One of the books that's really influenced they way I think is Iain McGilcgrist's The Master and his Emissary, and The Divided Brain the search for meaning. One of the best short explanations of his work is found on you tube the following link should get you there:
I was interested in his idea that the left side of the mind is producing a filter that stops the right side of our minds from operating at it natural pace, and this seems to be increasing as we get more and more technically minded, and the oddity that more technically minded tends to treat mind and body as machine and as a machine it can be reduced. It seems to explain the rash statements of fundamentalist atheists and their limitations.
The reductionist view of life, where we are reduced to 'nothing but' is a bleak place with no room for those who do not conform, who are not useful in some pragmatic way.
It also provided a reason why poetry, art, music and creativity are important and should be encouraged if we are to develop into a society which is more caring and grounded.
Quotes from The Master and his Emissary:
Love
"We are being asked to believe the palpable nonsense that love was 'nothing but' an over excitement in the ventral palladium".
Attention
"We can only know the world as we have inevitably shaped it by the nature of our attention... What we do not expect to find, we just will not see, much elegant research demonstrates we are essentially blind to what we do not think is there.
Better not Faster
"A doctor, priest, etc is unlike a machine, not necessarily better for doing more, doing it faster and doing it according to a standard specification. In fact each of these machine driven demands almost certainly makes things worse,"
In a machine age Iain has hit upon an important argument for simple living.
Below is my KIndle notebook taken from Iains book.
Introduction: The Master and His Emissary
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There is, apparently, vast redundancy.
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This is important because the most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world.
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An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.
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Science is neither more nor less than patient and detailed attention to the world, and is integral to our understanding of it and of ourselves.
PART ONE: THE DIVIDED BRAIN
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And, in the ultimate case of the modern human brain, its twin hemispheres have been characterised as two autonomous systems. 11
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But the fundamental problem in explaining the experience of consciousness is that there is nothing else remotely like it to compare it with: it is itself the ground of all experience.
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Mind has the characteristics of a process more than of a thing; a becoming, a way of being, more than an entity. Every individual mind is a process of interaction with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves according to its own private history.
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By standing back from the animal immediacy of our experience we are able to be more empathic with others, who we come to see, for the first time, as beings like ourselves.
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It is just one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed.
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relaxation, in other words – favours creativity because it permits broadening of attention,
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The one exception to the right hemisphere superiority for the expression of emotion is anger. 256 Anger is robustly connected with left frontal activation. 257 Aggression is motivating and dopamine plays a crucial role in the rewards it offers. 258
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Depression per se is probably associated with reduced right posterior activity in addition to increased right frontal activity in most cases, 297 although as one might predict threat monitoring is a right-posterior activity.
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the importance of metaphor is that it underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art.
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‘If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture's purpose was to disclose them.’
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and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.
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There is evidence that (a) those who are somewhat depressed are more realistic, including in self-evaluation;
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The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because being depressed gives you insight. 460
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The more we are aware of and empathically connected to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, the more we are likely to suffer.
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only humans with their left prefrontal cortex have the capacity for deliberate malice. But then only humans, with their right prefrontal cortex, are capable of compassion.
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Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle, for that matter, but are irreducible aspects of the phenomenal world, like colour.
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This conclusion has not been universally welcomed. There are a number of reasons, but one stands out, at least as far as concerns geneticists. Developments must demonstrate evolutionary advantage. Language, it is reasoned, gives a huge advantage in the power it confers to its possessor: but what has music to do with power – what advantage can it yield?
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So Oliver Sacks writes: This primal role of music is to some extent lost today, when we have a special class of composers and performers, and the rest of us are often reduced to passive listening. One has to go to a concert, or a church or a musical festival, to recap ture the collective excitement and bonding of music. In such a situation, there seems to be an actual binding of nervous systems …47
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Music is communication – but it speaks to us, not about things. It does not refer (to a third party): it has an ‘I– thou’ existence, not an ‘I– it’ existence.
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Einstein wrote that ‘the words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in the mechanism of my thought …’
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What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.
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In normal subjects, restricting hand movement produces an adverse effect on the content and fluency of speech. 77 Ramachandran even reports the case of
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Broca's area, the motor speech area of the frontal lobe, involves certain specialised nerves called mirror neurones which are involved in finger movements, and are also activated in watching others carry out hand movements.
