators either; his focus is solely on cultural contributions of the hemispheres. And he fastidiously avoids making personal statements of religious belief - one strongly suspects that he has religious or at least spiritual convictions, but he's not telling. Nonetheless, some people will fixate on this willingness to accept religion as a valid part of life and see it as throwing the entire edifice of his work into doubt. Such people could do with reminding that many scientists and thinkers of the past, whose work underpins our technologically advanced society, themselves held religious convictions, but that doesn't stop your light bulbs from working when you flick the switch.
Next, the mystique of the Orient. McGilchrist says at the outset that he does not intend to examine the cultural history of the orient due to a lack of familiarity, but towards the end of the book he expresses a belief that east asian cultures may have something to teach the West in terms of getting back in touch with our right hemispheres. His evidence for this seems a bit more specious than for the other 'science bits' of the book, and revolves around the greater ability of east asians to work together as a team, and their greater willingness to conform to the needs of their family, peer group or working unit - in other words, a less individualistic approach. They also exhibit a better ability than westerners to look at a picture and grasp the relationships between parts of the scene, whereas westerners tend to fixate on details of the 'subject' of the picture and tend not to remember what was happening in the background. I have read of similar research results elsewhere. But does this really mean they are more in touch with their right-hemispheres? I can't help thinking of the immense bureaucracy of medieval China, the rigid doctrines of Confuscianism, the closing of the Silk Road, and no shortage of totalitarian regimes or inhuman cruelty arising from a lack of empathy - all control-freak behaviours that McGilchrist has identified with an unchecked left-hemisphere. Might it not be the case that what the author has taken as evidence of greater right-hemisphere awareness is in fact evidence of greater left-hemisphere cultural priming for the acceptance of a more collective, socialist society rather than the west's greater emphasis on individualism? But no less mechanistic, materialist and rules-based?
For the record, I agree with McGilchrist that the West might learn something from the East, but in terms of getting the balance right between collective and individualist behaviour, which isn't necessarily the same thing as increased right hemispheric behaviour. However, it also seems to me that deciding where the best balance lies between these - which itself may vary dependant on the specifics of the moment - is an exercise for right-hemispheric intuition to resolve, so in a roundabout way maybe he's still correct.
Third - Africa. This is a book written from the perspective of a white European, and someone who takes pains not to express strong opinions on things he feels he knows nothing about; a commendable characteristic. But the lack of any comment whatsoever on native african and african american culture and its influence on the cultural history of the West will not go unnoticed in some quarters. In this, McGilchrist is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't, and he probably knows it. His dialogue is in terms of broad cultural epochs, not race; so it may not have occurred to him to go out of his way to discuss the impact of black culture. But even the fact that he might not feel it especially relevant is bound to upset someone. It could be worse, though - he may even be in the uncomfortable position of having nothing very flattering to say - he's clearly no cultural relativist - and this may wrongly be construed as racism. On a related note, he explicitly skirts the issue of gender differences in hemisphere function.
These difficulties aside, I think this is a truly marvellous book and definitely a book for our times, and deserves to be widely read and discussed. Read it, and you will, even if you disagree with the author's central thesis, be treated to some fascinating revelations from the world of neuroscience, and a lovely stroll through the history of language, art and philosophical thought. It will be roundly criticised by those of a strongly materialist bent, or those with dogmatically utilitarian political beliefs, who will deny the dalmation is there amidst the spots, or will simply declare, in their usual self-referential abdication of responsibility, that if the hemisphere correlation is true, then the left hemisphere has clearly already demonstrated its evolutionary superiority to the right. It will also, unfortunately, be used as a prop by all manner of charlatans peddling snake-oil, underwriting their product's efficacy by claiming that it 'taps into the latent power of the right hemisphere'. Or somesuch. But for some of us, at least, it will answer in a very lucid and convincing fashion, what is surely one of the most-asked questions of the 21st century: "Is it just me or is everything shit?" And more than this, it will offer an insight into what might be done about it.
October 5, 2010
I'm being a bit harsh giving this 3 stars because it is a really good book and everyone should read it. But there are inherent flaws on Iain's arguments that I cannot come to terms with. The first being that he treats the Right Brain as superior to the Left brain (the master and the emissary), which in itself is a hierarchical (left brain) way of thinking. Second, the author doesn't realize that religion is mostly left brain oriented. The inability of the left hemisphere to deal with uncertainty is the cause of all this God, karma, reincarnation hypothesis. The third and most important is the fact that the author doesn't warn about the right-brain impulsivities that plague most of the Eastern world. The herd mentality, the lack of individualism, the lack of introspection, the lack of proactiveness are all causes of a dominant right-hemisphere suppressing the left brain. And anyone who's lived in an eastern country (or even a small village) would immediately realize this.
So rather than giving the high-ground to one hemisphere, this book would've been so much better if it was balanced. Rather than a Master and an Emissary, it would've retained it's scientific touch (which it does so brilliantly in the first few chapters) if the story was about two masters, struggling, co-existing and co-inhabiting the brain.
So rather than giving the high-ground to one hemisphere, this book would've been so much better if it was balanced. Rather than a Master and an Emissary, it would've retained it's scientific touch (which it does so brilliantly in the first few chapters) if the story was about two masters, struggling, co-existing and co-inhabiting the brain.
July 4, 2011
1
It took McGilchrist 20 years to write.
From the author's website, http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/brief_... , comes a brief description of the book which you may be best to read first or only.
Now I was very sniffy about even picking this book up. The author had been doing the publicity tour and several people after about the five minutes or so minute interview they may have heard, were waxing lyrical to me about how a real scientist confirmed what the ancients have always known. Such knowledge often elevates the anti-rational, 'emotional' right hemisphere, aka 'the female side' or Yin principle, while dissing the unfeeling logical male left hemisphere. And so on. When I did pick the book up I was delighted to find him dismissing such nonsense in no uncertain terms, actually more ferociously than I ever have myself. So I read on.
McGilchrist has a compression of style which I like but demands attention and that tiresome, plodding thing called effort (such as an unfeeling rationalist may be able to give, unhindered by any feelings or imagination). He frequently raises topics and says he'll come back to them.
He begins by looking at brain functions in a quite straightforward way, not dissimilar to Damasio in approach. For me,who's been interested in neurophysiology most of my adult life. much of it is fascinating. Like Damasio too, he veers towards the view that emotion holds everything together, that social skills acquired early on in human evolution correlate with right hemisphere locations, as does music or the early articulation of a musical language; utterly contradicting pop psychology, he suggests that there is plenty of evidence that many aspects of high intelligence are found in the right hemisphere's 'how'. Good scientist that he is (I say 'scientist' but remember he is too a highly experienced psychiatrist and of that school which tends to psychiatry as a humanistic enterprise), he stresses the status of his provisional hypotheses or conclusions gleaned from evidence, and stresses too the limitation of models, including conceptual models, of course. What I particularly like is the growing feeling that he is moving towards an exploration of the crucial role of metaphor in culture and thinking generally, and in art, philosophy and science particularly.
I detect between the lines, and think it's not difficult to do, what I would call a naive cultural pessimism and things get worse as the book progresses. There are positions he takes or assumes which I think are not as transparent as he seems to think and I look forward to highlighting these in Part 2.I have made a shortish list of key questions which I shall have with me as I enter the main part of the book, something which I am very much looking forward to - partly because it is always worthwhile and interesting to see how a writer whom one respects relates to particular histories, philosophers and other key figures, as well as how the writer weaves together a coherent narrative - especially when it's something as big as the whole of human cultural evolution!
2 (up to the end of McGilchrist's Part 1)
This is hard work. Extremely dense but I think I'm coping. Is there anybody out there?
At best McGilchrist is bringing me excellent material on neuroscience. Sometimes I wish he'd stuck to that to make his case. He hasn't begun to suggest how brain and mind and culture relate together. (I most certainly hope he does not assume brain is the same as mind!) In fact, he's not making a case, he's constructing an argument, very much a Left Hemisphere (LH) activity, and he's doing it infuriatingly sloppily. Since he conflates reason/language'conceptual thinking with the LH which he is so definitely down upon, it is bizarre he has written such a long book depending on language, reason, sequential thinking. For him the Left Hemisphere is the usurper, the enemy of not only nature, art, religion, the body but of life itself. The LH offers only ghostly re-presentations of 'authentic' experience and, in its arrogance, believes its universe to be reality (whereas, of course, it is utterly separated from reality). Nowhere is there an acknowledgement of the immense philosophical difficulties that have saturated western thought regarding the ontologies of language, reason and thought. Instead we get a hotchpotch of his favourite artists, poets and philosophers as witnesses for his defence. If Heidegger, one of his favourites, or Goethe really have said it all before, why totally reframe it in neuroscience? He even, bizarrely, quotes a bit from one of the Upanishads about a bridge, which is supposed to be analogous to the corpus callossum's function between the brain hemispheres - keeping 'two worlds apart'.
He has a go at Damasio (see my review, Descartes' Error) whom he claims has 'far outstripped Descartes at his own game' in making reason the master, and the rest (feelings, body) servant (presumably with reference to the somatic marker hypothesis). Yet, again, I wonder how on earth can he have spent 20 years systemising his own hypothesis, mining the ideas of thinkers from centuries past, concluding that lnguage (equals rational thinking) is a closed, self-referential system that cannot break out of himself (a concession to postmodernism he is forced to make) while using that very same system himself to build his system? I mean, if his 'truth' comes from some transparent, intuitive right hemispherical revelation, why does he need to go around the houses looking for chunks of language to build his case brick by brick?
It may appear I'm not enjoying this much. Actually, I am for most of the time. McGilchrist seems unaware that it's ok to enjoy an aesthetic which is purely cerebral, more Bach than Wagner, more Apollo than Dionysus. There is a supreme joy in connectionism, the creative compounding of ideas, and actually his own writing at best is an example of this (presumably LH) aesthetic. As I said, he is clear (though I would think quite difficult for the novice) on neuroscience. In discussing a neurological correlation with the idea that consciousness is a 'canopy' that grows upwards from very deep, undivided brain structures before bifurcating (not totally, of course) at hemispherical level, he writes:
There are known to be highly complex, and complexly interconnected, cortico-subcortical loops involving the basal ganglia, deep-lying nuclei in the brain, way below the corpus callosum, which, as we understand more about them, we realise increasingly are involved, not just in motor co-ordination as we used to think, but in both the segregation and the integration of motor, affective and cognitive functions. These 'loops' underlie subtle, emotionally laden aspects of experience. Although the cognitive, motor and affective elements are carefully segregated, even within the subthalamic nuclei - relay centres that are minutes (only 5-155 mm in diameter) - they are equally carefully interconnected....
McGilchrist is concerned as here to explore, explain (and, dare one say, prescribe) processes of inhibition and facilitation neurocellular functioning in the status of integration or division; at a different level of his writing he employs logical reasoning to show how inhibition (e.g. of RH by LH) can be an example of integration (since division and unity can bring new unity, that is can be creative), but, to whet your appetite for the sort of writing you will encounter here:
It is not, per contra, true that out of the unity of division and unity a new division comes, nor is it true that out of the division of unity and division a new division comes...
I alluded above to the 'between the lines' cultural pessimism of McGilchrist. This is made explicit at times. He talks about 'meretricious' novelty or excitement seeking (of a left hemisphere cut off from authentic nature, life and so on, God presumably too). He talks about people (us) being dominated by the LH as a zombie 'whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.' The actual words he uses referring to my earlier paraphrase are: The history of the last 100 years particularly.... contains many examples of the left hemisphere's intemperate attacks on nature, art, religion... The Left Hemisphere is described here as an autonomous monster! An entity that would destroy us. The writer is part of a much broader tradition of cultural conservatism. There is far too much to say about this tradition here but I dare say I shall return to it.
There's quite a lot I have sympathy with in this work. I mean, as a lover of literature, I wouldn't be alone in mounting my own critique of society and culture. The difference is that McGilchrist is so dogmatically fixed into the vehicle of his exposition, so indignant, so sure he is an emissary from the halcyon cosmos that lies just over Sugarcandy Mountain. He has not, at this point of the book, realised that there are other frameworks that have grappled with his subject matter - and frameworks beyond the fine arts and fine ideas of philosophy. The fields of politics, economics, power, ideology and the psychoanalytic tradition (the latter a loose phrase; I'm thinking particularly of, though not necessarily endorsing, Marxist psychoanalysis and feminist psychoanalysis).
Questions I take with me into the remainder of the book include. Where does tribalism come from? What does anthropology (or neuroanthropology) have to teach us about the evolution of the western world? Why has there always been war and destruction? Exactly when was the golden age and what was it like and how do we know? What is the role of complexity theory in suggesting explanations for the emergence of human societies, interactions and globalism? Will McGilchrist share his secret of staying immune from the onslaughts of language, reason, modern culture and 'the left hemisphere's intemperate attacks'?
3
Professor McGilchrist answers some of my questions, or at least addresses them at the start of Part II of his book. It should be relatively downhill for the second half of the book consists of his survey of 2000 years or so of Western culture in support of his thesis. I look forward to this as it's always good to see the myriad patterns that emerge from any such survey. How wonderful individuality is in shaping the past, lives, history, whatever; how many stories will there be always to be told. It does strike me that pattern making may be, as well as a coherent RH process, a legitimate and pleasurable LH thing to do. I'm sure I'll pick up little fragments of knowledge along the way, references to writers or thinkers new to me, quotable quotes and so on. Bricoleur that I am I shall store these against my ruin, and even try to make some assemblage of them. Of course, ironising is close to ire, and a contemptuous sneer of LH quality, but then again, suggesting one's own interpretation of the world as just that rather than making it a most beautifully humble gift is also pretty arrogant: the clue is in the rhetoric.
He does, and I wish he emphasised this from the outset, make explicit the reciprocal relationship of culture and organism, long-term emergence and localised adaptation, and very lucidly shows how cultural transmission is so (I just know this is the wrong word) "efficient" (as well as influencing epigenetic factors involving the expression of genes). He acknowledges those other frames I mentioned earlier by which cultural history may be approached but doesn't really explain why, having dismissed them as too focused (missing the wood for the tress, as it were) his own approach is more freed to make an holistic overview. he comes very close, and this I find very easy to live with, to allowing us to live with the idea of the LH or the RH almost as anthropomorphisised entities, characterised by (deep) metaphor.
He ends the short Chapter 7 at the start of Part II, before getting stuck into "The Ancient World" with the provocative statement: In our contemporary world.... we are busy imitating machines.
Not that we are like machines, but we are machines. Earlier it was zombies, albeit happy ones, whistling as we walk towards the abyss. Who can save us?
4
As anticipated, the historical survey is 'easier going'. Not only that but extremely stimulating and well presented. The brief look at the introduction of the post-Socratic alphabet and use of currency in contexts of control, trade, power and wider historical developments is well done. the 'necessary distance' that, McGilchrist sees as crucial for being in the world (say in appreciating beauty, achieving empathy) is spelled out in terms of a period of harmony between the left and right hemispheres. It has now occurred to me that the writer may have been better advised in the earlier part of the book to emphasise the possibility that while the 'two worlds' of the hemisphere present a convenient fiction or metaphor, that a greater degree of relative closeness or distance between them would help his case. For instance, by his own painstaking arguments, the RH possesses its own 'syntax' (my word), language, cognition, and is not merely the passive recipient of 'experience' or 'perception' or 'presence': none of these things can be innocent or transparent. It may be better too, in terms of his central metaphor, to talk less, or imply less, absolute dominance of the (bad) LH or (good) RH, since it's likely that there are degrees of dominance. I would think that even the same individual can vary, voluntarily or unconsciously, modes of cognition and feeling depending upon context. T.S.Eliot, for instance was banker and poet.
