“He comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”

—Martin Heidegger, 1949

Value drives us all.

The attention of the left hemisphere reveals, principally, only two of its forms. As McGilchrist put it:

“Utility and power are effectively the only value goals of the left hemisphere.”

In a world where its myopic modality reigned supreme:

We would expect to see the championing of manipulation and extraction, above all else.

It is in this world, he himself will ‘have be taken as standing-reserve.’ It is in this world, he loses his ability to engage with anything but the hammer:

so it all turns to nails.

Preface: Interconnexion and Contextualisation

These were the wise words of a man who warned that the ethos of post-industrial socialisation has been underpinned by an education that trains for efficiency instead of ‘character’, building a collective that thinks critically about parts but neglects the whole moral purpose.

During his years at Harvard, he was an ardent scholar of the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel, whom, in 1956, he even named his favourite philosopher, having earlier in his life extolled:

“Life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.”

…

Who was this mysterious scholar?

You may have heard of him.

His name was Martin Luther King Jr.

Context is everything.

When a theory—especially one as multifaceted as the hemisphere hypothesis—is fragmented into a soundbite or two-page summary, its value is inevitably going to be diluted. The decontextualised nature of contemporary encounters with hemisphere theory - considering, as well, the stigma and popular dogmas attached to the field - might help to explain how it is that the mainstream is failing to incorporate the findings of laterality research which holds such clear and far-reaching implications for philosophy, culture and our scientific understanding of the human being.

“While it is true that the old pop psychology of hemisphere differences has been shown to be largely false, it does not follow that the topic itself has been somehow ‘debunked’ – just that our first thoughts have been superseded, as they were likely to be. People who think the topic is no longer important are stuck in the past; and themselves embrace a myth that is well overdue debunking… For example, I refer to approx. 5,500 papers in The Matter with Things alone: the argument that there’s ‘not enough evidence’ might have been true forty years ago, but it won’t wash now.”1

I carried out a brief exploration of some of that research in my last article, which I strongly recommend reading prior to this.

But, really, you don’t need to take any of this from him or I:

‘It’s odd that such an important subject has been neglected’ indeed.

Clearly, a great deal of confusion surrounding McGilchrist’s work stems from people - including professional scientists - not having actually read his material. Many would encounter his philosophy summed up in a snappy headline and think to themselves ‘differences between brain hemispheres? Providing insight into the structure of the mind and the world at large? I don't think so.’

But it is so. And if it weren’t, I sincerely doubt that his books would be receiving such widespread acclaim—not only from award-winning neuroscientists, but from some of the world’s most respected authors, physicists and doctors, as well:

“This is the most extraordinary book. It’s got evidence on every page of a mind that is stocked so richly and has meditated so long and so clearly on the most important subject we can face. I can’t recommend it enough: it’s an astonishing book, that will change many, many people’s lives. I have spent a decade absorbing the vision of McGilchrist’s previous book; I shall be happy to spend the rest of my life with this one, and still be learning things when I get to the end.”

—Phillip Pullman, at the How To Academy, and ‘Book of the Year’, in the New Statesman

“Breath-taking … a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and wisdom … I have never before encountered anything quite like it.”

—Dr. Phillip Ball, scientist, contributing editor at Nature, and one of the world’s most distinguished and noteworthy science communicators.

“Undoubtedly the best and profoundest description of the anatomy and function of our two brain hemispheres and of the different ways of our “being in the world” … a great achievement and an enormous gift.”

—Professor Jürg Kesselring, Professor of Neurology, University of Bern, and Neuroscience Center Zürich (ZNZ), University of Zürich. (This one’s especially cool because Kesselring is the only physician who can say they’ve served as Chair on the World Health Organisation’s working group for MS and played the cello in the movie inspired by McGilchrist’s work, “The Divided Brain”.)

Might the only safe way to wake a sleepwalker be an interception of dreams?