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Norman Geschwind ventured that language may not, after all, have originated in a drive to communicate – that came later – but as a means of mapping the world. 97 I would agree with that and go further. It is a means of manipulating the world.
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Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body.
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Metaphor is language's cure for the ills entailed on us by language (much as, I believe, the true process of philosophy is to cure the ills entailed on us by philosophising).
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The point of metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light.
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Yet with the rise of Saussurian linguistics in the twentieth century, it has become fashionable to insist on the arbitrary nature of the sign – a fascinating and counterintuitive move, designed to emphasise the ‘freedom’ of language as far as possible from the trammels of the body and of the physical world it describes.
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the last hundred years or so, towards the ever greater repudiation of our embodied being, in favour of an abstracted, cerebralised, machine-like version of ourselves that has taken hold on popular thinking
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Wittgenstein's famous phrase: ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’ – not a virtual representation of life, but a form of life. 118
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language originates as an embodied expression of emotion, that is communicated by one individual ‘inhabiting’ the body, and therefore the emotional world, of another;
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We can, through our ability to imitate, make our own choices about the direction we take, mould our thinking and behaviour, and therefore our human future, according to our own values, rather than waiting to be driven by the blind process of genetic competition, which knows only one value, that of utility.
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Where the left hemisphere's relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere's appears to be one of reaching out – just that.
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Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved that that would always inevitably be the case, that there will always be truths within any system that cannot be proved in terms of that system.
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Failure to take into account context, inability to understand Gestalt forms, an inappropriate demand for precision where none can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance.
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In real life one has come across people who take humorous remarks literally, or who laboriously attempt to replace understanding by the application of absolute rules and come up with a paradox, and they are usually somewhere along the Asperger spectrum.
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We should remember that in mammals the social bonding mechanisms are based on learning and are certainly more pervasive than the innate mechanisms for ‘kin recognition’. We can learn to love other animals … the acquisition of nurturant behaviour leaves a seemingly indelible print on a creature's way of being in the world. 32
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The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’.
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This idea of truth-as-unconcealing contrasts with the idea of truth-as-correctness, which is static, unchanging.
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Heidegger's somewhat gnomic saying, in der Unverborgenheit waltet die Verbergung (‘ in unconcealment dwells hiddenness and safekeeping’)
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As things become dulled and inauthentic, they become conceptualised rather than experienced; they are taken out of their living context, a bit like ripping the heart out of a living body.
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Scientism, the illicit extension of the methods and categories of science beyond their legitimate domain, is one such form, and the conception of the unity of the sciences and the methodological homogeneity of the natural sciences and of humanistic studies one such myth. It is the task of philosophy to defend us against such illusions of reason.
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‘Everything is what it is and not another thing,’ 83 an expression of the right hemisphere's passionate
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‘Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.’ 87
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Pascal, who, mathematician that he was, famously asserted that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
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is said that the meaning of the Hebrew words translated as ‘good and evil’, in the Genesis myth of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ‘mean precisely the useful and the useless, in other words, what is useful for survival and what is
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There is neurophysiological evidence that conscious awareness lags behind unconscious apprehension by nearly half a second.
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Detachment has a deeply ambiguous nature. The cool, detached stance of the scientific or bureaucratic mind ultimately may lead where we do not wish to follow.
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What we attend to, and how we attend to it, changes it and changes us. Seeing is not just ‘the most efficient mechanism for acquiring knowledge’, as scientists tend to see it.
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This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning. 153 It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists?
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and belief, once more, as in their etymology, are profoundly connected. 156 It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.
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Wittgenstein saw greater wisdom in mythic than in scientific accounts of the world, which ‘leave us with the distinct impression that everything has been accounted for; they give us the illusion of explaining a world that we might do better to wonder at …
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Too much self-awareness destroys not just spontaneity, but the quality that makes things live; the performance of music or dance, of courtship, love and sexual behaviour, humour, artistic creation and religious devotion become mechanical, lifeless, and may grind to a halt if we are too self-aware.
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significance, and it is relevant that in schizophrenia, which simulates an overactive left-hemisphere state, there is, as Louis Sass has shown, a perspectival slippage, a loss of grip on the frame of reference.
