Review #2: The Divided Brain and The Search For Meaning: Why Are We So Unhappy?

God, I've been falling behind on these, and this is going to be shitty and rushed, just so I can get it out, which is awful, but I guess that is the nature of these things.

I read a short 10,000 word essay called The Divided Brain and The Search For Meaning in late January by a lecturer who came to my university and spoke about how our brain physiology affects our understanding of the world, and it was a brilliant lecture, my favourite of the year.

The idea is that the left-hemisphere 'is' representationally-minded, substituting the richness of the world for symbols and icons in order to understand more quickly, breaking down the bigger picture into its smaller parts, in a word, logical.

The right-hemisphere 'is' more inclusive of the wholes, understands all-encompassing ideas that the left hemisphere has trouble with,  deals with empathy and the more detailed recognition of facts about life, like human faces and the details of nature, i.e. not iconastic like the other hemisphere; in a word ... I don't really know. But it's wholer, I guess.

The author wants to suggest that the former ought to be the emissary and the latter should be the master, but he worries that the emissary is getting out of hand, believing that the true power lies within him, and in his longer book (The Master and His Emissary), details what the predominance of "left-brain" thought is doing to society.

The short essay covers much of the same topics he spoke about in the talk he gave at my uni, but it's still truly worth a read and I recommend it. His approach isn't new-agey; it's backed by research and is scientific, but is humanistic in its scope. Which, I guess, reflects how he believes we ought to be in our approach to life, and which hemisphere we train and use.

One day I will read his longer tome, his magnus opus, but for now the short essay and talk will placate me.

Recommended! Iain McGilchrist, check him out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SoE update

According to the Google Reader counter, more than 5 people read this blog, which is impressive, considering a lot of what I do is literally just try to figure out how I should structure my days. Not very sexy or rock and roll. This is what this post is about. So the first week of the schedule of equilibrium went okay and the second week worse. I'm trying to judge where I'm going wrong. I added 2 hours of Miscellaneous in order to cover for shower time and other little things that I felt need not necessarily count as free time, or any of the other categories. That wasn't such a bad idea. I think, however, trying to keep consistent every day of the week how much time I allocate to each category is what makes things difficult, considering that each day asks of me different things. But at the same time I don't want the amount of time I spend on a particular thing to be arbitrary either, so I want there to be some consistency. Mondays are my busiest days work-wise, so ...
Read more

A Letter To A Friend (On Hedonism)

I was thinking about you the other hour and how by degrees of consideration I have begun to understand the pressure you once and possibly still do feel to achieve greatly, and how you consequently personally desire to do greatly, regardless perhaps of the impracticalities of such desires. I considered my own situation, as one must do in order to understand another, with the express desire to pinpoint the source of this endless undercurrent of guilt that courses through me in the knowledge that I am not doing all that I should be. I thought of Sartre who says that feelings such as guilt, anxiety, and apprehension presuppose the Other, that is: other people, and how if the consideration of the Other was absent, so too would anxiety, guilt, or apprehension. To me, at least compared to you, it always seemed to me that I do my A levels and I study what I study for myself, and that my grades reflect myself and that the sphere encompasses me and me only. But that was naturally, clearly, and d...
Read more

What Am I Interested In? [The Eternal Question]

I guess what I want from Philosophy is the ability to stir the passions of people -- an interesting way, a way that appeals to myself too, to look at the world and understand it. I don't mean I have to move people; I'm not so much about moving people. That's politics. I just want to see the world in a more clear, helpful way, without frill and pomp, but still with beauty and majesty, and I guess that's what I want to get out of philosophy and eventually get into my writing. I want to touch people's passions in such a way that they see differently, but this has nothing to do with moving people, or making them do anything. It's an internal thing. I'm trying to figure out the most moving regions of philosophy. Philosophy is very wide, and much of it is interesting, but there comes a point when you have to figure out what it is you're studying it for, and focus more on that area, otherwise you will only be weak in many areas, as opposed to strong or pro...
Read more