5
No wonder the second part of the book was fast to read. It was virtually all familiar. His sermon during the opening pages of the final chapter could stand alone as ti gathers the predictions and analyses of many cultural pessimists. As the author says himself he will have failed if he has achieved clarity since that would be to betray him as a Left Hemisphere thinking. Oddly, he didn't begin to question his highly technological expert knowledge drawn from theory and the DSM (whose gargantuan taxonomy offered with no qualification as to its usefulness or uselessness) In particular, he seemed to me to hide behind his reader's ignorance to say the most alarming things about schizophrenia (which he was relating to 'culture' - you know, 'culture') given that it may cover a multidimensional cluster of affective disorders: some even think the term is more trouble than it's worth. But we are asked to judge an expert.
He's an expert on much. A whole paragraph on every art movement in 'modernism'. A complete paragraph given to cinema.
He gives less emphasis to political struggles. He ignores entirely the cultural works of the labouring classes, and elevates high culture in the forms of culture backed by Morality and Religion. He bemoans the loss through industrialism and urbanism of old social orders and hierarchies, talking of a 'breakdown' of 'the loss of a sense of belonging'. I would suggest that this was partly to do with nationalist wars, and with suffrage and the birth of socialism. I am not in the least surprised to have found myself thinking of Leavis and the Scrutiny movement.
'Post-modernism' (Post-modernism) is encapsulated in four and a half pages. If a concept can be demonised, this is it. Post-modern art is a bully, all about power, tries to intimidate its vulnerable audience.Then again, this syndrome is 'familiar to psychiatrist because of the way psychopaths use displays of a lack of feeling - a jokey, gamesy, but chilling indifference...'
The book is highly repetitive (and often it is angry posturing that is repeated), makes some interesting connections in the historical survey (but this is a highly selective survey designed to carry his ideological thrust), is interesting on brain structures -- although he has to concur at the end that even if future research doesn't support his correlative linkage between the two hemispheres, as metaphor of something like divided soul etc. will still hold - and then he's back to hundreds of years before 'neuro' had been coined!
The worst thing about this book is its almost innocent assumption that the brain is the mind.Human beings are encultured creatures, and the history and development of cultures is not something I think McGilchrist has even considered as having provided a very erudite and larned body of knowledge - let alone being able to contribute to that body. Incidentally, a book I received today, Aping Mankind: Neoromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity by Raymond Tallis says that McGilchrist's thesis 'represents Neuromania at its most extreme.'
It took McGilchrist 20 years to write.
From the author's website, http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/brief_... , comes a brief description of the book which you may be best to read first or only.
Now I was very sniffy about even picking this book up. The author had been doing the publicity tour and several people after about the five minutes or so minute interview they may have heard, were waxing lyrical to me about how a real scientist confirmed what the ancients have always known. Such knowledge often elevates the anti-rational, 'emotional' right hemisphere, aka 'the female side' or Yin principle, while dissing the unfeeling logical male left hemisphere. And so on. When I did pick the book up I was delighted to find him dismissing such nonsense in no uncertain terms, actually more ferociously than I ever have myself. So I read on.
McGilchrist has a compression of style which I like but demands attention and that tiresome, plodding thing called effort (such as an unfeeling rationalist may be able to give, unhindered by any feelings or imagination). He frequently raises topics and says he'll come back to them.
He begins by looking at brain functions in a quite straightforward way, not dissimilar to Damasio in approach. For me,who's been interested in neurophysiology most of my adult life. much of it is fascinating. Like Damasio too, he veers towards the view that emotion holds everything together, that social skills acquired early on in human evolution correlate with right hemisphere locations, as does music or the early articulation of a musical language; utterly contradicting pop psychology, he suggests that there is plenty of evidence that many aspects of high intelligence are found in the right hemisphere's 'how'. Good scientist that he is (I say 'scientist' but remember he is too a highly experienced psychiatrist and of that school which tends to psychiatry as a humanistic enterprise), he stresses the status of his provisional hypotheses or conclusions gleaned from evidence, and stresses too the limitation of models, including conceptual models, of course. What I particularly like is the growing feeling that he is moving towards an exploration of the crucial role of metaphor in culture and thinking generally, and in art, philosophy and science particularly.
I detect between the lines, and think it's not difficult to do, what I would call a naive cultural pessimism and things get worse as the book progresses. There are positions he takes or assumes which I think are not as transparent as he seems to think and I look forward to highlighting these in Part 2.I have made a shortish list of key questions which I shall have with me as I enter the main part of the book, something which I am very much looking forward to - partly because it is always worthwhile and interesting to see how a writer whom one respects relates to particular histories, philosophers and other key figures, as well as how the writer weaves together a coherent narrative - especially when it's something as big as the whole of human cultural evolution!
2 (up to the end of McGilchrist's Part 1)
This is hard work. Extremely dense but I think I'm coping. Is there anybody out there?
At best McGilchrist is bringing me excellent material on neuroscience. Sometimes I wish he'd stuck to that to make his case. He hasn't begun to suggest how brain and mind and culture relate together. (I most certainly hope he does not assume brain is the same as mind!) In fact, he's not making a case, he's constructing an argument, very much a Left Hemisphere (LH) activity, and he's doing it infuriatingly sloppily. Since he conflates reason/language'conceptual thinking with the LH which he is so definitely down upon, it is bizarre he has written such a long book depending on language, reason, sequential thinking. For him the Left Hemisphere is the usurper, the enemy of not only nature, art, religion, the body but of life itself. The LH offers only ghostly re-presentations of 'authentic' experience and, in its arrogance, believes its universe to be reality (whereas, of course, it is utterly separated from reality). Nowhere is there an acknowledgement of the immense philosophical difficulties that have saturated western thought regarding the ontologies of language, reason and thought. Instead we get a hotchpotch of his favourite artists, poets and philosophers as witnesses for his defence. If Heidegger, one of his favourites, or Goethe really have said it all before, why totally reframe it in neuroscience? He even, bizarrely, quotes a bit from one of the Upanishads about a bridge, which is supposed to be analogous to the corpus callossum's function between the brain hemispheres - keeping 'two worlds apart'.
He has a go at Damasio (see my review, Descartes' Error) whom he claims has 'far outstripped Descartes at his own game' in making reason the master, and the rest (feelings, body) servant (presumably with reference to the somatic marker hypothesis). Yet, again, I wonder how on earth can he have spent 20 years systemising his own hypothesis, mining the ideas of thinkers from centuries past, concluding that lnguage (equals rational thinking) is a closed, self-referential system that cannot break out of himself (a concession to postmodernism he is forced to make) while using that very same system himself to build his system? I mean, if his 'truth' comes from some transparent, intuitive right hemispherical revelation, why does he need to go around the houses looking for chunks of language to build his case brick by brick?
It may appear I'm not enjoying this much. Actually, I am for most of the time. McGilchrist seems unaware that it's ok to enjoy an aesthetic which is purely cerebral, more Bach than Wagner, more Apollo than Dionysus. There is a supreme joy in connectionism, the creative compounding of ideas, and actually his own writing at best is an example of this (presumably LH) aesthetic. As I said, he is clear (though I would think quite difficult for the novice) on neuroscience. In discussing a neurological correlation with the idea that consciousness is a 'canopy' that grows upwards from very deep, undivided brain structures before bifurcating (not totally, of course) at hemispherical level, he writes:
There are known to be highly complex, and complexly interconnected, cortico-subcortical loops involving the basal ganglia, deep-lying nuclei in the brain, way below the corpus callosum, which, as we understand more about them, we realise increasingly are involved, not just in motor co-ordination as we used to think, but in both the segregation and the integration of motor, affective and cognitive functions. These 'loops' underlie subtle, emotionally laden aspects of experience. Although the cognitive, motor and affective elements are carefully segregated, even within the subthalamic nuclei - relay centres that are minutes (only 5-155 mm in diameter) - they are equally carefully interconnected....
McGilchrist is concerned as here to explore, explain (and, dare one say, prescribe) processes of inhibition and facilitation neurocellular functioning in the status of integration or division; at a different level of his writing he employs logical reasoning to show how inhibition (e.g. of RH by LH) can be an example of integration (since division and unity can bring new unity, that is can be creative), but, to whet your appetite for the sort of writing you will encounter here:
It is not, per contra, true that out of the unity of division and unity a new division comes, nor is it true that out of the division of unity and division a new division comes...
I alluded above to the 'between the lines' cultural pessimism of McGilchrist. This is made explicit at times. He talks about 'meretricious' novelty or excitement seeking (of a left hemisphere cut off from authentic nature, life and so on, God presumably too). He talks about people (us) being dominated by the LH as a zombie 'whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.' The actual words he uses referring to my earlier paraphrase are: The history of the last 100 years particularly.... contains many examples of the left hemisphere's intemperate attacks on nature, art, religion... The Left Hemisphere is described here as an autonomous monster! An entity that would destroy us. The writer is part of a much broader tradition of cultural conservatism. There is far too much to say about this tradition here but I dare say I shall return to it.
There's quite a lot I have sympathy with in this work. I mean, as a lover of literature, I wouldn't be alone in mounting my own critique of society and culture. The difference is that McGilchrist is so dogmatically fixed into the vehicle of his exposition, so indignant, so sure he is an emissary from the halcyon cosmos that lies just over Sugarcandy Mountain. He has not, at this point of the book, realised that there are other frameworks that have grappled with his subject matter - and frameworks beyond the fine arts and fine ideas of philosophy. The fields of politics, economics, power, ideology and the psychoanalytic tradition (the latter a loose phrase; I'm thinking particularly of, though not necessarily endorsing, Marxist psychoanalysis and feminist psychoanalysis).
Questions I take with me into the remainder of the book include. Where does tribalism come from? What does anthropology (or neuroanthropology) have to teach us about the evolution of the western world? Why has there always been war and destruction? Exactly when was the golden age and what was it like and how do we know? What is the role of complexity theory in suggesting explanations for the emergence of human societies, interactions and globalism? Will McGilchrist share his secret of staying immune from the onslaughts of language, reason, modern culture and 'the left hemisphere's intemperate attacks'?
3
Professor McGilchrist answers some of my questions, or at least addresses them at the start of Part II of his book. It should be relatively downhill for the second half of the book consists of his survey of 2000 years or so of Western culture in support of his thesis. I look forward to this as it's always good to see the myriad patterns that emerge from any such survey. How wonderful individuality is in shaping the past, lives, history, whatever; how many stories will there be always to be told. It does strike me that pattern making may be, as well as a coherent RH process, a legitimate and pleasurable LH thing to do. I'm sure I'll pick up little fragments of knowledge along the way, references to writers or thinkers new to me, quotable quotes and so on. Bricoleur that I am I shall store these against my ruin, and even try to make some assemblage of them. Of course, ironising is close to ire, and a contemptuous sneer of LH quality, but then again, suggesting one's own interpretation of the world as just that rather than making it a most beautifully humble gift is also pretty arrogant: the clue is in the rhetoric.
He does, and I wish he emphasised this from the outset, make explicit the reciprocal relationship of culture and organism, long-term emergence and localised adaptation, and very lucidly shows how cultural transmission is so (I just know this is the wrong word) "efficient" (as well as influencing epigenetic factors involving the expression of genes). He acknowledges those other frames I mentioned earlier by which cultural history may be approached but doesn't really explain why, having dismissed them as too focused (missing the wood for the tress, as it were) his own approach is more freed to make an holistic overview. he comes very close, and this I find very easy to live with, to allowing us to live with the idea of the LH or the RH almost as anthropomorphisised entities, characterised by (deep) metaphor.
He ends the short Chapter 7 at the start of Part II, before getting stuck into "The Ancient World" with the provocative statement: In our contemporary world.... we are busy imitating machines.
Not that we are like machines, but we are machines. Earlier it was zombies, albeit happy ones, whistling as we walk towards the abyss. Who can save us?
4
As anticipated, the historical survey is 'easier going'. Not only that but extremely stimulating and well presented. The brief look at the introduction of the post-Socratic alphabet and use of currency in contexts of control, trade, power and wider historical developments is well done. the 'necessary distance' that, McGilchrist sees as crucial for being in the world (say in appreciating beauty, achieving empathy) is spelled out in terms of a period of harmony between the left and right hemispheres. It has now occurred to me that the writer may have been better advised in the earlier part of the book to emphasise the possibility that while the 'two worlds' of the hemisphere present a convenient fiction or metaphor, that a greater degree of relative closeness or distance between them would help his case. For instance, by his own painstaking arguments, the RH possesses its own 'syntax' (my word), language, cognition, and is not merely the passive recipient of 'experience' or 'perception' or 'presence': none of these things can be innocent or transparent. It may be better too, in terms of his central metaphor, to talk less, or imply less, absolute dominance of the (bad) LH or (good) RH, since it's likely that there are degrees of dominance. I would think that even the same individual can vary, voluntarily or unconsciously, modes of cognition and feeling depending upon context. T.S.Eliot, for instance was banker and poet.
5
No wonder the second part of the book was fast to read. It was virtually all familiar. His sermon during the opening pages of the final chapter could stand alone as ti gathers the predictions and analyses of many cultural pessimists. As the author says himself he will have failed if he has achieved clarity since that would be to betray him as a Left Hemisphere thinking. Oddly, he didn't begin to question his highly technological expert knowledge drawn from theory and the DSM (whose gargantuan taxonomy offered with no qualification as to its usefulness or uselessness) In particular, he seemed to me to hide behind his reader's ignorance to say the most alarming things about schizophrenia (which he was relating to 'culture' - you know, 'culture') given that it may cover a multidimensional cluster of affective disorders: some even think the term is more trouble than it's worth. But we are asked to judge an expert.
He's an expert on much. A whole paragraph on every art movement in 'modernism'. A complete paragraph given to cinema.
He gives less emphasis to political struggles. He ignores entirely the cultural works of the labouring classes, and elevates high culture in the forms of culture backed by Morality and Religion. He bemoans the loss through industrialism and urbanism of old social orders and hierarchies, talking of a 'breakdown' of 'the loss of a sense of belonging'. I would suggest that this was partly to do with nationalist wars, and with suffrage and the birth of socialism. I am not in the least surprised to have found myself thinking of Leavis and the Scrutiny movement.
'Post-modernism' (Post-modernism) is encapsulated in four and a half pages. If a concept can be demonised, this is it. Post-modern art is a bully, all about power, tries to intimidate its vulnerable audience.Then again, this syndrome is 'familiar to psychiatrist because of the way psychopaths use displays of a lack of feeling - a jokey, gamesy, but chilling indifference...'
The book is highly repetitive (and often it is angry posturing that is repeated), makes some interesting connections in the historical survey (but this is a highly selective survey designed to carry his ideological thrust), is interesting on brain structures -- although he has to concur at the end that even if future research doesn't support his correlative linkage between the two hemispheres, as metaphor of something like divided soul etc. will still hold - and then he's back to hundreds of years before 'neuro' had been coined!
The worst thing about this book is its almost innocent assumption that the brain is the mind.Human beings are encultured creatures, and the history and development of cultures is not something I think McGilchrist has even considered as having provided a very erudite and larned body of knowledge - let alone being able to contribute to that body. Incidentally, a book I received today, Aping Mankind: Neoromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity by Raymond Tallis says that McGilchrist's thesis 'represents Neuromania at its most extreme.'
September 18, 2022
Close to the end of this book, Iain McGilchrist is dissing an inferior bard when he quips (paraphrased) ‘their borrowings made the book sparkle like a magpies nest’.
McGilchrist took 20 years to research this book.
The sheer volume of absolutely marvelous source material make it shimmer like an angels tapestry. Reading McGilchrist is like listening to a preternaturally talented D.J. of wisdom. He’s a scholar’s scholar.
This book feels cherry picked from the lords orchard.
If heaven has a library, this book reads like its Cliffs Notes.
The Master and His Emissary is McGilchrist’s staggeringly brilliant tour de force treatise on…
Well…
So much that it is kind of ridiculous to try to summarize it in a few paragraphs.
But here goes.
The main hypothesis of the book has to do with left/right brain hemispheric lateralization, and the differences in function, perception and world view that each respective hemisphere engenders.
If you’re already circumspect.
You’re not alone.
McGilchrist himself is quick to acknowledge just how very fraught this particular subject is, considering the amount of pop psychology ballyhoo that it has received.
