Summary
The Master and his Emissary written by Iain “Right brain so hott right now” McGilchrist is the product of twenty years of research into hemispheric differences in the human brain. He starts out by dismantling the pop psychology version of the hemispheric differences saying that the simple male(left)/ female(right) dichotomy is incorrect because the right is actually good at logic too so now, we can’t find a female part of the brain anywhere. To put the book in a single sentence it would be that the left sees parts while the right sees the whole. Part of the impetus of this book seems to be that the right hemisphere has been neglected by research and considered of lesser importance than the left (which does the talking) according to McGilchrist this is flipped. The “master” in his title is in reference to the right hemisphere and the emissary to the left. His claim is that thought originates in the RH and is sent to the LH but must importantly return to the RH to find its grounding in lived experience. He makes some really broad claims that are bound to ruffle a few feathers. Shots are fired at many folks, like Descartes, everyone’s favorite punching bag, Plato who we are assuming you understand if you are disagreeing with him, and Chomsky the misguided genius of the left. This book is full of interesting anecdotes about the functions of the brain, here are a few that stood out. The LH and RH seem to work in a sort of opponent processing. Where if one side loses some power, the other side will step in to fill the gap. This usually causes undesirable outcomes for example in stroke patients or the like. He claims the singing (RH biased) preceded language (LH biased) due to its simplicity and the way our brains pick up rhythm and some studies that showed that babies tend to pick up words lyrically prior to syntax. [Chomsky shakes his fist in feudal rage] The corpus callosum is the major connector between the LH and RH. This is what was severed in patients with severe epilepsy because it appeared to ease the symptoms creating what we call “split brain” patients. Two things are interesting here, first that for the most part the patients were able to live normal lives after the operation. Secondly, that bridge appears not only as a connector, but a borderline that held the hemispheres at bay. So, after the operation the instances of strange behavior like the left hand reaching for a coat (controlled by the RH) and the right hand (controlled by the LH) reaching out to stop it are caused by this imbalance in opponent processing. One of his major claims in the book is that the western world has become a machine world, the LH preferred way of looking at the world. We moved away from the dynamic world of the RH which is full of curves, circles, and flow into the static world of the left, line segments, n-gons, and timesteps. From art to the written word itself, the world has shifted towards an LH biased mode of operation. Language used to be written vertically and made with pictograms (like hieroglyphs) which meant reading favored the RH, we now use abstracted symbols and read left to right which is exactly the way LH prefers it. The shift to favor the LH has torn us out of an experiential world and placed us into a mechanistic world where we are observers. He makes the case that this perspective is very similar to cases of schizophrenia, which are primarily a malady wherein the LH is overactive. He ends the book by looking at the ways in which this LH bias is not as apparent in eastern cultures and that perhaps this signals a way forward for us.
Thoughts
The more books I read from thinkers in recent history the more it seems that for all the disagreement they have, there is one thing in which they all agree. Modern society is not built for humans. We have created a world that wears on us, day after day. The left brain dissects things, and you can only dissect what is dead. This book appealed to things bigger than us. Truth and beauty are concepts outside ourselves which act as meaning makers. The problem is the RH hemisphere’s ability to communicate in language is next to nil, so we are left in a world with a premium on the logos. The left brain makes its case for why something should be done in such and such a way, while there is only silence from the right brain. McGilchrist agrees with the idea that metaphor and poetry are the primary way in which the right brain can hint at its ineffable intuitions. One interesting development since the writing of this book has been the rise of AI. For McGilchrist Art, Music and Poetry were almost sacred in their ability to communicate embodied truths about experience, but what are we to think when the creations of AI (the epitome of the LH) become indistinguishable from artists and poets? McGilchrist argues the LH constructs hermetically sealed, self-referential worlds. The self-referential aspect or as he called it “hall of mirrors” alienates us from experience. His point is that the RH is the way out back into the world as such. These AI creations suggest to me that this is another delusion that cannot survive the information age, where all meaning becomes simulated into nothing. I will need to come back to this book after reading more, some of his arguments were a little too attached to unknown concepts for me to wrap my head around. I really appreciated this book and this perspective; he provides a compelling argument for a more antiquated view of this thing we call life. This book is brilliant and reminds me of how far away we are from solving the mind body problem.