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
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
The right hemisphere, the so-called minor hemisphere, is in fact the one that knows, and more importantly the one that understands, more.
The arts and humanities need to remember this: they don't have to feel inferior to science, and try to model themselves on them. Like physicists, but in a quite different way, they are in the ultimately important business of understanding the world and making sense of it, not just learning how to manipulate it.
This has the profoundest consequences for the way it sees the world, when contrasted with the take of the right hemisphere, which sees things as a whole, never as isolated particles independent of a context.
Only the left hemisphere encodes tools and machines – you will remember that the purpose of the left hemisphere is to allow us to manipulate the world, not to understand it.