Early discoveries regarding differences in left/right brain hemisphere function were some of the first neuroscience findings to become popularized.
Beginning around 1980, it became common to hear stuff like “I’m a real right brain thinker” which probably meant they were a hippy artist or something, as opposed to a “left brain thinker” which probably referred to a square who had good credit and could do math and that kind of stuff.
After a while the whole left/right brain thing became cringey and tired as fuck, and as such, incredibly uncool for any serious thinker to entertain.
McGilchrist admits that he was concerned this book would equate to career suicide. But that the subject matter was ultimately too compelling to ignore.
McGilchrist acknowledges that many of the counter arguments debunking the bogus popular misnomers regarding brain lateralization were accurate. But that the baby got chucked out with the bath water, and that there is real validity and use value to investigating and understanding the differences in hemispheric function.
McGilchrist acknowledges that “the whole brain does what the whole brain does”. And that equating a given brain function to a specific structure is overly simple.
However, McGilchrist additionally argues that denying that there are important differences between hemispheric functions is equally simplistic.
McGilchrist ponders, why would the brain have two hemispheres, which are asymmetrical in healthy humans, if these hemispheres didn’t have any meaningful differences in functionality? And then continues to argue the point via an exhaustive review of the neuroscience.
McGilchrist validates the popular notion that the right hemisphere facilitates a holistic, feeling, intuitive outlook, and the left hemisphere facilitates a reductive, verbal, logical and linear outlook.
However, contrary to popular ideas, McGilchrist asserts that the right hemisphere is actually dominant (the master), and the left hemisphere plays a more supportive (emissarial) role.
McGilchrist states that the right brain scans the whole environment for danger (as do prey animals), and the left brain locks on to a target (as do predators).
McGilchrist hypothesizes that the science and technology driven culture of the west is dominated by the left hemisphere (reductionistic, predatory) modality, and has been so successful, that it threatens to eclipse the right brain holistic/humanistic way of being and seeing altogether.
And according to McGilchrist, that’s why we’re all about to drown in a hot pool of flaming trash. Because it just wouldn’t be one of these kinda books if it didn’t evoke the threat of apocalyptic climate change.
And absolutely rightly so.
Anyway…
There’s just far too much detail to appropriately summarize in this venue.
But suffice it to say, McGilchrist can really turn a phrase in the service of making a very VERY compelling argument.
In fact the most staggeringly brilliant thing about this staggeringly brilliant book is the staggeringly brilliant McGilchrist himself. Who literally couldn’t be more wise, witty and authentically erudite (in the very best sense).
The book continues (on and on and on) with sprawling, wonderful, thought provoking, facile discussions on science, philosophy, music, poetry, art, history, politics, and more.
So much more.
I could go on and on.
But suffice it to say.
I just fucking love this guy so much.
McGilchrist is a fucking mesmerizing wizard of a human.
And I fucking LOVE this fucking book!
It’s a treasure
A wonder even.
I savored the experience of reading it.
I went to sleep thinking about it.
And I woke up still thinking about it.
I feel like a different person after reading it.
5/5 ⭐️
McGilchrist took 20 years to research this book.
The sheer volume of absolutely marvelous source material make it shimmer like an angels tapestry. Reading McGilchrist is like listening to a preternaturally talented D.J. of wisdom. He’s a scholar’s scholar.
This book feels cherry picked from the lords orchard.
If heaven has a library, this book reads like its Cliffs Notes.
The Master and His Emissary is McGilchrist’s staggeringly brilliant tour de force treatise on…
Well…
So much that it is kind of ridiculous to try to summarize it in a few paragraphs.
But here goes.
The main hypothesis of the book has to do with left/right brain hemispheric lateralization, and the differences in function, perception and world view that each respective hemisphere engenders.
If you’re already circumspect.
You’re not alone.
McGilchrist himself is quick to acknowledge just how very fraught this particular subject is, considering the amount of pop psychology ballyhoo that it has received.
Early discoveries regarding differences in left/right brain hemisphere function were some of the first neuroscience findings to become popularized.
Beginning around 1980, it became common to hear stuff like “I’m a real right brain thinker” which probably meant they were a hippy artist or something, as opposed to a “left brain thinker” which probably referred to a square who had good credit and could do math and that kind of stuff.
After a while the whole left/right brain thing became cringey and tired as fuck, and as such, incredibly uncool for any serious thinker to entertain.
McGilchrist admits that he was concerned this book would equate to career suicide. But that the subject matter was ultimately too compelling to ignore.
McGilchrist acknowledges that many of the counter arguments debunking the bogus popular misnomers regarding brain lateralization were accurate. But that the baby got chucked out with the bath water, and that there is real validity and use value to investigating and understanding the differences in hemispheric function.
McGilchrist acknowledges that “the whole brain does what the whole brain does”. And that equating a given brain function to a specific structure is overly simple.
However, McGilchrist additionally argues that denying that there are important differences between hemispheric functions is equally simplistic.
McGilchrist ponders, why would the brain have two hemispheres, which are asymmetrical in healthy humans, if these hemispheres didn’t have any meaningful differences in functionality? And then continues to argue the point via an exhaustive review of the neuroscience.
McGilchrist validates the popular notion that the right hemisphere facilitates a holistic, feeling, intuitive outlook, and the left hemisphere facilitates a reductive, verbal, logical and linear outlook.
However, contrary to popular ideas, McGilchrist asserts that the right hemisphere is actually dominant (the master), and the left hemisphere plays a more supportive (emissarial) role.
McGilchrist states that the right brain scans the whole environment for danger (as do prey animals), and the left brain locks on to a target (as do predators).
McGilchrist hypothesizes that the science and technology driven culture of the west is dominated by the left hemisphere (reductionistic, predatory) modality, and has been so successful, that it threatens to eclipse the right brain holistic/humanistic way of being and seeing altogether.
And according to McGilchrist, that’s why we’re all about to drown in a hot pool of flaming trash. Because it just wouldn’t be one of these kinda books if it didn’t evoke the threat of apocalyptic climate change.
And absolutely rightly so.
Anyway…
There’s just far too much detail to appropriately summarize in this venue.
But suffice it to say, McGilchrist can really turn a phrase in the service of making a very VERY compelling argument.
In fact the most staggeringly brilliant thing about this staggeringly brilliant book is the staggeringly brilliant McGilchrist himself. Who literally couldn’t be more wise, witty and authentically erudite (in the very best sense).
The book continues (on and on and on) with sprawling, wonderful, thought provoking, facile discussions on science, philosophy, music, poetry, art, history, politics, and more.
So much more.
I could go on and on.
But suffice it to say.
I just fucking love this guy so much.
McGilchrist is a fucking mesmerizing wizard of a human.
And I fucking LOVE this fucking book!
It’s a treasure
A wonder even.
I savored the experience of reading it.
I went to sleep thinking about it.
And I woke up still thinking about it.
I feel like a different person after reading it.
5/5 ⭐️
February 22, 2010
Ian McGilchrist's thick book on the "divided brain" is the most interesting book I've read this year. I'd come to regard the fabled right brain/left brain antithesis as so much entertaining pop psychology (e.g., Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind) — handy for provoking corporate robots, but hardly more than a convenient fiction. McGilchrist has convinced me that it's a metaphor worth taking seriously, that in fact it may be the fundamental metaphor for a scientistic age.
McGilchrist's thesis is simple: the right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master" of his title) provides our primary connection to the world – to whatever is outside ourselves; the left hemisphere is its Emissary, breaking wholes into parts, analyzing and abstracting, devising categories, names and theories, then returning the results of its investigations to the right brain to be integrated into lived experience. The health of both individuals and civilizations depends upon the reciprocal connection. The problem is that the left brain, which imagines it "knows" things it can't possibly know, usurps its role and projects its own partial, definite vision of the world onto the world's essentially ambiguous reality.
Stated simply (and the above is my own wording for McGilchrist's argument) I risk making the book sound as if it was written by a crank with an overweening metaphor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book, which begins by examining a huge range of neurological research on the brain, then examines how the structure of the brain has affected (nothing less than!) the history of Western civilization, is continuously fascinating, rich in detail and bold in observation. Both its science and practice of philosophy are exemplary. McGilchrist takes almost 500 pages to build his case. Fortunately, he's an engaging and unpretentious writer.
His argument reminded me of some of the most stimulating books I've ever read. A short list of ideational echoes: James Hillman's discussion of "seeing through" in Revisioning Psychology; Owen Barfield's examination of polarity in the evolution of consciousness in What Coleridge Thought; F S C Northrup's study of the Aesthetic and Theoretic components in The Meeting of East and West; Paul Ricoeur's theory of "second naivete" in The Symbolism of Evil; and Colin Falck's post-structuralist approach to literary language in Myth, Truth and Literature. Each of these books is a touchstone to me, and each is illuminated by McGilchrist's speculations.
At the same time, McGilchrist's discussion and bibliography pointed me to books I'd never heard of and now can't wait to read: Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism; Stephen Gaukroger's The Emergence of a Scientific Culture; and Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image. I realize this review doesn't do much more than emphasize my own enthusiasm – but for the curious reader, maybe that will suffice.
McGilchrist's thesis is simple: the right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master" of his title) provides our primary connection to the world – to whatever is outside ourselves; the left hemisphere is its Emissary, breaking wholes into parts, analyzing and abstracting, devising categories, names and theories, then returning the results of its investigations to the right brain to be integrated into lived experience. The health of both individuals and civilizations depends upon the reciprocal connection. The problem is that the left brain, which imagines it "knows" things it can't possibly know, usurps its role and projects its own partial, definite vision of the world onto the world's essentially ambiguous reality.
Stated simply (and the above is my own wording for McGilchrist's argument) I risk making the book sound as if it was written by a crank with an overweening metaphor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book, which begins by examining a huge range of neurological research on the brain, then examines how the structure of the brain has affected (nothing less than!) the history of Western civilization, is continuously fascinating, rich in detail and bold in observation. Both its science and practice of philosophy are exemplary. McGilchrist takes almost 500 pages to build his case. Fortunately, he's an engaging and unpretentious writer.
His argument reminded me of some of the most stimulating books I've ever read. A short list of ideational echoes: James Hillman's discussion of "seeing through" in Revisioning Psychology; Owen Barfield's examination of polarity in the evolution of consciousness in What Coleridge Thought; F S C Northrup's study of the Aesthetic and Theoretic components in The Meeting of East and West; Paul Ricoeur's theory of "second naivete" in The Symbolism of Evil; and Colin Falck's post-structuralist approach to literary language in Myth, Truth and Literature. Each of these books is a touchstone to me, and each is illuminated by McGilchrist's speculations.
At the same time, McGilchrist's discussion and bibliography pointed me to books I'd never heard of and now can't wait to read: Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism; Stephen Gaukroger's The Emergence of a Scientific Culture; and Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image. I realize this review doesn't do much more than emphasize my own enthusiasm – but for the curious reader, maybe that will suffice.
Read
June 4, 2015I find it impossible to rate this book. The author is astonishingly erudite, and this book must be the culmination of a lifetime of research and study. The problem with the book is not just that it’s difficult and dense, but, more importantly, that it’s difficult to put the pieces together and get a coherent picture. McGilchrist is making an enormous claim, and he has written a magnum opus to prove it. The individual chapters offer amazing information and insight into not just brain and neurology, but history, arts, linguistic, philosophy, and psychology. But once you finish the book, you ask yourself: Am I now convinced that the differences in the two brain hemispheres can explain the course that Western world has taken over the past 500 years? I’m not sure you can answer that question with a resounding yes.
McGilchrist warns in the introduction of the book against the popular simplifications that the left hemisphere is hardnosed, logical, realistic, and boring (and male!), and the right hemisphere is creative and exciting (and female!). But once he proceeds with the long and detailed explanation of the differences between the hemispheres and their functions and the way they interpret the world, you feel like he ends up proving the same things that he had warned against as being misconceptions. Regardless – the first half of the book is a fascinating study of the brain. What he wants to prove is that even though the right hemisphere has a clear primacy in understanding the world, the left hemisphere has been more and more triumphant in dictating its picture of the world.
The second half get into social sciences and tries to find and provide evidence for the aforementioned claim, and attempts to explain the more recent Western history based on the hemispheric differences. This is where it gets murky, and you feel that McGilchrist is turning from a scientist into a scientist with an agenda. There are so many questions that arise here. How did the left hemisphere suddenly become triumphant? Are we undergoing rapid changes in our brain structure? How do you prove a causal relationship between the course of history and the hemispheric differences? What if history and culture have taken a turn to the “ways of the left hemisphere” for completely other reasons? What does it even mean that now arts and culture are more influenced by the left hemisphere?
The book is definitely a masterpiece – even though you can end up thinking that the author is too smart for his own good. This wasn’t an easy read. I tried reading it by the pool once. I felt ridiculous and put it away.
McGilchrist warns in the introduction of the book against the popular simplifications that the left hemisphere is hardnosed, logical, realistic, and boring (and male!), and the right hemisphere is creative and exciting (and female!). But once he proceeds with the long and detailed explanation of the differences between the hemispheres and their functions and the way they interpret the world, you feel like he ends up proving the same things that he had warned against as being misconceptions. Regardless – the first half of the book is a fascinating study of the brain. What he wants to prove is that even though the right hemisphere has a clear primacy in understanding the world, the left hemisphere has been more and more triumphant in dictating its picture of the world.
The second half get into social sciences and tries to find and provide evidence for the aforementioned claim, and attempts to explain the more recent Western history based on the hemispheric differences. This is where it gets murky, and you feel that McGilchrist is turning from a scientist into a scientist with an agenda. There are so many questions that arise here. How did the left hemisphere suddenly become triumphant? Are we undergoing rapid changes in our brain structure? How do you prove a causal relationship between the course of history and the hemispheric differences? What if history and culture have taken a turn to the “ways of the left hemisphere” for completely other reasons? What does it even mean that now arts and culture are more influenced by the left hemisphere?
The book is definitely a masterpiece – even though you can end up thinking that the author is too smart for his own good. This wasn’t an easy read. I tried reading it by the pool once. I felt ridiculous and put it away.
November 1, 2018
2/10. A terrible book which could be profitably, and with little loss, compressed from its current 600-page bloat to no more than the 40 or 60 pages of a short thesis, and even more profitably then have its thesis inverted. I save the appellation 'truly terrible', which I don't believe I've used before, to denote that if someone were to write the exact inverse of this book - interpreting opposite to the author in a framework inverted from that present - that someone would probably have a four-star work. It's confusing and a bit hard to mark down as a 'one', when everything is got so wrong that you just have to read the opposite to get some right. The work is tedious, and tediously written, to boot.
I'll start out by saying the author denies both the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle /explicitly/, and seems to deny the law of identity around page 285 implicitly. With that as a given, how he expects to write anything (serendipitously, he's not exactly true to his denials so the work is still 'readable' in a very loose sense) is beyond me. I think he'd accuse me of 'rationalism' (meant as a slur) for thinking so, and for hewing absolutely to all three of the classical laws of thought. He blames non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle for the ills of modernity and the mental illness of schizophrenia both!
The author rambles and rambles, repeats himself ad nauseam (many entire passages of significant length are repeated verbatim or almost so passim), draws untenable conclusions, and contradicts himself in numerous ways (first he attributes an attribute to X, then to Y, then its opposite to X, and then muffins and rhubarb to Y), rendering his entire presentation solipsistic - the work is at core extremely anti-rational and anti-language (!) and the author is attempting to use (semi-)reasoned linguistic argument to convince his readers that reason is useless (except for manipulating sets of self-referential symbols in internally consistent systems - and technology!), in fact evil, and is a betrayal of 'real, authentic, and intuitive' human nature which he spares no word or expense in incessantly bolstering and promoting.
The book is actually two books. Book I is unconventional neuropsychology. Book II is a work of amateur historiography and social criticism with only minor links to Book I, which exists solely to attempt to establish the meaningfulness and truth of the author's diminution of reason and language in favor of immediate intuition, haziness, mystery-mongering, etc. - to reason and language unfettered he attributes all of the ills of the world in Book II. And even then he's not very convincing, with a deficient grasp of the history he interprets.