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Some fascinating research confirms that affective judgment is not dependent on the outcome of a cognitive process.
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As Nietzsche wrote, ‘thoughts are the shadows of our feelings— always darker, emptier, simpler’.
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He points out that very little brain activity is in fact conscious (current estimates are certainly less than 5 per cent, and probably less than 1 per cent),
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Philosophers and psychologists who champion the view that our mental processes are akin to those of a computer ‘have yet to notice that we only become aware of our skills when things are not going smoothly or when someone performing an experiment has given us a task in which we have no prior experience or skill.
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The left hemisphere builds systems, where the right does not. It therefore allows elaboration of its own workings over time into systematic thought
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But there can be no evidence within reason that yields the premises from which reason must begin, or that validates the process of reasoning itself – those premises, and the leap of faith in favour of reason, have to come from behind and beyond, from intuition or experience.
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Nature turned into ‘one gigantic filling station’, as he once graphically put it. 64
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the left hemisphere would rather believe authority, ‘what it says on this piece of paper’, than the evidence of its own senses.
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Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, a blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary Western life.
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dissociation involves a functional superiority of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere. 74 The ultimately dissociative
PART TWO: HOW THE BRAIN HAS SHAPED OUR WORLD
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In fact imitation is imagination's most powerful path into whatever is Other than ourselves.
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Children eagerly imitate other human beings, but do not imitate mechanical devices that are carrying out the same actions.
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The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power. In an older language, this is ‘sympathetic magic’; and I believe it is as necessary to the very process of knowing as it is to the constitution and subsequent naturalisation of identities
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Trackers, in cultures dependent on hunting, learn to ‘get inside’ the animal they are tracking, to reflect it as much as possible in their own being, what it must have been feeling and thinking as it left its track:
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This was understood by Pascal, who realized that the path to virtue was imitation of the virtuous, engagement in virtuous habits – the foundation of all monastic traditions.
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The overwhelming importance of mimesis points to the conclusion that we had better select good models to imitate, because as a species, not only as individuals, we will become what we imitate.
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That is what I believe has happened in recent Western history. In our contemporary world, skills have been downgraded and subverted into algorithms: we are busy imitating machines.
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The right hemisphere prefers vertical lines, but the left hemisphere prefers horizontal lines.
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So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.
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Poets are to be banished from the Republic.
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But, as Freeman admits, there was resistance to such formulations in early Christianity, as well, and Christians as much as pagans suffered under Theodosius’ decree.
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The passion is for control, for fixity, for certainty; and that comes not with religion alone, but with a certain cast of mind, the cast of the left hemisphere.
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Christianity, which is in one sense the most powerful mythos in advocacy of the incarnate world, and of the value of the individual, that the world has ever known, also ended up a force for conformity, abstraction, and the suppression of independent thought.
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Magic is the way that the left hemisphere sees powers over which it has no control. This is similar to the paranoia which the left hemisphere displays in schizophrenia,
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one of the most damaging legacies of the Reformation. Continuing the idea that sacrament has been reduced to information transfer,
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(Note that these acronyms start with Roman bureaucracy (e.g. SPQR) and are, I would say, a hallmark of the bureaucratic mind – look at modern officialdom.)
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Weber held that the cognitive structure of Protestantism was closely associated with capitalism: both involve an exaggerated emphasis on individual agency, and a discounting of what might be called ‘communion’.
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In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity – the Word is made Flesh – becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word.
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One might think that odd in view of, for example, the received version of Galileo's dispute with the Church – a piece of hagiography that suits the dogma of our own age, that Galileo must have been the champion of reason in the face of irrational bigotry on the part of the Church.
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If Descartes had observed that caveat, he would never have made the fatal mistake of believing ‘that I could take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true’. 80 That was the fallacy that was to derail the next three centuries of Western thought.
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All rationality can do is to provide internal consistency once the system is up and running.
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schizophrenia is not characterised by a Romantic disregard for rational thinking and a regression into a more primitive, unself-conscious, emotive realm of the body and the senses, but by an excessively detached, hyperrational, reflexively self-aware, disembodied and alienated condition.
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the nature of the attention we bring to bear on anything alters what we find there.
