The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

As Pascal wrote, ‘The ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can't get as far as understanding that.’

One way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere's raison d'être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere's is to open them up into possibility. In life we need both. In fact for practical purposes, narrowing things down to a certainty, so that we can grasp them, is more helpful. But it is als

The right hemisphere, the so-called minor hemisphere, is in fact the one that knows, and more importantly the one that understands, more.

The left hemisphere is not in touch with the world. It is demonstrably self-deceiving, and confabulates – makes up a story, when it cannot understand something, and tells it with conviction. Michael Gazzaniga first demonstrated this in split-brain patients. Subsequent research shows that, unlike the right hemisphere, which tends toward self-doubt,

What do I mean by ‘betweenness'? Think about the nature of music. Music does not exist in one particular note – which is in itself meaningless; or in a lot of such single notes, each in itself meaningless. I am tempted to say it exists more in the spaces than in the notes: the spaces between successive notes in pitch that creates the melody, the sp

The right hemisphere seems to be involved more with new experience, new events, things, ideas, words, skills or music, or whatever it may be, while they are still fresh, original and unique, and so to speak present, to the mind. The right hemisphere's world is present – or more precisely ‘presences’ to us, as Heidegger puts it. By contrast the left

It would be crazy to suppose that our brains were so perfectly constructed that they could understand and make us aware of everything in the universe.

The left hemisphere is not in touch with reality but with its representation of reality, which turns out to be a remarkably self-enclosed, self-referring system of tokens.

What we do not expect to find, we just will not see: much elegant research demonstrates that we are essentially blind to what we do not think is there.