There needs to be a warning on the cover that 'this book contains poetry', and a good hundred-page chunk of Book II is nothing but art, art criticism, art interpretation, etc. of poetry and painting mainly which I had to cursorily skim at best, technically putting this in to the category of 'DNF' - 'did not finish'.
Modernist and Postmodernist in varying compositions to the core, every cliche of those philosophies and the search for 'authenticity' are on brazenly naked display here. Further, McGilchrist is a complete relativist, but repeatedly puts the disclaimer, 'just because there's more than one mutually inconsistent truth' or 'just because truth is not unitary does not mean "anything goes" and any meaning whatsoever can be attributed to [whatever he's talking about]', but never shows how this could possibly be true beyond the repeated assertions. 'Mutually inconsistent truth' renders meaningless either consistency or truth. Or both.
Everything is twisted to fit the needs of the author at the moment, and then untwisted or retwisted as the need arises. The author refuses to make value judgements on every third page, with the entire book being one massive value judgement - that sort of thing, along with inconsistent assumptions and attributions of lateralized function in the service of 'whatever makes the right hemisphere look good' (add a dose of handwavium: the author reifies the hemispheres, and then emotionally attributes or predicates of them as if the right hemisphere were his friend and the left his enemy and he were writing an almost-pathological polemic... it makes no sense to reify brain structures in such a way and then predicate ethically and emotionally of them).
The author would defend all of this by declaiming that he's trying to express something which 'can not be expressed in language', attempts at which - along with using reason to frame language - again, the author decries as the ultimate bete noire of all the evils of modernity.
It is partially redeemed by (1) the inclusion of some important and interesting facts which are, however, interpreted incorrectly and set within an utterly untrue, incoherent, inconsistent, and self-referential (the author decries this on every page, ironically) framework, and (2) the concluding chapter, 'The Master Betrayed', which would be better set to print as a separate work after being shrove of its connections to the author's theory of brain lateralization and its meaning for history.
The inclusion of important and interesting facts (no matter how badly and destructively interpreted, and how nonsensically, the facts still can theoretically stand on their own and be placed in to a more congenial setting), and the concluding essay, which is probably stronger than I admit (since it's at the end of the book, and I'm so fed up with it - bordering on disgusted - by reaching the end, you could stick a masterwork there and I'd likely give it a middling review) saves it - I think - from a truly one-star or rating. I'll give it two of ten, but in the five-star system it resolves to 'one' anyways - call it a 'high one'. The book reminds me in all the wrong ways of 'The Devil's Pleasure Palace' but with a good deal more factual information scattered throughout and a scientific veneer.
I'll start out by saying the author denies both the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle /explicitly/, and seems to deny the law of identity around page 285 implicitly. With that as a given, how he expects to write anything (serendipitously, he's not exactly true to his denials so the work is still 'readable' in a very loose sense) is beyond me. I think he'd accuse me of 'rationalism' (meant as a slur) for thinking so, and for hewing absolutely to all three of the classical laws of thought. He blames non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle for the ills of modernity and the mental illness of schizophrenia both!
The author rambles and rambles, repeats himself ad nauseam (many entire passages of significant length are repeated verbatim or almost so passim), draws untenable conclusions, and contradicts himself in numerous ways (first he attributes an attribute to X, then to Y, then its opposite to X, and then muffins and rhubarb to Y), rendering his entire presentation solipsistic - the work is at core extremely anti-rational and anti-language (!) and the author is attempting to use (semi-)reasoned linguistic argument to convince his readers that reason is useless (except for manipulating sets of self-referential symbols in internally consistent systems - and technology!), in fact evil, and is a betrayal of 'real, authentic, and intuitive' human nature which he spares no word or expense in incessantly bolstering and promoting.
The book is actually two books. Book I is unconventional neuropsychology. Book II is a work of amateur historiography and social criticism with only minor links to Book I, which exists solely to attempt to establish the meaningfulness and truth of the author's diminution of reason and language in favor of immediate intuition, haziness, mystery-mongering, etc. - to reason and language unfettered he attributes all of the ills of the world in Book II. And even then he's not very convincing, with a deficient grasp of the history he interprets.
There needs to be a warning on the cover that 'this book contains poetry', and a good hundred-page chunk of Book II is nothing but art, art criticism, art interpretation, etc. of poetry and painting mainly which I had to cursorily skim at best, technically putting this in to the category of 'DNF' - 'did not finish'.
Modernist and Postmodernist in varying compositions to the core, every cliche of those philosophies and the search for 'authenticity' are on brazenly naked display here. Further, McGilchrist is a complete relativist, but repeatedly puts the disclaimer, 'just because there's more than one mutually inconsistent truth' or 'just because truth is not unitary does not mean "anything goes" and any meaning whatsoever can be attributed to [whatever he's talking about]', but never shows how this could possibly be true beyond the repeated assertions. 'Mutually inconsistent truth' renders meaningless either consistency or truth. Or both.
Everything is twisted to fit the needs of the author at the moment, and then untwisted or retwisted as the need arises. The author refuses to make value judgements on every third page, with the entire book being one massive value judgement - that sort of thing, along with inconsistent assumptions and attributions of lateralized function in the service of 'whatever makes the right hemisphere look good' (add a dose of handwavium: the author reifies the hemispheres, and then emotionally attributes or predicates of them as if the right hemisphere were his friend and the left his enemy and he were writing an almost-pathological polemic... it makes no sense to reify brain structures in such a way and then predicate ethically and emotionally of them).
The author would defend all of this by declaiming that he's trying to express something which 'can not be expressed in language', attempts at which - along with using reason to frame language - again, the author decries as the ultimate bete noire of all the evils of modernity.
It is partially redeemed by (1) the inclusion of some important and interesting facts which are, however, interpreted incorrectly and set within an utterly untrue, incoherent, inconsistent, and self-referential (the author decries this on every page, ironically) framework, and (2) the concluding chapter, 'The Master Betrayed', which would be better set to print as a separate work after being shrove of its connections to the author's theory of brain lateralization and its meaning for history.
The inclusion of important and interesting facts (no matter how badly and destructively interpreted, and how nonsensically, the facts still can theoretically stand on their own and be placed in to a more congenial setting), and the concluding essay, which is probably stronger than I admit (since it's at the end of the book, and I'm so fed up with it - bordering on disgusted - by reaching the end, you could stick a masterwork there and I'd likely give it a middling review) saves it - I think - from a truly one-star or rating. I'll give it two of ten, but in the five-star system it resolves to 'one' anyways - call it a 'high one'. The book reminds me in all the wrong ways of 'The Devil's Pleasure Palace' but with a good deal more factual information scattered throughout and a scientific veneer.
Shelved as 'dnf'
February 23, 2018I quit at 46% (which is actually 2/3 of the way through as the ebook finished at 68%) and watched the crib notes
Very well written, thoroughly researched, but I found it a drag read.
Very well written, thoroughly researched, but I found it a drag read.
June 10, 2016
Note to self: The first chapters are a real slog to get through, with a litany of neurobiological and psychological differences between the left and right hemispheres, but after McGilchrist sets down all the facts as he found them, it's a fascinating read. Though he repeatedly cautions the reader that the hemispheric differences are not to be considered absolute in any way (as they depend on each other and we are almost always using both hemispheres in our day-to-day lives), his book ironically reinforces the folk psychology view of the brain in terms of right and left. But then that's a infinitesimally minor issue. His sheer erudition is simply mesmerizing and what I often appreciate about erudite minds is that they approach problems carefully, tentatively, allowing for fuzzy boundaries and uncertainties, the way, say, Wittgenstein approaches philosophical problems, or Montaigne ruminates on various issues of how to live life better, or my translation theorist hero Douglas Robinson compares the act of translation to spirit channeling (which would be, in McGilchrist's terms, left hemisphere trying to describe a right hemisphere activity). In other words, McGilchrist is subtle and expansive and enlightening and—most importantly—anti-dogmatic. The huge takeaway from this book is that we have two diametrically opposed modes of living and looking at the world, represented by our different brain hemispheres. Our LH likes to look at the world and ourselves as machines (epitomized by scientific materialism a la Daniel Dennett and the other three Horsemen of new atheism), but the problem is that the metaphors we use to describe/understand something alters the nature of what we are looking at and what we eventually find from it. So if we think of the world as a huge machine, then we will only see the machine-like aspects of the world (helped by what psychologists call confirmation bias, theory-blindness, and self-fulfilling prophecy). On the other hand, the RH way of looking at the world is, familiarly enough, holistic, contextual, interdependent, and—dare I say this?—spiritual (as opposed to serial, isolated, linear, & mechanistic). It's always reaching out for the Other, seeking what lies beyond the literal. Metaphor is key here, and the crucial thing about this mode of living/seeing the world is that it needs to remain implicit & intuitive (just try explaining a joke or a metaphor without killing it) in order for it to function well. So what happens when LH tries to explain this thing that it doesn't understand? It kills it. RH is concerned with reciprocity, holiness, relationships, contexts, individuals, concreteness, etc. while LH is all about competition, control, power, acquisition, abstraction, overconfidence, and, of course, UTILITY. For LH, everything—altruism, artwork, religion, creativity, food, etc.—is reducible to utility. How do you get people to meditate? You tell them 15 minutes of daily meditation will decrease the risk of heart attack by so-and-so percent. Utility. How do you sell artworks? You tell them their relaxation effects will help them get through a nerve-wrecking business meeting.
Basically, this book put into words everything I've felt wrong about our over-reliance on science (you can smell the reek of dogmatic condescension when you hear people categorically dismiss any "unscientific" phenomena with an air of epistemological superiority). Atheism, to me at least, misses the point (it's not whether God exists—a factual claim I really don't care to argue about—but HOW you see the world and live your life. It's your disposition toward the world we're talking about when we talk about spirituality and religion and belief (but alas, LH, being literal, doesn't understand the difference). I for one wouldn't want to live in a mechanistic world drained of mystery and wonder). I've always admired Wittgenstein, not only for his way of thinking, but also for his passionate yearning to believe in something larger than himself despite being unable to do so (too much philosophizing/LH thinking hampers RH activity; rationality kills faith, as it did for me in college).
Once I realized that the scientific view is just that, a view and not THE view (clarity is not a degree of perception but a type of knowledge), and that the metaphors we use and the attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of what we are looking at, then all my intuitions and impulses and instincts I couldn't really verbalize (because they probably came from my RH self, which has a poor vocabulary and not so adept at language and expressing itself, and because it's in their nature to remain implicit) made A WHOLE LOT OF sense.
Cool facts I learned (notes):
-music as the precursor of language, acting as a way of uniting social groups
-LH sees a whole made up of aggregate parts, while RH sees a whole as a whole (seeing individuals as belonging in a contextual whole, an aggregate from which they are not divided)
-LH as an interpreter and confabulator who needs to be certain and right.
-Altruism as a necessary consequence of empathy
-"We can never make others understand something unless they already, at some level, understand it" (p.153)
-"How we see the world alters not just others, but who we are" (p.167)
-Clarity as a type of knowledge (p.182)
-"We do not see paintings, as much as see according to them...We are aware of them but see through them, see the world according to them" (p.183)
-paradox as a way to truth (p.200)
-imitation vs. copying: "...imitation is imagination's most powerful path into whatever is Other than ourselves" (p.248); the superiority of an imitation gene over other genes that code for a trait that happens to enhance the likelihood for survival (pp.251-256)
-the change in the direction of writing from vertical to horizontal (LH likes horizontal lines) and right-to-left to left-to-right, a shift favoring LH processing
-3 kinds of remembering: 1) remembering the long perspective of the historical past; 2) a projection forward to a time when you can see yourself retrospectively through the eyes of others after you are dead; and 3) the remembrance of your own past and its losses (p.302)
-longing vs. wanting (longing happens between us and another thing, a desire for re-union; wanting is unidirectional, clear)
-"The world is not a brute fact but, like a myth of metaphor, semi-transparent, containing all its meaning within itself, yet pointing to something lying beyond itself" (p.312)
-LH's either/or thinking vs. RH's metaphorical thinking at work in iconoclastic reasoning during the Reformation: "Either the statue is God or it is a thing since it is 'obviously' not God, it must be a thing, and therefore 'mere wood,' in which case it has no place in worship. To see that 'mere' wood can partake of the divine requires seeing it as a metaphor, and being able to see that, precisely because it is a metaphor rather than a representation, it is itself divine. It is not just something non-divine representing the divine, it is something divine" (p.316)
-2 types of union/division: 1) LH: "there is at one level the part of fragment, and, at the other, the generalized abstraction, aggregated from the parts"; and 2) RH: "there is the individual entity in all its distinctness, at one level, and the whole to which it belongs, at the other." RH can deal with specificity/particularities as well as wholes
-communion vs. agency (David Bakan): "Agency manifests itself in isolation, alienation, and aloneness: communion in contact, openness and union. Agency manifests itself in the urge to master: communion in non-contractual co-operation" (p.321)
-rationality vs. reason. Rationality can't ground itself according to its own principles of proof. The value of rationality has to come from outside itself (Godel, Escher, etc.). Reason: "flexible, resisting fixed formulation, shaped by experience, and involving the whole living being"; Rationality: "rigitd, rarefied, mechanical, governed by explicit laws" (p.330)
-"We are, and outght to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us" (p.356)
-"We rush to the meaning too quickly in its subject matter...: (p.373)
-fancy vs. imagination / novelty vs. newness: fantasy "presents something novel in the place of the too familiar thing, and imagination clears away everything between us and the not familiar enough thing so that we see it itself, new, as it is." (374); or "Newness (seeing afresh what one thought of as familiar, as though for the first time) and novelty (deliberately disturbing the representation of reality in an attempt to 'shock' oneself into something that feels unfamiliar)" (412)
-the mythos of science: 1) myth of the sovereignty of the scientific method (vs. tinkering); 2) science as above morality coupled with the idea that it's the only sure foundation for decency and morality (history of its harm to humans notwithstanding); 3) myth of its brave stand against the forces of dogma (blind to its own dogmatism?)
-"straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends" (p. 387 -Delacroix)
-the story about a Benedictine monastery in South France. With their usual daily sleep of 4 hours and relentless work, all the monks were exhausted and sick until they were allowed to chant (p.417)
-RH and LH in conversation: "One says 'I do not know,' the other 'I know—that there is nothing to know.' One believes that one cannot know: the other 'knows' that one cannot believe." (427)
-RH's way: The RH's "disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with 'care') towards something which it knows is beyond itself. It tries to open itself (not to say 'no') to something that language can allow only by subterfuge, to something that reason can reach only in transcending itself; not, be it noted, by the abandonment of language and reason, but through and beyond them. (p.427)
-happiness in the developed countries is best predicted by "the breadth and depth of one's social connections" (435)
-How we moderns see ourselves: "We now see ourselves in largely mechanistic terms, as happiness-maximizing machines, and not very successful ones at that" (436)
-"We might have to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently—and may indeed be seeing less than they did" (461)
Basically, this book put into words everything I've felt wrong about our over-reliance on science (you can smell the reek of dogmatic condescension when you hear people categorically dismiss any "unscientific" phenomena with an air of epistemological superiority). Atheism, to me at least, misses the point (it's not whether God exists—a factual claim I really don't care to argue about—but HOW you see the world and live your life. It's your disposition toward the world we're talking about when we talk about spirituality and religion and belief (but alas, LH, being literal, doesn't understand the difference). I for one wouldn't want to live in a mechanistic world drained of mystery and wonder). I've always admired Wittgenstein, not only for his way of thinking, but also for his passionate yearning to believe in something larger than himself despite being unable to do so (too much philosophizing/LH thinking hampers RH activity; rationality kills faith, as it did for me in college).
Once I realized that the scientific view is just that, a view and not THE view (clarity is not a degree of perception but a type of knowledge), and that the metaphors we use and the attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of what we are looking at, then all my intuitions and impulses and instincts I couldn't really verbalize (because they probably came from my RH self, which has a poor vocabulary and not so adept at language and expressing itself, and because it's in their nature to remain implicit) made A WHOLE LOT OF sense.
