In the May edition of the In Beta newsletter I shared some resources linked to Iain McGilchrist’s ideas on the way that we’ve come to think about the relative roles of the right and left brain hemispheres, their relationship to each other, and the possible impact that this has had on Western civilization. For me, it’s been one of those profound ideas that’s upended a common perspective on something fundamental.
In The Master and His Emissary McGilchrist describes a different way of thinking about the left and right hemisphere’s relationship to each other, and to ourselves. He uses a story of the master of a community who is responsible for high-level oversight and management, who decides that he needs help managing the affairs of the community. He passes off some of his work to a trusted emissary who is able to focus on the daily work and operational demands of the community. In other words, someone to manage the discrete tasks that all need to happen but which, in isolation, say little about how the community is run.
Over time the emissary decides that he knows more about how the community ought to be run and so takes over from the master. But since he – the emissary – understands only discrete parts of the overall picture and has no concept of how they are connected to produce a coherent whole, he ends up presiding over the downfall of the community.
McGilchrist suggests that, rather than each hemisphere being responsible for logic and creative thinking respectively, it’s more accurate to think of them as being detail-oriented (left hemisphere) and whole-oriented (right hemisphere). He goes on to argue that our cultural and social privileging of rationality over creativity may, in fact, be pushing us to focus mainly on the discrete details of the world, at the expense of understanding the whole.
In a society where we privilege reason and intellectual pursuits over artistic ones (i.e. where the left hemisphere – the emissary – is interpreting our experience of the world), we may be putting too much faith in the hemisphere that literally cannot see the whole picture. McGilchrist claims that it’s not true that the left hemisphere of the brain is involved primarily with reason and analysis and that the right is devoted to creativity and innovation. The left and right hemispheres are profoundly involved with all aspects of our experience, but each hemisphere offers us different versions of the world that we then need to integrate.
I find these ideas difficult to wrap my head around and am constantly struggling to appreciate the subtle points that McGilchrist is making. But it’s a fascinating area of research and scholarship that I suspect has deep implications for how we think about learning, relationships, society, and ultimately, what we value as a species.
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