divided brain
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.
from The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning by Iain McGilchrist
divided brain
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
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re-presented (interesting)
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,
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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
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certainty as an useful illusion
Some elegant research into gesture and speech reveals that thought begins and ends in the right hemisphere, passing through the necessary staging post of the left hemisphere, where it is put into serial sentences. This follows a typical pattern in the way the hemispheres relate: the origins and the end lie in the right hemisphere's world, but it is
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But there are still other paths to the abandonment of truth – darker than those we have discussed. In a world dominated by left hemisphere modes of being, two important developments could be predicted to proliferate: administrative control – evident in the decline of every civilisation – and machine learning. Both depend on algorithmic paths that a... See more
Iain McGilchrist • Moving on
"Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can’t see your own back (without mirrors).“
Robert Anton Wilson • Prometheus Rising
McGilchrist brings up again and again that the right hemisphere is more deeply connected with the body than the left one, and that it specializes in broad, open awareness — so our obvious choices are open awareness meditation and somatic meditation .
The go-to options for learning about these are:
The go-to options for learning about these are:
- Reggie Ray
- Loch Kelly
- Judith Blackstone
- My Somatic Reson
River Kenna • Solving McGilchrist's Big Problem (or, fix right hemisphere imbalance with these 7 weird tricks?)
The left hemisphere world is characterised by what is familiar and fully expressible in language; the right hemisphere is more open to and attentive towards whatever is ‘other’, and can be only indirectly expressed. The left hemisphere is less capable of Keats’s ‘negative capability’ – ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritab... See more