Cool facts I learned (notes):
-music as the precursor of language, acting as a way of uniting social groups
-LH sees a whole made up of aggregate parts, while RH sees a whole as a whole (seeing individuals as belonging in a contextual whole, an aggregate from which they are not divided)
-LH as an interpreter and confabulator who needs to be certain and right.
-Altruism as a necessary consequence of empathy
-"We can never make others understand something unless they already, at some level, understand it" (p.153)
-"How we see the world alters not just others, but who we are" (p.167)
-Clarity as a type of knowledge (p.182)
-"We do not see paintings, as much as see according to them...We are aware of them but see through them, see the world according to them" (p.183)
-paradox as a way to truth (p.200)
-imitation vs. copying: "...imitation is imagination's most powerful path into whatever is Other than ourselves" (p.248); the superiority of an imitation gene over other genes that code for a trait that happens to enhance the likelihood for survival (pp.251-256)
-the change in the direction of writing from vertical to horizontal (LH likes horizontal lines) and right-to-left to left-to-right, a shift favoring LH processing
-3 kinds of remembering: 1) remembering the long perspective of the historical past; 2) a projection forward to a time when you can see yourself retrospectively through the eyes of others after you are dead; and 3) the remembrance of your own past and its losses (p.302)
-longing vs. wanting (longing happens between us and another thing, a desire for re-union; wanting is unidirectional, clear)
-"The world is not a brute fact but, like a myth of metaphor, semi-transparent, containing all its meaning within itself, yet pointing to something lying beyond itself" (p.312)
-LH's either/or thinking vs. RH's metaphorical thinking at work in iconoclastic reasoning during the Reformation: "Either the statue is God or it is a thing since it is 'obviously' not God, it must be a thing, and therefore 'mere wood,' in which case it has no place in worship. To see that 'mere' wood can partake of the divine requires seeing it as a metaphor, and being able to see that, precisely because it is a metaphor rather than a representation, it is itself divine. It is not just something non-divine representing the divine, it is something divine" (p.316)
-2 types of union/division: 1) LH: "there is at one level the part of fragment, and, at the other, the generalized abstraction, aggregated from the parts"; and 2) RH: "there is the individual entity in all its distinctness, at one level, and the whole to which it belongs, at the other." RH can deal with specificity/particularities as well as wholes
-communion vs. agency (David Bakan): "Agency manifests itself in isolation, alienation, and aloneness: communion in contact, openness and union. Agency manifests itself in the urge to master: communion in non-contractual co-operation" (p.321)
-rationality vs. reason. Rationality can't ground itself according to its own principles of proof. The value of rationality has to come from outside itself (Godel, Escher, etc.). Reason: "flexible, resisting fixed formulation, shaped by experience, and involving the whole living being"; Rationality: "rigitd, rarefied, mechanical, governed by explicit laws" (p.330)
-"We are, and outght to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us" (p.356)
-"We rush to the meaning too quickly in its subject matter...: (p.373)
-fancy vs. imagination / novelty vs. newness: fantasy "presents something novel in the place of the too familiar thing, and imagination clears away everything between us and the not familiar enough thing so that we see it itself, new, as it is." (374); or "Newness (seeing afresh what one thought of as familiar, as though for the first time) and novelty (deliberately disturbing the representation of reality in an attempt to 'shock' oneself into something that feels unfamiliar)" (412)
-the mythos of science: 1) myth of the sovereignty of the scientific method (vs. tinkering); 2) science as above morality coupled with the idea that it's the only sure foundation for decency and morality (history of its harm to humans notwithstanding); 3) myth of its brave stand against the forces of dogma (blind to its own dogmatism?)
-"straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends" (p. 387 -Delacroix)
-the story about a Benedictine monastery in South France. With their usual daily sleep of 4 hours and relentless work, all the monks were exhausted and sick until they were allowed to chant (p.417)
-RH and LH in conversation: "One says 'I do not know,' the other 'I know—that there is nothing to know.' One believes that one cannot know: the other 'knows' that one cannot believe." (427)
-RH's way: The RH's "disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with 'care') towards something which it knows is beyond itself. It tries to open itself (not to say 'no') to something that language can allow only by subterfuge, to something that reason can reach only in transcending itself; not, be it noted, by the abandonment of language and reason, but through and beyond them. (p.427)
-happiness in the developed countries is best predicted by "the breadth and depth of one's social connections" (435)
-How we moderns see ourselves: "We now see ourselves in largely mechanistic terms, as happiness-maximizing machines, and not very successful ones at that" (436)
-"We might have to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently—and may indeed be seeing less than they did" (461)
December 16, 2021
‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’ (the last line from the movie ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’). It doesn’t really matter if the metaphor (the legend) is scientific, what really matters if you learn and grow from it as I did with this book. This book is flawed but it can be liberating for those who strongly fit into his main metaphor and no longer feel the need to justify themselves to the world because they can now say “that’s just the way I am and I’ve got the metaphor to prove it!”.
The book does at times get ahead of its own metaphor especially in the second part. In order to not be offended by the generalities in the second part of this book it’s best to imagine that you are listening to a Great Course Lecture on the history of Western civilization with bifocal lens which only distinguish between two ways of seeing the world: one abstractly the other concretely, the left/right brain metaphor.
Of course, the author has more complexity than just that. He dissects the lateralization of the brain through multiple attributes and usually dichotomizes traits or states of being for how one lives in the world. It was really easy to follow his narrative especially since for me no matter how he would characterize his attributes with his thirty or so dichotomies my dominating characteristic was always of the left, so I would always know which attribute laid on which side of the brain just by asking which was dominant within me.
All of the dichotomies can flow from whether or not one tends to see the world abstractly as units of translational symmetries that are invariant to a host of transformations (left brain), or whether one sees the world concretely and holistically by synthesizing a whole from parts and experiencing the parts as the sum of a whole such that the parts are more than the sum of the whole (right brain).
The author in the first part of the book will almost always put autism as a deficit of some right brain attribute. He also states some mumbo jumbo about ‘theory of mind’ and autistics (neuro-diverse) have a deficit in mind reading, lack an ability to understand face movements and eye gestures, possess social awkwardness and lack ‘empathy’. Though, I think it’s just as easy to state that autistics are very strong left brain and have a propensity for seeing the world predominately with left hemisphere attributes and they don’t fall for the misdirection inherent in social interactions by deceptive face movements or eye gestures from those who want to dominant every situation while they (neuro-typicals) principally appeal to mythos and pathos through using feelings, intuitions, imaginations and misdirection rather than relying on logos. It’s possible in some diagnosed autistics they are just incredibly strong left brain and not autistic at all.
The author asks Heidegger’s favorite question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and applies it to the brain and its lateralization. He’ll say that the right brain is the master and the left brain re-presents what the right gives it and that between the two hemispheres what goes on is a master/slave relationship in the style of Hegel. Two of my top five favorite books are by either Hegel or Heidegger and each is a major character for this author and Heidegger for him is his protagonist in this book.
The author mentioned that both Nietzsche and Heidegger acknowledge a world without a meta-narrative which means that the world does not have a narrative about the narrative and the author notes that they are only observing not prescribing. In the terms of the book, the left hemisphere creates the facts about the world, pretends it has certainty, while the right hemisphere provides the meaning to the facts and creates the meta-narrative. (The author does point out that there is a story teller within the left hemisphere as well but of a different kind).
The author does slip into pseudo-scientific Freudian/Jungian mumbo jumbo from time to time by over relying on unconscious behavior determining who we are by using functional archetypes. Also, he will unconvincingly invert Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” to explain parts of what he’s trying to get at; I would say an inversion of pseudo-science is still pseudo-science. He’ll explain anorexia, schizophrenia, autism, and other DSM worthy diagnosis by simply explaining them as deficits of the right hemisphere, forgetting how humans can be complex, need context, history and relativity in order to make worthwhile conclusion.
The author probably mentions about a hundred different philosophers and how they fit into his overall theory. Usually, when that many different philosophers are brought up the author is just dropping names. I didn’t think that with this author because the author was able to put them into his narrative and couple them to his metaphor. Immanuel Kant takes space, time and causality out of the world and gives us intuition, imagination and the transcendental deduction (all right brain using this author’s metaphor); Henri Bergson cries out for ‘creative evolution’ (by all means read the Nobel Prize winning author Bergson and his book ‘Creative Evolution’, it is well worthwhile) and ‘lived time’, more right brain way of thinking.
There’s one book this author didn’t mention, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. That book speaks about a ‘body without an organ’, that would include the left brain in this author’s metaphor and they put schizophrenia (the micro way of seeing the world, according to them, and the micro definitely would be within the left brain according to this author), and they would say that it is really the schizoid who is sane in this insane world and that the macro way of seeing (the right brain according to this author) leads to paranoia and fascism. This author puts fascism in the left not the right. It’s always possible to take a metaphor too far.
The author will say that left brain people are individualistic and the right brain people are more cooperative and he cites the Japanese as right brain people and Americans as left brain. The author has the right brain enslave the left and makes the individualistic left part of the right’s cooperative whole and takes his right/left brain metaphor to explain the sum of the parts of the brain as a whole. One does not need to accept all of the author’s uses of his metaphor in order appreciate this book. There’s a book that explains this part of his story better than this book does; it’s called “How Emotions are Made’ by Barrett and tells a similar story by having our emotions controlling our body budget by desiring homeostasis, and in this author’s metaphor the emotions would be of the right brain. It’s more complex than I’m letting on but this book and Barrett’s book complement each other to a large degree.
I’m glad this book was fairly successful. It has a lot to offer. It’s flawed on many different levels and a lot of the statements the author makes are problematic to say the least. Overall, his major metaphor (backed by science, nevertheless) is an incredibly profitable way to look at the world. I seldom have found a book where an author is covering as many philosophers and thinkers, and I, the most critical critic, didn’t find fault with his interpretations. That in itself makes this a very good book! Oh yeah, the author definitely prefers the right brain interpretation for the world and thinks the left brain people need to change.
The book does at times get ahead of its own metaphor especially in the second part. In order to not be offended by the generalities in the second part of this book it’s best to imagine that you are listening to a Great Course Lecture on the history of Western civilization with bifocal lens which only distinguish between two ways of seeing the world: one abstractly the other concretely, the left/right brain metaphor.
Of course, the author has more complexity than just that. He dissects the lateralization of the brain through multiple attributes and usually dichotomizes traits or states of being for how one lives in the world. It was really easy to follow his narrative especially since for me no matter how he would characterize his attributes with his thirty or so dichotomies my dominating characteristic was always of the left, so I would always know which attribute laid on which side of the brain just by asking which was dominant within me.
All of the dichotomies can flow from whether or not one tends to see the world abstractly as units of translational symmetries that are invariant to a host of transformations (left brain), or whether one sees the world concretely and holistically by synthesizing a whole from parts and experiencing the parts as the sum of a whole such that the parts are more than the sum of the whole (right brain).
The author in the first part of the book will almost always put autism as a deficit of some right brain attribute. He also states some mumbo jumbo about ‘theory of mind’ and autistics (neuro-diverse) have a deficit in mind reading, lack an ability to understand face movements and eye gestures, possess social awkwardness and lack ‘empathy’. Though, I think it’s just as easy to state that autistics are very strong left brain and have a propensity for seeing the world predominately with left hemisphere attributes and they don’t fall for the misdirection inherent in social interactions by deceptive face movements or eye gestures from those who want to dominant every situation while they (neuro-typicals) principally appeal to mythos and pathos through using feelings, intuitions, imaginations and misdirection rather than relying on logos. It’s possible in some diagnosed autistics they are just incredibly strong left brain and not autistic at all.
The author asks Heidegger’s favorite question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and applies it to the brain and its lateralization. He’ll say that the right brain is the master and the left brain re-presents what the right gives it and that between the two hemispheres what goes on is a master/slave relationship in the style of Hegel. Two of my top five favorite books are by either Hegel or Heidegger and each is a major character for this author and Heidegger for him is his protagonist in this book.
The author mentioned that both Nietzsche and Heidegger acknowledge a world without a meta-narrative which means that the world does not have a narrative about the narrative and the author notes that they are only observing not prescribing. In the terms of the book, the left hemisphere creates the facts about the world, pretends it has certainty, while the right hemisphere provides the meaning to the facts and creates the meta-narrative. (The author does point out that there is a story teller within the left hemisphere as well but of a different kind).
The author does slip into pseudo-scientific Freudian/Jungian mumbo jumbo from time to time by over relying on unconscious behavior determining who we are by using functional archetypes. Also, he will unconvincingly invert Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” to explain parts of what he’s trying to get at; I would say an inversion of pseudo-science is still pseudo-science. He’ll explain anorexia, schizophrenia, autism, and other DSM worthy diagnosis by simply explaining them as deficits of the right hemisphere, forgetting how humans can be complex, need context, history and relativity in order to make worthwhile conclusion.
The author probably mentions about a hundred different philosophers and how they fit into his overall theory. Usually, when that many different philosophers are brought up the author is just dropping names. I didn’t think that with this author because the author was able to put them into his narrative and couple them to his metaphor. Immanuel Kant takes space, time and causality out of the world and gives us intuition, imagination and the transcendental deduction (all right brain using this author’s metaphor); Henri Bergson cries out for ‘creative evolution’ (by all means read the Nobel Prize winning author Bergson and his book ‘Creative Evolution’, it is well worthwhile) and ‘lived time’, more right brain way of thinking.
There’s one book this author didn’t mention, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. That book speaks about a ‘body without an organ’, that would include the left brain in this author’s metaphor and they put schizophrenia (the micro way of seeing the world, according to them, and the micro definitely would be within the left brain according to this author), and they would say that it is really the schizoid who is sane in this insane world and that the macro way of seeing (the right brain according to this author) leads to paranoia and fascism. This author puts fascism in the left not the right. It’s always possible to take a metaphor too far.
The author will say that left brain people are individualistic and the right brain people are more cooperative and he cites the Japanese as right brain people and Americans as left brain. The author has the right brain enslave the left and makes the individualistic left part of the right’s cooperative whole and takes his right/left brain metaphor to explain the sum of the parts of the brain as a whole. One does not need to accept all of the author’s uses of his metaphor in order appreciate this book. There’s a book that explains this part of his story better than this book does; it’s called “How Emotions are Made’ by Barrett and tells a similar story by having our emotions controlling our body budget by desiring homeostasis, and in this author’s metaphor the emotions would be of the right brain. It’s more complex than I’m letting on but this book and Barrett’s book complement each other to a large degree.
I’m glad this book was fairly successful. It has a lot to offer. It’s flawed on many different levels and a lot of the statements the author makes are problematic to say the least. Overall, his major metaphor (backed by science, nevertheless) is an incredibly profitable way to look at the world. I seldom have found a book where an author is covering as many philosophers and thinkers, and I, the most critical critic, didn’t find fault with his interpretations. That in itself makes this a very good book! Oh yeah, the author definitely prefers the right brain interpretation for the world and thinks the left brain people need to change.
November 19, 2019
This book had a lot of potential. Clearly other people feel as if it reached it potential. I am in the minority of people who rated fewer than 5 stars, but I was so happy to reach the end. The introduction spent pages and pages telling me what I should think. Just show me the data and the methods by which the data was acquired. He went on and on... and on about how it's not respectable to study hemispheric differences. This book was written in 2009. Students and highly respected professors alike, in universities all over the world, were discussing differences in brain hemispheres. It was not a subversive topic, at all. What was and is subversive is suggesting there are male - female differences or that the brain is completely lateralized without considering the interactions between regions. McGilchrist addressed this at the beginning of Chapter One. So why make it seem as if he was trudging down the lone road of hemispheric research? Why spend pages and pages to suggest this is a much bigger controversy? I probably should have stopped at that point, but I love, and I do mean LOVE, to learn about the brain-- the most wonderful of human tools -- and how it went about building the world that we know. I could not wait to get to the chapters about the Ancient World, Enlightenment, and so on. But, this book could have been a 5th as long, a *lot* more relatable, and much more expressive of the awe that is the human brain and how that brain connects with other brains to create cities, philosophies, scientific concepts, etc.
