The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

Virtually all insights involved a change in understanding … a surprising number of insights were triggered by inconsistencies and contradictions. The insights that were triggered by contradictions seemed to depend on the person taking the anomalous data point seriously rather than attempting to explain it away …

This emphasis on simultaneity applies not just to individual experiences, but to whole categories of existence. Thus we are used to thinking of the individual and the general, the temporal and the eternal, the embodied and the disembodied as exclusive pairings; whereas they are not only inclusive, but – as it was possibly Goethe’s greatest insight

following a stroke affecting the speech area of the left frontal lobe, known as Broca’s area, improvement can result from temporarily disrupting the corresponding area of the right hemisphere.55 Such studies ‘are difficult to understand in terms of traditional ideas that homologous cortical regions co-operate with each other across the midline.’56

it is the left hemisphere’s process of apprehending the world that gives rise to the very idea of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ – a false dichotomy. As I suggested in Part I, there is, rather, as disclosed by the mode of the right hemisphere, a ‘betweenness’ to reality; a world that comes into being for us, which, to paraphrase Wordsworth, we ha

Alfred Kazin wrote that we should trust to the contradictions and see them out. Never annul one force to give supremacy to another. The contradiction itself is the reality in all its manifoldness … the more faithful [man] is to his perception of the contradiction, the more he is open to what there is for him to know … a contradiction that is faced

Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. The altered nature of attention can appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space, eviscerate emotion, and render the living inanimate. It is a profoundly moral act.

In a classical mechanism, causation is linear and can be clearly outlined. However, in biological systems, causation tends to follow not straight lines, but spirals, involving recursive loops, and multiple causes leading to multiple effects across a network, with sometimes competing factors cross-regulating one another, reciprocally interacting, an

As J.B.S. Haldane put it, using the image of fire – pure energy – rather than water, ‘a flame is like an animal in that you cannot stop it, examine the parts, and start it again, like a machine. Change is part of its very being.’55

Part III is the recompense for the painstaking examination of the portals (Part I) and the paths (Part II) whereby we can come to know the world. I look at the nature of the world, as disclosed by each of these paths and all of our faculties, and conclude that it looks nothing like the one that is commonly portrayed, but something far more complex,

Much as the right hemisphere understands the need for the left, but the left does not understand the need for the right, generalists appreciate the need for specialists, while the specialist is less able to see the need for the generalist.