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this Cartesian world view would lead to devitalisation, and in social terms, to bureaucratisation.
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Thus when Mrs Elton, in Jane Austen's Emma, enthusiastically describes her proposed picnic party in the grounds of Mr Knightley's house, she is firmly put in her place: ‘There is to be no form or parade – a sort of gipsy party’, gushes Mrs Elton: ‘We are to walk about your gardens, and gather the strawberries ourselves, and sit under trees; – and whatever else you may like to provide, it is to be all out of doors – a table spread in the shade, you know. Every thing as natural and simple as possible. Is not that your idea?’ ‘Not quite. My idea of the simple and the natural will be to have the table spread in the dining-room. The nature and the simplicity of gentlemen and ladies, with their servants and furniture, I think is best observed by meals within doors. When you are tired of eating strawberries in the garden, there shall be cold meat in the house.’ Nature was to be treated
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The American Revolution, with its famous claims for the individual right to pursue happiness, expresses the left hemisphere's belief that any good – happiness, for example – should be susceptible to the pursuit of the will, aided by rationality.
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Fraternity too lives in the relationships that are formed in the communities of kinship and society made possible by evolution of the right frontal lobe (not ‘Society’, a conceptual construct of the left hemisphere).
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‘It will be a society which tries to keep its citizens in “perpetual childhood” it will seek to preserve their happiness, but it chooses to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness.’
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Goethe deplored the tendency for us, like children that go round the back of a mirror to see what's there, to try to find a reality behind the particularity of the archetypal phenomenon. 12
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forever separated from the simple pleasures of rusticity by his awareness that true pleasure belongs only to those who are not self-aware.
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Reverence is no abasement, they understood, but with as much truth an exaltation: a sense of belonging to something greater than oneself, which for the Romantics was the phenomenal world, and what one could see through it.
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This philosophy, known as materialism, was explicitly based on a view that science is the only foundation for knowing and understanding the world.
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Aristotle had warned, each kind of knowledge has its proper context: it cannot be assumed that what is rational for the geometer is rational for the physician, or for the politician.
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It is an uncomfortable fact that Hitler, too, was later to write that the Aryan is ‘the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth.‘ 121 In sweeping away the past, it seems that the concept of hubris, which the Greeks had understood as lying at the heart of all tragedy, was lost.
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At the same time, science preached that it was exempt from the historicisation or contextualisation that was being used to undermine Christianity in the nineteenth century,
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This doctrine of the infallibility of science is also a result of the Enlightenment failure to understand the contextual nature of all thought, what Dewey called ‘the dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems’.
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of television and the internet, which between them have created a largely insubstantial replica of ‘life’ as processed by the left hemisphere
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‘Traditional art invites a look’, she wrote. ‘[ Modernist art] engenders a stare’. 28 The stare is not known for building bridges with others, or the world at large: instead it suggests alienation, either a need to control, or a feeling of terrified helplessness.
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When implicit meaning is not understood, as Wittgenstein surmised, paranoia is the result:
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The high stimulus society in which we live is represented through advertising as full of vibrancy and vitality, but, as
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advertisers know only too well, its condition is one of boredom, and the response to boredom.
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Scheler speaks of our ‘ “culture” of entertainment’ as a collection of ‘extremely merry things, viewed by extremely sad people who do not know what to do with them.’
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In England schizophrenia was rare indeed, if it existed at all, before the eighteenth century, but increased dramatically in prevalence with industrialisation.
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mental health is better in rural than non-rural populations and deteriorates in tandem with population density.
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There is even evidence of alterations in structural brain asymmetry in borderline personality disorder, with strong leftward deviations in the parietal region, especially marked in those who demonstrate clear dissociative states.
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Increasing virtuality and distance from other human lives tends to induce a feeling of an alien, perhaps hostile environment. Social isolation leads to exaggerated fear responses, violence and aggression, 77 and violence and aggression often lead, in turn, to isolation.
