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 lik...