In fact even more striking is that the Greek word which subsequently came to indicate the body considered separately from the person, so-ma, is never used in Homer to refer to the living body, only to a corpse.334

It is worth considering that numbers can either signify absolutes – a quantifiable amount, as in statistics – which would suggest an affinity with the left hemisphere, or signify relations, which would suggest an affinity with the right hemisphere.

Problem solving, making reasonable deductions, and making judgments may become harder if we become conscious of the process. Thus rendering one’s thought processes explicit, or analysing a judgment, may actually impair performance, because it encourages the left hemisphere’s focus on the explicit, superficial structure of the problem.

Brain regions involved in conscious identification of colour are probably left-sided, perhaps because it involves a process of categorisation and naming;288 however, it would appear that the perception of colour in mental imagery under normal circumstances activates only the right fusiform area, not the left,289 and imaging studies, lesion studies

An inability to recognise faces is called prosopagnosia, and follows right-hemisphere lesions.241

The right hemisphere plays an important role in what is known as ‘theory of mind’, a capacity to put oneself in another’s position and see what is going on in that person’s mind.

Food, however, and musical instruments, presumably because of the intimate way in which they take part in the life of the body, sort with the living rather than the non-living.

Don’t think, though, that this categorising drive has a life of its own only in people who we regard as ill. It’s at work all the time in all of us. As Henry Maudsley put it: we have a sufficiently strong propensity not only to make divisions in knowledge where there are none in nature, and then to impose the divisions on nature, making the reality

In general, then, the left hemisphere’s tendency is to classify, where the right hemisphere’s is to identify individuals.