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At the same time people with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology and administration
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The left hemisphere ‘creates’ newness by recombining in a novel fashion what is already known,
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Nazism is ‘the very epitome of the modern’, writes the historian of modernism, Modris
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One might not want to go as far as Paul Virilio does, when he makes the direct connection between the German Expressionists (who did call for murder) and Ilse Koch, the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’, who turned prisoners skins into art brut (the Russian poet Mayakovsky also called for skulls to be turned into
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where, for example, performance artists display material that would normally call forth strong emotional reactions, and then undercut, or ironise it, this is a form of coercive self-aggrandisement.
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The trend in criticism towards a superiority born of the ability to read the code is perhaps first seen in the culture of psychoanalysis, which, writes Sass, claims to reveal ‘the all-too-worldly sources of our mystical, religious, or aesthetic leanings, and to give its initiates a sense of knowing superiority’.
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but the point that it is built into the structure, and that one needs to be constantly vigilant not to succumb to it, remains valid.
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Thomas Nagel (‘ Certain forms of perplexity – for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life – seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to these problems’);
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Both believer and atheist may quite coherently hold the position that any assertion about God will be untrue; but their reasons are diametrically opposed. The difference is not in what is said, but in the disposition each holds toward the world.
Conclusion: The Master Betrayed
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The concepts of skill and judgment, once considered the summit of human achievement, but which come only slowly and silently with the business of living, would be discarded in favour of quantifiable and repeatable processes.
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The authors list them as: the necessity of procedures that are known, and in principle knowable; anonymity; organisability; predictability; a concept of justice that is reduced to mere equality; and explicit abstraction.
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Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion.
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Following the left hemisphere’s path has already involved the destruction and despoliation of the natural world,
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Over the last twenty-five years, levels of satisfaction with life have actually declined in the US, a period during which there has been an enormous increase in prosperity; and there may even have been a significant inverse relationship between economic growth and happiness there.
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The hedonic treadmill makes sure of that: modern consumers everywhere are in a ‘permanent state of unfulfilled desire’.
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happiness reaches a plateau at an average national income that is remarkably low compared with most people’s aspirations, variably estimated as between $ 10,000– $ 20,000 (£ 7,500– £ 15,000) per annum. 14
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Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, ‘is that happiness is best predicted by’ – let’s guess: if not wealth, then health? No, not that either, but –
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‘the breadth and depth of one’s social connections’.
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In fact the positive effects of social integration rival the detrimental effects of smoking, obesity, high blood pressure and physical
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inactivity. 21 According to Putnam, ‘statistically
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Just as those who believe that religions are mistaken, or even that they have proved to be a greater source of harm than good, must recognise that they have given rise to many valuable and beautiful things,
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This shift is not about evolution, nor even about emotion versus cognition: it is about two modes of being, each with its cognitive and emotional aspects, and each operating at a very high level.
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the body becomes just the first thing we see out there, and we feel impelled to shape it to our sense of how it ‘should’ be. In
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Such a tendency to see the body as an assemblage of parts, or an illness as a series of discrete issues, without reference to the whole (including often vitally important emotional, psychological and spiritual issues),
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who is sick? And science itself, our science … is scientific method perhaps no more than fear of and flight from pessimism? A subtle defence against – truth? Or, to put it in moral terms, is it something like cowardice and insincerity?
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The price of their achievement is that they must make themselves open, even to ridicule, rather than shelter behind a self-protective carapace of ironic knowingness and cynicism.
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Wittgenstein also saw the true process of philosophy as a way of transcending or healing the effects of philosophy in the philosophical mind:
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In Zen Buddhism, according to Soiku Shigematsu, the abbot of Shogenji temple, ‘a word is a finger that points at the moon. The goal of Zen pupils is the moon itself, not the pointing finger. Zen masters, therefore, will never stop cursing words and letters.’ 57
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Iwata argues that among the Japanese as well as most southeast Asian people, whether the people are formally Buddhists or Christians, there exists an intuition of animism.
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Where Chinese students try to retain elements of opposing perspectives by seeking to synthesise them, American students try to determine which is correct so that they can reject the other.
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Emphasis on high self-esteem as a sign of mental health is a relatively recent, Western phenomenon, and is far from being an unmixed good.
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People in the West characteristically over-estimate their abilities, exaggerate their capacity to control essentially uncontrollable events, and hold over-optimistic views of the future. In fact, so much does our happiness depend on such illusions, that, in the West, lacking them is even correlated with psychiatric problems.
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Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.
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Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith.
