the Chomskyan theory of universal grammar.113 The belief that the structures of analytic language are hard-wired into our brains helps to perpetuate the idea that the brain is a cognitive machine, a computer that is fitted with a rule-based programme for structuring the world, rather than its being an inextricable part of an embodied, living organi

is not a gradual putting together of bits of information, but an ‘aha!’ phenomenon – it comes all at once.

the right hemisphere will empathise with, identify with, and aim to imitate only what it knows to be another living being, rather than a mechanism

What if one hemisphere is, apparently, attuned to whatever is new?

The left hemisphere's principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used.

We know that we are neither as active in choosing where we direct our attention, nor as passive in the process of seeing, as this account suggests.

This kind of knowing may help us to understand, rather than simply to amass information about, a host of things in the world, animate and inanimate.

Any one thing can be understood only in terms of another thing, and ultimately that must come down to a something that is experienced, outside the system of signs (i.e. by the body).

The right hemisphere perceives that there is permanence even where there is flow.