When I finished this book, I had a strong desire to read this same book but one written by an author who used far fewer words to concisely relate the information this author tried to convey.
When I finished this book, I had a strong desire to read this same book but one written by an author who used far fewer words to concisely relate the information this author tried to convey.
November 16, 2014
This is an ambitious work, reminiscent of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, but without the happy ending. The first half is a review to date of research in the hemispherical differentiation of the human brain. The second half is a survey of Western history since Homer, told in terms of presumed shifts of hemispherical dominance. One is also reminded of C.G. Jung's Psychological Types, another survey of Western history related to psychological theory, focused primarily on the history of ideas.
Personally, I found reading this tome an ordeal. The first portion was more intellectually interesting as I hadn't read much in this field since Ornstein and Jaynes in the seventies. This served as an update, but too long-winded and repetitive, The second portion was far more readable, but so selective as to be unconvincing. Besides, unlike Hegel or Jung, it was depressing.
To McGilchrist's credit, his concluding remarks allow for the very real possibility that his beliefs about the differences between the hemispheres and their respective influences may be mistaken. He holds, however, to his historical narrative and, particularly, to his diagnosis of the current unhappy situation--a diagnosis with which I substantially agree.
Personally, I found reading this tome an ordeal. The first portion was more intellectually interesting as I hadn't read much in this field since Ornstein and Jaynes in the seventies. This served as an update, but too long-winded and repetitive, The second portion was far more readable, but so selective as to be unconvincing. Besides, unlike Hegel or Jung, it was depressing.
To McGilchrist's credit, his concluding remarks allow for the very real possibility that his beliefs about the differences between the hemispheres and their respective influences may be mistaken. He holds, however, to his historical narrative and, particularly, to his diagnosis of the current unhappy situation--a diagnosis with which I substantially agree.
October 6, 2022
Very interesting subject matter but completely unconvincing conclusions.
Update: I've posted further commentary here:
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/ab...
Update: I've posted further commentary here:
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/ab...
August 18, 2012
This work is not for everyone, but I give my highest recommendation. If you have ever had an interest in the brain, consciousness, or how we all perceive and engage the world, this might your cup of tea. Iain McGilchrist does an incredible job with developing our current understanding of the brain from a hemispheric point of view. The work completely altered my understanding of the right and left hemispheres. The way the right and left sides work are not what you may think. The book then takes you on a trip through time and suggests how our hemispheric balance as a civilization may have have changed over history. He also looks at current cultures and suggests different balances due cultural behaviors, etc. He also gives ideas on how our current hemispheric unbalance might be brought into a more fruitful alignment. So much food for thought here. It took me a while to work my way through and there is some technical jargon, but so well worth it. One of the most significant non-fiction books I've ever read.
January 16, 2013
Magisterial treatment of left and right brain hemispheres by a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who read English lit (and apparently philosophy) at Oxford. This is where neuroscience comes of age. McGilchrist offers a readable account on the workings of the hemispheres, then a sweeping account of how in history since the Greeks -- reflected in literature and philosophy and science -- they have come to dysfunction, the rationalistic left brain usurping the intuitive gestalt function of the right. It's too complicated to try here, but McGilchrist makes a lot of sense of how rationalistic, positivistic science and technology have come to rule the roost in the last 200 (or 3 or 400) years. The last chapter is a veritable Bach fugue that pulls it all together and makes the whole slog (some 500 pages) all worth it. Great and important book.
September 22, 2023
Finished this today. I’m going to write a review full of hyperboles later on, and it’s still not going to do justice to how deep and important this book is.
The topic is the differences between our left and right brain hemispheres.
Aside from blowing my mind, and that doesn’t even begin to describe the impact that this book had on me, it’s also a very therapeutic work.
Soooo many intuitions that I had inside of me, about myself and about people I know, never articulated, McGilchrist confirmed here.
I must have written “I KNEW IT!!” a thousand times in the enthusiastic notes that I took on the side of each page.
Even if it’s written by a non-religious person, it is one of the best and most profoundly articulated demonstrations of the importance of religion that I’ve ever read.
I also uploaded a video where I discuss it with my friend Richard Emerson, who recommended it to me. The video is titled "The most important book of the century", and it's not an exaggeration! Here it is:
https://youtu.be/01AUovOS3Bo
The topic is the differences between our left and right brain hemispheres.
Aside from blowing my mind, and that doesn’t even begin to describe the impact that this book had on me, it’s also a very therapeutic work.
Soooo many intuitions that I had inside of me, about myself and about people I know, never articulated, McGilchrist confirmed here.
I must have written “I KNEW IT!!” a thousand times in the enthusiastic notes that I took on the side of each page.
Even if it’s written by a non-religious person, it is one of the best and most profoundly articulated demonstrations of the importance of religion that I’ve ever read.
I also uploaded a video where I discuss it with my friend Richard Emerson, who recommended it to me. The video is titled "The most important book of the century", and it's not an exaggeration! Here it is:
https://youtu.be/01AUovOS3Bo
August 16, 2021
The book is long and difficult. What makes it difficult is the neuroscience. He has to explain the neuroscience, however, because his whole thesis is that Western Civilization is doing something with the human brain that is wrong. He does not mean by this that Western Civilization is bad for the brain, but that it started favoring the activity of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere during the Enlightenment (more or less). If you don't get the neuroscience, if you don't understand what each hemisphere does and how they support and check each other, then you will not understand the book.
There are plenty of books about the wrong turn we have taken. There is not shortage of those who argue for the Enlightenment being the source of a lot of our problems. But this philosophical book is not exclusively philosophical, and some may find that an advantage.
I struggled through it, found things to object to, but on the whole found it persuasive. I hesitate to say this, but I do think he might at least try to read Plato as carefully as he reads Wittgenstein. He's great on Nietzsche. Still, I find the argument useful, it adds a layer of explanation from another point of view, or at least another set of metaphors. The argument (very roughly) is that our right hemisphere is more intuitive and capacious in processing what appears to us, and the left tends to stereotype and limit. Both are needed: the left to filter out excess, the right to keep the left from stultifying everything. The right is more true to reality, but reality is too much for us, so we need the left to help us manage it all. The right ought to be the master, the left the emissary, but as the paintings of Pablo Picasso demonstrate, the left has gained ascendancy, overmastering and reducing reality too much.
The conclusion to it all is when he gets elegiac, and I love when a good writer does that. When, having built up to it carefully, hinting at it occasionally, he enters into those final ruminations like the panorama of a detailed, mysterious landscape.
There are plenty of books about the wrong turn we have taken. There is not shortage of those who argue for the Enlightenment being the source of a lot of our problems. But this philosophical book is not exclusively philosophical, and some may find that an advantage.
I struggled through it, found things to object to, but on the whole found it persuasive. I hesitate to say this, but I do think he might at least try to read Plato as carefully as he reads Wittgenstein. He's great on Nietzsche. Still, I find the argument useful, it adds a layer of explanation from another point of view, or at least another set of metaphors. The argument (very roughly) is that our right hemisphere is more intuitive and capacious in processing what appears to us, and the left tends to stereotype and limit. Both are needed: the left to filter out excess, the right to keep the left from stultifying everything. The right is more true to reality, but reality is too much for us, so we need the left to help us manage it all. The right ought to be the master, the left the emissary, but as the paintings of Pablo Picasso demonstrate, the left has gained ascendancy, overmastering and reducing reality too much.
The conclusion to it all is when he gets elegiac, and I love when a good writer does that. When, having built up to it carefully, hinting at it occasionally, he enters into those final ruminations like the panorama of a detailed, mysterious landscape.
October 8, 2023
The Master and His Emissary (2009) by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that left hemispheric function has come to dominate our modes of thought over the course of Western history. This has been to our benefit and detriment, but McGilchrist alleges it will sow the seeds of civilizational destruction. Although such a perspective probably appears polemical and only incidentally connected to neuroscience, McGilchrist is in fact interested in pursuing knowledge about the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain and is offering a different way to think about this neurological asymmetry.
The book's title comes from a Nietzschean parable in which a virtuous ruler sends forth a redoubtable emissary to foster peaceful prosperity in his kingdom, only to have the counselor usurp the throne and wreak havoc and destruction on the realm. This is the central metaphor that enlivens McGilchrist's thesis. The right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master") provides our primary connection to the world, processing it holistically, while the left hemisphere (the "Emissary") reduces wholes into parts, analyzes, abstracts, and devices categories and theories.
Despite, of course, being aware of the pitfall of over-interpreting hemispheric difference McGilchrist's thesis is still plagued by this misleading understanding of the brain. There is of course interesting and accurate science in the work that provokes important question, but there are also much better explanation of the patterns of Western history than hemispheric difference. For instance, I would point readers to books like The WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret to Our Success by Jo Henrich which presents a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of Western historical success. Even solely geographical accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel likely provide more explanatory insight than the asymmetry of man's brain.
Nonetheless, this is a compelling book that I hope to return to because I read it too quickly and there is just many thoughtful and interesting commentaries on science and philosophy here.
The book's title comes from a Nietzschean parable in which a virtuous ruler sends forth a redoubtable emissary to foster peaceful prosperity in his kingdom, only to have the counselor usurp the throne and wreak havoc and destruction on the realm. This is the central metaphor that enlivens McGilchrist's thesis. The right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master") provides our primary connection to the world, processing it holistically, while the left hemisphere (the "Emissary") reduces wholes into parts, analyzes, abstracts, and devices categories and theories.
Despite, of course, being aware of the pitfall of over-interpreting hemispheric difference McGilchrist's thesis is still plagued by this misleading understanding of the brain. There is of course interesting and accurate science in the work that provokes important question, but there are also much better explanation of the patterns of Western history than hemispheric difference. For instance, I would point readers to books like The WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret to Our Success by Jo Henrich which presents a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of Western historical success. Even solely geographical accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel likely provide more explanatory insight than the asymmetry of man's brain.
Nonetheless, this is a compelling book that I hope to return to because I read it too quickly and there is just many thoughtful and interesting commentaries on science and philosophy here.
May 13, 2016
A long slow read for me. McGilchrist seems to be one of those people who really does have a brain the size of a planet - few people could be a consultant psychiatrist, have done scientific research at John Hopkins and taught English at Oxford. His wide spanning knowledge shows in this book where he flows effortlessly between discussions about the structure of the brain, philosophy, literature, poetry, art and history. This is intellectually impressive stuff.
This is a disturbing book, well argued and researched, that explores McGilchrist's view that we are becoming increasingly left brain dominated. The disturbing side comes from the implications for society. Unless you have some knowledge of modern theories of the brain - you probably won't know the difference between left and right brain dominance (and it is not that trite pseudo science that is often said about the brain). Read the book to find out! It is an intriguing and interesting hypothesis.
Criticisms? Yes there are some. I want to pick on 3. This is not to put you off the book, but to make sure you know what you are getting into if you read it:
1) There are ten endorsements on the version of the book I have. Seven of them are from people with the title "professor". This should be a bit of a give-away that this is a fairly academic book. I have no issue with that - more a problem with the style that comes with this. It is written in a fairly academic style and it does read at times as if you are listening to an old professor ramble away. McGilchrist may have lectured in English at Oxford and know tons about literature, but his style is at times rambling and ponderous. Long sentences, with lots of sub-clauses. This does not always make for an easy read. I have been told he is a brilliant speaker, perhaps - but again great speakers don't always make great writers.
2) McGilchrist produces a lot of evidence for his theory. If you do not have a brain, an education and have done the research to match his, (i.e. you are like me) then all you get are the data in favour of his arguments. For all I know there are equal amounts of good data pointing the other way. This does not detract from the book, but I think it does mean you have to be clear you are only seeing one side of the argument. You probably will never see the other side unless someone else decides to write it and you choose to read it.
3) Most of his arguments in favour of increasing left brain dominance relate to things like art, poetry, literature, philosophy, music and so on. It is, in other words, a fairly elitist view of the world. Are the habits we see in people watching or participating in sport, TV or mainstream cinema and what sorts of politics are currently fashionable equally a sign of left brain dominance? I have absolutely no idea, but it would have been good if Gilchrist could have found some everyday examples to back up his theory.
Conclusions: read this if you like scholarly works, like inter-disciplinary thinking, cultural and artistic history, or have an interest in brain science and philosophy. If you are looking for some popular science, this may not be quite what you were expecting.
This is a disturbing book, well argued and researched, that explores McGilchrist's view that we are becoming increasingly left brain dominated. The disturbing side comes from the implications for society. Unless you have some knowledge of modern theories of the brain - you probably won't know the difference between left and right brain dominance (and it is not that trite pseudo science that is often said about the brain). Read the book to find out! It is an intriguing and interesting hypothesis.
Criticisms? Yes there are some. I want to pick on 3. This is not to put you off the book, but to make sure you know what you are getting into if you read it:
1) There are ten endorsements on the version of the book I have. Seven of them are from people with the title "professor". This should be a bit of a give-away that this is a fairly academic book. I have no issue with that - more a problem with the style that comes with this. It is written in a fairly academic style and it does read at times as if you are listening to an old professor ramble away. McGilchrist may have lectured in English at Oxford and know tons about literature, but his style is at times rambling and ponderous. Long sentences, with lots of sub-clauses. This does not always make for an easy read. I have been told he is a brilliant speaker, perhaps - but again great speakers don't always make great writers.
2) McGilchrist produces a lot of evidence for his theory. If you do not have a brain, an education and have done the research to match his, (i.e. you are like me) then all you get are the data in favour of his arguments. For all I know there are equal amounts of good data pointing the other way. This does not detract from the book, but I think it does mean you have to be clear you are only seeing one side of the argument. You probably will never see the other side unless someone else decides to write it and you choose to read it.
3) Most of his arguments in favour of increasing left brain dominance relate to things like art, poetry, literature, philosophy, music and so on. It is, in other words, a fairly elitist view of the world. Are the habits we see in people watching or participating in sport, TV or mainstream cinema and what sorts of politics are currently fashionable equally a sign of left brain dominance? I have absolutely no idea, but it would have been good if Gilchrist could have found some everyday examples to back up his theory.
Conclusions: read this if you like scholarly works, like inter-disciplinary thinking, cultural and artistic history, or have an interest in brain science and philosophy. If you are looking for some popular science, this may not be quite what you were expecting.
July 15, 2021
This book puts to words what I have intuited, namely that the sense of metaphor is at the core of being human, and it gives the relevant neurological basis for this- the right hemisphere is where the sense of metaphore resides, and christendom has lost this sense in the last 150 something years. I have witnessed exactly this in clinical practice; in forensic psychiatry I saw schizophrenic patients with a disconnect between right and left hemisphere. In the stroke ward I have come across patients with dysfunction of part of the right or left hemisphere with resultig dysfunction manifested in the soul and body of the affected person. Movements originating as an inpulse to return to authenticity is however easily dominated by the program of the left hemisphere- the will to power, to categorize, to objectify. This is why Heidegger and Marx was hijacked by Nazism and Stalinism to produce catastrophe. The right hemisphere is the core of the personality and the left hemisphere must be subservient to this- this will achieve the harmony which St Augustine refers to as heavenly peace.
April 16, 2021
The first review I've written because I'm astounded by the ideas in this book and will be reeling from it for a long time. McGilchrist argues that in addition to controlling different functions, the brain's two hemispheres also generate two incompatible versions of the world with very different priorities and values. Over the centuries, the left brain hemisphere has slowly become dominant over the right hemisphere (its natural 'master'), with disturbing consequences that have played out in the arts, literature, music, philosophy, and most obviously in today's capitalistic, consumerist society.
On a broader level, this is a book about what humanity has sacrificed in the name of progress, and why we now find ourselves amid a crisis of mental, spiritual, and environmental health. An incredibly well-researched work over 20 years in the making, and written from the heart. It's radically changed the way I understand myself and the world.
