The human brain Right and left Nov 26th 2009 | From the print edition Timekeeper SPL The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. By Iain McGilchrist. Yale University Press; 608 pages; $38 and £25. Buy from Amazon, Amazon.co.uk “I THUS drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.” So said Robert Louis Stevensons Dr Jekyll. Iain McGilchrist, a former Oxford literary scholar, now a doctor and psychiatrist, has reached a similar conclusion about the duality of man, and he too feels somewhat shipwrecked about it. According to Mr McGilchrist, the left and right hemispheres of the human brain have opposing personalities which have been at war ever since the time of Plato, and especially since the Enlightenment. The brains left hemisphere (the “Emissary” of his title) is the villain of the piece, since it has wrested control from the right (the “Master”, who ought to be in charge). The upstart left hemisphere has created a dehumanised society in the West, contributed to epidemics of schizophrenia and autism, caused environmental despoliation, and given rise to some wilfully ugly modernist art and music into the bargain. In this section Spanish eyes Both sides of the coin Learning to make do and mend Right and left Once more unto the breach Seeing is believing Reprints Related topics Science Science and technology Cognitive science Life sciences The relationship between the two sides of the brain became a hot topic in the 1960s after a spate of operations on epilepsy patients to sever the main connections between their hemispheres. These “split-brain” subjects generally found that their fits became less debilitating, and they functioned normally in everyday life. But when experimenters found ways to feed information to just one of their disconnected hemispheres, such bizarre things started to happen that some researchers reckoned they were dealing with two independent spheres of consciousness in a single person. In recent decades a great deal more about the sides of the brain has been learned, mainly by studying stroke patients, and from imaging techniques that reveal which parts of the brain are most active when performing various tasks. Mr McGilchrist dismisses the pop-science idea that the left brain is rational, dull and male, while the right is creative, impressionistic and female. Almost everything once thought to happen in just one hemisphere turns out to involve both, and the differences between them concern not what the brain does, but the way it does things. In particular, he says, the left specialises in narrowly focused attention, while the right attends to broader contexts. That, at any rate, is his cautious, official position, and he gives intriguing evidence to back it up. But the reader is also treated to some very loose talk and to generalisations of breathtaking sweep. The lefts world is “ultimately narcissistic”; its “prime motivation is power”, and the Industrial Revolution was, in some mysterious sense, the lefts “most audacious assault yet on the world of the right hemisphere”. The sainted right, by contrast, has “ideals” that are in harmony with an “essentially local, agrarian, communitarian, organic” conception of democracy. In a tour of Western intellectual history that takes up half of this large book, Mr McGilchrist describes broad movements and famous figures as if they were battles and soldiers in a 2,500-year war between the brains hemispheres. Romanticism was mostly a victory for the right brain; the Enlightenment, in the end, a victory for the left. Shakespeare was a general of the right-hemisphere party, because of his celebration of the uncategorisable variety of human character; Descartes was a champion of the sinister camp, because of his mechanistic reductionism. A scintillating intelligence is at work in this part of the book, particularly in the discussions of poetry, but it has plainly become untethered from its moorings in brain science. Mr McGilchrist claims that the allegedly sharp dichotomy between left- and right-hemisphere thinking does not exist in Asian cultures, or not in the same way. But he offers no evidence that such differences can be explained in physiological terms. The book ends with a deflating admission that will not surprise those readers who feel the authors main claims about the cerebral hemispheres have the ring of loose analogies rather than hard explanations. Mr McGilchrist would not be unhappy to learn that what he has to say about the roles of the hemispheres in Western culture is simply a metaphor and is not literally true. In other words, he seems to be in two minds about his own thesis, which is fitting but not encouraging.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 06:41:21 +0000
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