On a broader level, this is a book about what humanity has sacrificed in the name of progress, and why we now find ourselves amid a crisis of mental, spiritual, and environmental health. An incredibly well-researched work over 20 years in the making, and written from the heart. It's radically changed the way I understand myself and the world.
November 11, 2020
It would be hard to overstate the ambition, challenge, and importance of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Iain McGilchrist devotes the first part of the book to examining the research that has documented two different roles played by the left and right hemisphere; this examination is grounded in empirical science that is both sophisticated and on occasion serendipitous. He then spends the latter part of the book examining how western civilization has privileged the subordinate left hemisphere over the naturally dominant (and larger) right hemisphere...to the detriment of western civilization and the planet.
I have been intrigued by left brain/ right brain issues for almost fifty years and won't go into the details. What's important is the functional differences McGilchrist and others find in the two hemispheres.
The right brain is holistic, "open-minded," (i.e., susceptible to respecting the "other," which includes nature), and better at all things we think of as artistic.
The left brain is judgmental, prefers working in fragments, strong in categorization, and a kind of computational receptacle for the flood of perceptions cast its way by the right brain.
Yes, I'm being reductionist here, but I don't want to rewrite the whole magnificent book. To become even more reductionist, think of the right brain in terms of curved lines and the left brain in terms of straight lines (and then point out all the straight lines that occur in nature). Or think of the left brain strong in pushing particulars into generalizations and the right brain happy in dwelling on the particularities of particulars. And think of the left brain strong on fear, apt to reject inconvenient intrusions. And the right brain not so timid, and perhaps a good deal more vulnerable.
Having spent a few hundred pages on brain research, McGilchrist devotes a few hundred pages more to tracing the left brain's creeping dominance over the right brain from Plato to the present. His breadth of knowledge is astonishing; so is his gift for coming up with citations that are supportive of his argument. He is at ease with Rousseau, Wordsworth, Heraclitus, Luther, Blake, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and dozens of others who rank as major forces in western thought and art.
What one sees from the "Age of Reason" through industrialization to the Digital age is a pronounced tendency to corral reality and give it structural efficiency at the expense of reality's diversity, orneriness, and beauty. This is a process Weber called disenchantment. It also is a process that leads most of us to lose track of the wonder we felt as children
As McGilchrist points out, a majority of us were happier at work in the 1950s than we are now, even if we are not as productive as we are nowworking for Amazon or Microsoft. We tend to follow economic leads, not common sense. The environment--who can challenge this?--consequently has been massively trashed. We have polluted earth, sky, and sea. The imperative for the left brain is functioning in a "logical" way; it is not functioning in a way that is more pleasing but less susceptible to metrics, measurement, and profit margins.
Deep within McGilchrist's analysis lies the contention that the left brain operates in terms of representation. That's what the words you now are reading are: representations. They don't resemble McGilchrist or filthy smokestacks or dandelions. Plato's eternal forms obviously are representations, not realities, but the left brain likes that, and naturally the left brain agrees with Plato that music and the arts need to be watched carefully so that they don't distract us into meaningful but unproductive pleasures.
Meanwhile, the right brain tends to shrink, loses its talent for guiding us toward greater sensuous satisfaction in being alive , and we become more easily regimented. Who doesn't think STEM education is more important than the arts and humanities? Fewer and fewer of us.
The greatest of artists and thinkers, Leonardo or Einstein, have been able to draw on both sides of the brain as their needs required. No artist, McGilchrist contends, is more gifted at developing work that is relentlessly fascinating because it is relentlessly particular than Shakespeare. Think Falstaff, think Hamlet. There are no models for such figures, full of contradictions, flaws, and magnificence.
McGilchrist's reading of Wordsworth is quite compelling; he seems to understand exactly what Wordsworth was attempting.
McGilchrist's dismissal of Descartes is hilarious. We know that Descartes' theory contends we can know nothing beyond the representations in our mind. Descartes, on looking out a window at the street, could not be sure about the people and carriages passing by. To this Sam Johnson replied that he knew a stone was real because he could kick it...and not give himself a headache.
The joyless, geometric, flatness and abstraction of painting in the west for almost half a century impels us to stare at it long enough until our left brain's come up with a rationalization underpinning its beauty. Artists and writers and composers all have fallen into the trap of trying to outdo the left brain on its own terms. The left brain is about itself. The right brain catches onto things that aren't the self and celebrates them. But science has been so extraordinary that the arts and letters have tied themselves in knots seeking to compete, left brain to left brain, neglecting the joys of the right brain.
Well, this is all nonsense, your left brain might tell you. Listen to me, it might say. The one sure way to underscore the power of the right brain, it seems to me, is curiously absent from McGilchrist's book. I'm thinking about dreams. He says very briefly that dreams are associated with the right brain. He does not go on to make the point that while the left brain is sleeping, the right brain generates images and actions and scenarios that are more dazzling than any movie ever made. I think you know what I mean without having visited my dreams because I'm sure you have had equally powerful dreams yourself. Do they make sense? Not always, maybe not even often. But are they manifestations of a part of the mind that is infinitely more vivid and compelling and intriguing than the getting and spending of our daily lives?
As a final thought I've long had, this is the kind of book that the "academy" is likely to trash. McGilchrist defends all his points fiercely, but he can't be, as he admits, an expert in all of this, and he can't produce many falsifiable experiments to test his propositions. Well, again, that's the left brain talking. If McGilchrist reads somewhat like a polymath on speed, so be it. That's what dreams are like, too.
I have been intrigued by left brain/ right brain issues for almost fifty years and won't go into the details. What's important is the functional differences McGilchrist and others find in the two hemispheres.
The right brain is holistic, "open-minded," (i.e., susceptible to respecting the "other," which includes nature), and better at all things we think of as artistic.
The left brain is judgmental, prefers working in fragments, strong in categorization, and a kind of computational receptacle for the flood of perceptions cast its way by the right brain.
Yes, I'm being reductionist here, but I don't want to rewrite the whole magnificent book. To become even more reductionist, think of the right brain in terms of curved lines and the left brain in terms of straight lines (and then point out all the straight lines that occur in nature). Or think of the left brain strong in pushing particulars into generalizations and the right brain happy in dwelling on the particularities of particulars. And think of the left brain strong on fear, apt to reject inconvenient intrusions. And the right brain not so timid, and perhaps a good deal more vulnerable.
Having spent a few hundred pages on brain research, McGilchrist devotes a few hundred pages more to tracing the left brain's creeping dominance over the right brain from Plato to the present. His breadth of knowledge is astonishing; so is his gift for coming up with citations that are supportive of his argument. He is at ease with Rousseau, Wordsworth, Heraclitus, Luther, Blake, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and dozens of others who rank as major forces in western thought and art.
What one sees from the "Age of Reason" through industrialization to the Digital age is a pronounced tendency to corral reality and give it structural efficiency at the expense of reality's diversity, orneriness, and beauty. This is a process Weber called disenchantment. It also is a process that leads most of us to lose track of the wonder we felt as children
As McGilchrist points out, a majority of us were happier at work in the 1950s than we are now, even if we are not as productive as we are nowworking for Amazon or Microsoft. We tend to follow economic leads, not common sense. The environment--who can challenge this?--consequently has been massively trashed. We have polluted earth, sky, and sea. The imperative for the left brain is functioning in a "logical" way; it is not functioning in a way that is more pleasing but less susceptible to metrics, measurement, and profit margins.
Deep within McGilchrist's analysis lies the contention that the left brain operates in terms of representation. That's what the words you now are reading are: representations. They don't resemble McGilchrist or filthy smokestacks or dandelions. Plato's eternal forms obviously are representations, not realities, but the left brain likes that, and naturally the left brain agrees with Plato that music and the arts need to be watched carefully so that they don't distract us into meaningful but unproductive pleasures.
Meanwhile, the right brain tends to shrink, loses its talent for guiding us toward greater sensuous satisfaction in being alive , and we become more easily regimented. Who doesn't think STEM education is more important than the arts and humanities? Fewer and fewer of us.
The greatest of artists and thinkers, Leonardo or Einstein, have been able to draw on both sides of the brain as their needs required. No artist, McGilchrist contends, is more gifted at developing work that is relentlessly fascinating because it is relentlessly particular than Shakespeare. Think Falstaff, think Hamlet. There are no models for such figures, full of contradictions, flaws, and magnificence.
McGilchrist's reading of Wordsworth is quite compelling; he seems to understand exactly what Wordsworth was attempting.
McGilchrist's dismissal of Descartes is hilarious. We know that Descartes' theory contends we can know nothing beyond the representations in our mind. Descartes, on looking out a window at the street, could not be sure about the people and carriages passing by. To this Sam Johnson replied that he knew a stone was real because he could kick it...and not give himself a headache.
The joyless, geometric, flatness and abstraction of painting in the west for almost half a century impels us to stare at it long enough until our left brain's come up with a rationalization underpinning its beauty. Artists and writers and composers all have fallen into the trap of trying to outdo the left brain on its own terms. The left brain is about itself. The right brain catches onto things that aren't the self and celebrates them. But science has been so extraordinary that the arts and letters have tied themselves in knots seeking to compete, left brain to left brain, neglecting the joys of the right brain.
Well, this is all nonsense, your left brain might tell you. Listen to me, it might say. The one sure way to underscore the power of the right brain, it seems to me, is curiously absent from McGilchrist's book. I'm thinking about dreams. He says very briefly that dreams are associated with the right brain. He does not go on to make the point that while the left brain is sleeping, the right brain generates images and actions and scenarios that are more dazzling than any movie ever made. I think you know what I mean without having visited my dreams because I'm sure you have had equally powerful dreams yourself. Do they make sense? Not always, maybe not even often. But are they manifestations of a part of the mind that is infinitely more vivid and compelling and intriguing than the getting and spending of our daily lives?
As a final thought I've long had, this is the kind of book that the "academy" is likely to trash. McGilchrist defends all his points fiercely, but he can't be, as he admits, an expert in all of this, and he can't produce many falsifiable experiments to test his propositions. Well, again, that's the left brain talking. If McGilchrist reads somewhat like a polymath on speed, so be it. That's what dreams are like, too.
May 11, 2021
Despite being excited to start this one, The Master and His Emissary fell flat for me...
Author Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and has three times been elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of this book.
Iain McGilchrist:
My review here is for the new expanded edition; circa 2019. This new edition had a very long preface; a harbinger of the writing that was to follow.
McGilchrist mentions the hypothesis he forwards here is open to scrutiny, and writes about scientific flexibility and growth through peer review.
McGilchrist writes that this is a cross-disciplinary field of inquiry; delving into "psychology, philosophy, literature and the arts, and even, to some extent, archaeology and anthropology."
Interestingly, McGilchrist writes about the common missconceptions related to the left-right brain paradigm:
Unfortunately, despite fielding subject matter that is extremely interesting, I found most of the author's writing here to be extremely long-winded, arduous, technical, and dry. McGilchrist takes a deep dive right from the get-go into neuroanatomy and neuroscience here, without ever taking a breath to provide the reader with any relevant foundational knowledge or context required for them to fully absorb this technical material.
He is likely to lose many people in the weeds with prose like this... Sadly, this is somewhat typical of many science books written by scientists. Too bad; as their message will not be accessible to many (or indeed - most) readers.
For the sake of clarity, my own future reference, and for anyone else interested, I have included a synopsis of the book below; taken from its Wikipedia page:
I also really disliked the formatting of this book. McGilchrist fires off countless different characteristics, patterns, and cognitive tasks, and then places them in either a right brain or left brain category. There is a glaring lack of an overarching theme that can be readily absorbed by the reader here. I found the book seriously lacking in both direction and cohesion.
A great example of ineffective communication; the book also should have been much more rigorously edited for the sake of both brevity and clarity. In my opinion; roughly ~75% of this writing could have been cut without any noticeable loss of communication. Indeed, it probably should have been...
I really dislike when science books are formatted and/or written this way, and I always penalize them harshly for it.
When a science book is presented in an overly verbose, technical, and dry manner such as this, it does a great disservice to the field of science communication, IMO. Quite possibly appealing primarily to other scientists and various assorted scientifically literate autodidacts, this book will likely render many readers completely lost... In the worst-case scenario, the reader will become frustrated with his or her journey into scientific reading, and could be dissuaded from reading further scientific books. A definite failure of communication. Absolutely terrible...
The icing on the cake for me here; quite a large chunk of the book is devoted to extremely long-winded rambling philosophical navel-gazing and other assorted tedious contemplations. McGilchrist endlessly ponders the nature of knowledge, reality, the conscious experience, and other related philosophy that nearly put me to sleep...
So, while McGilchrist is most likely a thorough and competent professional in his fields of scientific inquiry, he failed to present this work to the reader in a manner that they will find accessible, or even understandable.
Combine this with the ridiculous length of this book (the PDF copy I have is 1,099 pages, the audiobook version ~28hours), and I would opine that The Master and His Emissary makes for an interesting case study of how not to write science...
Remind me to take a pass on any other books from this author.
1.5 stars.
Author Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and has three times been elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of this book.
Iain McGilchrist:
My review here is for the new expanded edition; circa 2019. This new edition had a very long preface; a harbinger of the writing that was to follow.
McGilchrist mentions the hypothesis he forwards here is open to scrutiny, and writes about scientific flexibility and growth through peer review.
McGilchrist writes that this is a cross-disciplinary field of inquiry; delving into "psychology, philosophy, literature and the arts, and even, to some extent, archaeology and anthropology."
Interestingly, McGilchrist writes about the common missconceptions related to the left-right brain paradigm:
"One of my favourites is this list, a slide I sometimes use in lectures with the health warning in the title: ‘Right and…WRONG!’
Although there is nothing unusual here, and it is actually one of the more nuanced such summaries on the web, the nuances don’t help – because they are wrong. There is only one pairing here that is broadly correct. All the others are false, sometimes so badly that they represent the inverse of what is known to be the case..."
Unfortunately, despite fielding subject matter that is extremely interesting, I found most of the author's writing here to be extremely long-winded, arduous, technical, and dry. McGilchrist takes a deep dive right from the get-go into neuroanatomy and neuroscience here, without ever taking a breath to provide the reader with any relevant foundational knowledge or context required for them to fully absorb this technical material.
He is likely to lose many people in the weeds with prose like this... Sadly, this is somewhat typical of many science books written by scientists. Too bad; as their message will not be accessible to many (or indeed - most) readers.
For the sake of clarity, my own future reference, and for anyone else interested, I have included a synopsis of the book below; taken from its Wikipedia page:
Part One: The Divided Brain
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
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.
I also really disliked the formatting of this book. McGilchrist fires off countless different characteristics, patterns, and cognitive tasks, and then places them in either a right brain or left brain category. There is a glaring lack of an overarching theme that can be readily absorbed by the reader here. I found the book seriously lacking in both direction and cohesion.
A great example of ineffective communication; the book also should have been much more rigorously edited for the sake of both brevity and clarity. In my opinion; roughly ~75% of this writing could have been cut without any noticeable loss of communication. Indeed, it probably should have been...
I really dislike when science books are formatted and/or written this way, and I always penalize them harshly for it.
When a science book is presented in an overly verbose, technical, and dry manner such as this, it does a great disservice to the field of science communication, IMO. Quite possibly appealing primarily to other scientists and various assorted scientifically literate autodidacts, this book will likely render many readers completely lost... In the worst-case scenario, the reader will become frustrated with his or her journey into scientific reading, and could be dissuaded from reading further scientific books. A definite failure of communication. Absolutely terrible...
The icing on the cake for me here; quite a large chunk of the book is devoted to extremely long-winded rambling philosophical navel-gazing and other assorted tedious contemplations. McGilchrist endlessly ponders the nature of knowledge, reality, the conscious experience, and other related philosophy that nearly put me to sleep...
So, while McGilchrist is most likely a thorough and competent professional in his fields of scientific inquiry, he failed to present this work to the reader in a manner that they will find accessible, or even understandable.
Combine this with the ridiculous length of this book (the PDF copy I have is 1,099 pages, the audiobook version ~28hours), and I would opine that The Master and His Emissary makes for an interesting case study of how not to write science...
Remind me to take a pass on any other books from this author.
1.5 stars.
July 31, 2012
Part 1 is great and would get 4 stars on its own, but I'm left wishing I hadn't invested so much time reading part 2. The principal thesis of the book is a defense of the right brain against the mainstream view of it as a flaky, playful, and less competent portion of the brain. Part 1 does this on the grounds of the latest science, which provides fascinating revelations. For example, a right-brain stroke is more debilitating than an equivalent left-brain stroke, and many of common psychiatric illnesses of our day, such as schizophrenia and autism, have been linked to reduced activity in the right brain relative to the left. The right brain can better solve certain puzzles that baffle the left with their complexity. Clearly, the right brain is doing something far more essential than it is normally given credit for, even by neuroscientists.
McGilchrist makes the case that the right brain's advantages have to do with engagement with the outside world, so the discussion naturally tends to go beyond the laboratory. As the book progresses into part II, the arguments are increasingly based on the art, poetry, and philosophy of the Western world through the ages. I can't help feeling that the the author got lost in this vast topic, and that the book devolved to an old man's ramblings about his favourite things. A highly educated old man with lots of interesting thing to say, structured in chronological order, but nevertheless lacking in rigour. He occasionally finds solid ground, for example the tendency of portrait subjects to look to the left, but soon leaps back into the quicksand without a rope. It would be too easy to list the numerous holes and contradictions in the arguments of part II.
It is equally easy to question whether I am trying to apply left-brain analysis to a discussion that was meant to be properly understood by the right-brain. How do you get past that, when any protest might be a symptom of your own shortcomings? Fortunately, McGilchrist avoids accusing his readers this way; even when confronted in interviews, he graciously retreats to the laboratory evidence of part 1. The book's conclusion even admits vulnerability to charges of naivete or copping out. Since the controversial hypotheses are offered without pretense, I can't complain of error, but I feel like I've wasted some of my time. Part 1 revolutionized my understanding of the "divided brain"; part 2 left me quite dissatisfied about "the making of the Western world."
McGilchrist makes the case that the right brain's advantages have to do with engagement with the outside world, so the discussion naturally tends to go beyond the laboratory. As the book progresses into part II, the arguments are increasingly based on the art, poetry, and philosophy of the Western world through the ages. I can't help feeling that the the author got lost in this vast topic, and that the book devolved to an old man's ramblings about his favourite things. A highly educated old man with lots of interesting thing to say, structured in chronological order, but nevertheless lacking in rigour. He occasionally finds solid ground, for example the tendency of portrait subjects to look to the left, but soon leaps back into the quicksand without a rope. It would be too easy to list the numerous holes and contradictions in the arguments of part II.
It is equally easy to question whether I am trying to apply left-brain analysis to a discussion that was meant to be properly understood by the right-brain. How do you get past that, when any protest might be a symptom of your own shortcomings? Fortunately, McGilchrist avoids accusing his readers this way; even when confronted in interviews, he graciously retreats to the laboratory evidence of part 1. The book's conclusion even admits vulnerability to charges of naivete or copping out. Since the controversial hypotheses are offered without pretense, I can't complain of error, but I feel like I've wasted some of my time. Part 1 revolutionized my understanding of the "divided brain"; part 2 left me quite dissatisfied about "the making of the Western world."
January 12, 2023
Full of insight and very deep thought. It will take me a long time to fully digest all of the new ideas and concepts I gleaned from this book. Some parts of it were also very challenging for me as he sometimes reaches conclusions which I disagree with from premises which I do agree with. These instances push me to think and make McGilchrist a fruitful thought partner even where I may ultimately disagree with him.
Extremely worthwhile read for anyone who either:
A) is interested in the history of ideas or
B) is interested in consciousness, the brain, or cognitive science ect.
Affirming of paradox and mystery, this book makes a very rational argument for the necessary limitations of human rationality. This is reminiscent of Godel’s discoveries in math. The book aptly expressed how rational thought is necessarily nested within imaginative and metaphorical thought. When we get rid of all ambiguity we lose the ability to express that which is within its own nature ambiguous.
As someone who has recently begun to realize the inherent shortcomings of my Cartesian epistemology this book expressed in a much more holistic way, it’s faults, while simultaneously pointing the way to a much less impoverished epistemology. I appreciated that McGilChrist’s arguments against a Cartesian epistemology were themselves very rational. He was able to win over the most Cartesian part of me on my own terms.
Rationality is good and necessary on the road to truth and we must never have less than rationality yet truth is deeper than we can fully grasp by human rationality alone. This reminds me of Augustine saying “I believe therefore I understand.” Faith does not need to be sub rational but can rather be super rational in its stretching out towards the truth.
I disagree with most of his analysis of the Protestant Reformation but even this section is well argued and made me think.
Itself providing a powerful mental model which lends much conceptual clarity, this book also provides a superordinate injunction against confusing the abstract with the real—the map with the territory. In theory theory and practice are the same. In practice they are not.
Extremely worthwhile read for anyone who either:
A) is interested in the history of ideas or
B) is interested in consciousness, the brain, or cognitive science ect.
Affirming of paradox and mystery, this book makes a very rational argument for the necessary limitations of human rationality. This is reminiscent of Godel’s discoveries in math. The book aptly expressed how rational thought is necessarily nested within imaginative and metaphorical thought. When we get rid of all ambiguity we lose the ability to express that which is within its own nature ambiguous.
As someone who has recently begun to realize the inherent shortcomings of my Cartesian epistemology this book expressed in a much more holistic way, it’s faults, while simultaneously pointing the way to a much less impoverished epistemology. I appreciated that McGilChrist’s arguments against a Cartesian epistemology were themselves very rational. He was able to win over the most Cartesian part of me on my own terms.
Rationality is good and necessary on the road to truth and we must never have less than rationality yet truth is deeper than we can fully grasp by human rationality alone. This reminds me of Augustine saying “I believe therefore I understand.” Faith does not need to be sub rational but can rather be super rational in its stretching out towards the truth.
I disagree with most of his analysis of the Protestant Reformation but even this section is well argued and made me think.
Itself providing a powerful mental model which lends much conceptual clarity, this book also provides a superordinate injunction against confusing the abstract with the real—the map with the territory. In theory theory and practice are the same. In practice they are not.
September 13, 2019
I picked up the idea of the left and right side brain through the well-regarded book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by art teacher Betty Edwards. In her book, the left-brain handles the perceiving and processing verbally and analytically. In describing the right side of the brain, however, she instructed students to understand and draw of edges and lines, space between items, perspective, and proportion between things, light and shadows and the whole (gestalt) as the first four. The left and right sides function very differently, and for artists, her advice was to draw on the right side.
The author, Iain McGilchrist, taught literature before studying medicine. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, demonstrates that the right hemisphere takes stock of the whole (Gestalt) and the right region is more abreast with the world. The left provides precision on the many details of the world, e.g., measurement, mechanistic models. Western culture, moreover, values the left hemisphere above the right side--meaning, the left should be and has been in charge throughout western culture since early times.
My thesis writes McGilchrist, is that for human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of utmost importance in bringing about the recognizably human world' and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the human brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact, involved in a sort of power struggle and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture (p. 3); philosophy in the West is essentially a left-hemisphere process (p. 137). EEG coherence data point to the predominance of the right hemisphere in REM sleep and dreaming (p. 188). Coleridge wrote of his love of 'the Great' & 'the Whole.'--Those who have been led to the same truths step by step thro' the constant testimony of their senses seem to me to want a sense which I possess--They contemplate nothing but parts--and all parts are necessarily little--and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things (p. 202).
My dear friend Guy Burneko, who recommended reading McGilchrist, observes that clearly, the differential binary of the human brain is complementarity with having our two eyes and two ears and two legs (Burneko, Guy C. New Reflections on Things at Hand: Contemplating Ecohuman Sustainability, Kindle Edition, Location. 6171).
The author, Iain McGilchrist, taught literature before studying medicine. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, demonstrates that the right hemisphere takes stock of the whole (Gestalt) and the right region is more abreast with the world. The left provides precision on the many details of the world, e.g., measurement, mechanistic models. Western culture, moreover, values the left hemisphere above the right side--meaning, the left should be and has been in charge throughout western culture since early times.
My thesis writes McGilchrist, is that for human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of utmost importance in bringing about the recognizably human world' and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the human brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact, involved in a sort of power struggle and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture (p. 3); philosophy in the West is essentially a left-hemisphere process (p. 137). EEG coherence data point to the predominance of the right hemisphere in REM sleep and dreaming (p. 188). Coleridge wrote of his love of 'the Great' & 'the Whole.'--Those who have been led to the same truths step by step thro' the constant testimony of their senses seem to me to want a sense which I possess--They contemplate nothing but parts--and all parts are necessarily little--and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things (p. 202).
My dear friend Guy Burneko, who recommended reading McGilchrist, observes that clearly, the differential binary of the human brain is complementarity with having our two eyes and two ears and two legs (Burneko, Guy C. New Reflections on Things at Hand: Contemplating Ecohuman Sustainability, Kindle Edition, Location. 6171).
March 21, 2014
This is a phenomenal book, perhaps one of the best I've ever read. It is neither short nor an easy one. There are more than 500 pages of very dense text that could easily span above 800 in a bit more conventional typesetting... But the true challenge comes from the author; a true erudite, a modern day polymath, who effortlessly combines neuroscience, with philosophy, with literature, with arts, with social sciences and humanism, and even things that are completely in between, to create a coherent argument on the duality of our brain and how it is reflected trough the history and our doings.
The first part of the book examines neurological evidence (patients with brain strokes, split brain patients, schizophrenics, etc), then moves to philosophy, further on to the history of the Western civilization and at the end he tries to synthesize a conclusion that merges all of this together. The language is rich and amazing to read (McGilchrist was an Oxford professor of English before turning into neuroscience), but that makes things only slightly easier on the conceptual level. The first part demands at least basic preexisting knowledge on neural anatomy and neural development, the second part is much more rewarding to be read by prior reading of philosophers (all the big names; Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger,...), and the last part requires knowledge of basic history and history of Arts (pictorial, music, literature, drama...). Needless to say, I had some difficulties getting trough to the middle part (since philosophers have never been exactly my coup of tea), but I enjoyed the neurological and the art-historical parts so much more. They felt like a balsam for my soul: the last quarter of the book is a powerful assault on modernism and the nonsense of art of 20th century. In that he says everything I wanted to say, but couldn't find the right voice for it.
This is one of those books (along with Antifragile by Taleb) that completely (re?)shaped the way I see the world and myself (in it). Not just that it gave me a deeper understanding, it also gave shape and meaning to my own ideas, by which I feel flattered. Of course, I am being openly biased in that, for it is easy to like a book which agrees with you, but what the hell... Every page was better than the previous one!
The first part of the book examines neurological evidence (patients with brain strokes, split brain patients, schizophrenics, etc), then moves to philosophy, further on to the history of the Western civilization and at the end he tries to synthesize a conclusion that merges all of this together. The language is rich and amazing to read (McGilchrist was an Oxford professor of English before turning into neuroscience), but that makes things only slightly easier on the conceptual level. The first part demands at least basic preexisting knowledge on neural anatomy and neural development, the second part is much more rewarding to be read by prior reading of philosophers (all the big names; Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger,...), and the last part requires knowledge of basic history and history of Arts (pictorial, music, literature, drama...). Needless to say, I had some difficulties getting trough to the middle part (since philosophers have never been exactly my coup of tea), but I enjoyed the neurological and the art-historical parts so much more. They felt like a balsam for my soul: the last quarter of the book is a powerful assault on modernism and the nonsense of art of 20th century. In that he says everything I wanted to say, but couldn't find the right voice for it.
This is one of those books (along with Antifragile by Taleb) that completely (re?)shaped the way I see the world and myself (in it). Not just that it gave me a deeper understanding, it also gave shape and meaning to my own ideas, by which I feel flattered. Of course, I am being openly biased in that, for it is easy to like a book which agrees with you, but what the hell... Every page was better than the previous one!
August 11, 2019
In his book The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist delves deep into the brain and what it tells us about ourselves. McGilchrist mainly focuses on the differences between brain hemispheres that everyone has. Most people have heard of the differences between the right brain and the left brain. These are often far too generalized to be of use to anyone and there are always exceptions. McGilchrist speaks of the myths and facts of the different brain hemispheres and attempts to answer a simple question; why does the brain have hemispheres at all?
Early on, most of what we learned about the brain hemispheres and the various things it is good at is through people that have had disorders or lesions on that section. Basically, we learned through what that person could not do. In our modern times, we have devices to probe the secrets of the brain, but even that is somewhat limited.
McGilchrist starts out by talking about each hemisphere in terms of what it is capable of. Language processing, musical proficiency, various tasks that make us human, and so on. The most suggestive experiments occur with people that underwent a procedure to sever the Corpus Callosum, the large bundle of nerves that connect the hemispheres together and inform them of what the other is doing.
The book is really good. My only problem was with the size of the print. Other than that, there are plenty of images and a massive bibliography. The author explains the references by stating that he did not want to miss any facts or misconceptions.
Early on, most of what we learned about the brain hemispheres and the various things it is good at is through people that have had disorders or lesions on that section. Basically, we learned through what that person could not do. In our modern times, we have devices to probe the secrets of the brain, but even that is somewhat limited.
McGilchrist starts out by talking about each hemisphere in terms of what it is capable of. Language processing, musical proficiency, various tasks that make us human, and so on. The most suggestive experiments occur with people that underwent a procedure to sever the Corpus Callosum, the large bundle of nerves that connect the hemispheres together and inform them of what the other is doing.
The book is really good. My only problem was with the size of the print. Other than that, there are plenty of images and a massive bibliography. The author explains the references by stating that he did not want to miss any facts or misconceptions.
July 28, 2021
I come into this book with two important biases which made me want to read it even more in the first place - 1) I am a graduate of neuroscience with research experience, and 2) I am heavily inclined towards processing the world with my left hemisphere, by which I mean slightly autistically so (which, as McGilchrist points out in the book, comes with its set of pros and cons in the 21st century). The book earns 5 stars not because I thought every single page was captivating (some of his interpretations of some philosophers, as well as historical reviews of certain epochs were a little bit of work to get through), but because I think he summarized a very simple, if not too obvious an idea which truly has real world significance on a civilizational level. I particularly enjoyed his criticism of currents of thought in neuroscience itself, which to a large degree disregards the only thing which we obviously know about the brain, which is that it is composed of two halves, and that the differences between the hemispheres are something that is disregarded as pop-psychology by neuroscientists.
The coolest thing about this book is that it leaves the left hemisphere speechless - it uses its own way of thinking to prove it wrong, and (for me at least) nicely shows that some things in the world are better left ineffable and uninterpreted by the interpreter.
The coolest thing about this book is that it leaves the left hemisphere speechless - it uses its own way of thinking to prove it wrong, and (for me at least) nicely shows that some things in the world are better left ineffable and uninterpreted by the interpreter.
February 3, 2019
Wow... a beautiful and erudite book. It starts off with the statement that the common perception between the dichotomy of the left and right hemisphere is a myth yet holds some truth. The left and the right hemisphere have opposing viewpoints and perspectives on the nature of reality; the left sees the world as mechanistic, sequential and analytical, it breaks down reality bit by bit delving towards conceptual and metaphorical frameworks of the world. The right on the other hand sees the world in a holistic manner tending to see reality as as whole rather than breaking it down by bits: this difference in perspective ultimately leads to both hemisphere pursueing different truths. Iain McGilchrist states that many of the philosophical problems that arise are as a result of the left hemisphere thinking; he emphasises the right hemisphere to be the Master of reality and of truth while the left hemisphere should play the role of the emissary helping the right seek truth. This truly is a multi-disciplinary book reflecting on a host of domains such as art, literature, mathematics, neuroscience, psyschology, philosophy and many more; allowing the reader to partake on a journey of the nature of truth and reality.
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