It’s crucial we do not rush these things. McGilchrist’s thought rests on the intersection of two “relatively complex” subjects, philosophy and neuropsychiatry, which is to say that the potential for misconception is considerable—especially to the unfamiliar reader, who is likely approaching truth in the exact way McGilchrist is calling into question. I also understand that not everybody feels as if they have the time to parse through 2000 pages of ‘hemisphere philosophy’, however clear and engaging McGilchrist’s writing may be. It is for this reason I am attempting to convey his message in a way that is all in one place and more accessible to the general population. That said, I must reinforce that these articles are in no way a replacement for engaging with the many lectures, dialogues and books he has put out over the years—many of which, are completely free to the public.

Putting it very bluntly, McGilchrist believes that we are living through the most left-hemispheric period in civilisational history.

Being both an Oxford humanist scholar and Emeritus consultant psychiatrist, McGilchrist occupied a unique position enabling him to examine the development of Western civilisation and analyse the periods in which societies have exhibited this all-too-familiar, left-skewed cognitive imbalance. Again, very crudely speaking:

He found that, in contrast with the Homeric/pre-Socratic Greek, Renaissance and Romantic periods; in which the left-hemisphere’s [LH] fragmenting modality was ‘balanced’ by the right-hemisphere’s holistic vision, periods of LH-ascendency—such as the Hellenistic-Roman world and the Reformation—consistently demonstrate a pernicious turn towards abstraction, bureaucracy and rigid, self-referential system-building. Culturally, LH-usurpation manifests as a growing distrust for metaphor; what is tacit, intuitive, and ambiguous, shrouding a culture’s ability to recognise multiple meanings simultaneously. This rise in literalism ultimately ends with language, symbols and conceptual referents replacing the embodied, living realities they were made to re-present. McGilchrist argues the same is happening now: only to a hitherto “unprecedented” extent.

I wanted to make it unquestionably clear, in this preface, that many of our world’s best and brightest, from professors of physics:

“McGilchrist shows us the world afresh, and ourselves within it. The matter with things is that there are no things, because all is flow and relationship. And the matter with political, social, and personal things is that we have lost the balance of our mental hemispheres” (Dr. Steane, Oxford)

…to legendary professors of psychology:

“this is a book of surpassing, even world-historical ambition, and—still more rare—one that delivers on its promise” (Dr. Sass, Rutgers)

…are in absolute agreement with him. Professor Charles Foster (a practicing barrister, veterinarian and professor of medical law and ethics at Oxford) exclaimed, after reading The Matter with Things (2021), “this is one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever… Put everything else aside. Read this now to know what sort of creature you are and what sort of place you inhabit.”

It should go without saying that I believe Dr. Foster’s estimation is absolutely correct. McGilchrist shows us, in a way that is profound, lucid and empirical, exactly where we are going wrong, and, equally as significant—what we can do to steer ourselves in the right direction.

All I can hope for by now is a couple fragments of your receptive attention. Verily, I believe that the salience of McGilchrist’s hypothesis is unparalleled, not only for those in pursuit of pragmatic scientific and philosophical discovery, but for the flourishing of life—human or otherwise—as a whole.

§1: Reductive Thinking and the Hemisphere Hypothesis

As Dr. King, Jr. (above) and McGilchrist have pointed out, people don’t like to think—or aren’t trained to think—in integrative, holistic systems. Everything needs to be linear, siloed and reducible:

“I get this a lot:

‘the neuroscience is fine, no problem with that. But then you start trying to relate it to the world of ideas, and I’m not comfortable with that.’

It’s like neuroscience is just something which just goes on in a lab and has no implications to human beings—and that’s not a position that any clinician would take, because if you’re a neurologist, a psychiatrist, or a neuropsychiatrist—you see, all the time, the evidence that—surprise-surprise—the brain is quite important for the experience of a human being; and it changes in predictable ways, what that human experiences.

The other kind of group are people in the humanities who go: ‘look, the neuroscience may be right—I really can’t judge—but your analysis of civilisational history is fascinating; I don’t think it really needs all this neuroscience.’

So you get these two factions, each of them saying ‘as far as our stuff goes, yes that’s right—but why put these together?’ Now that is fascinating, because I think it’s part of the way in which our whole intellectual world has fallen apart into silos…

(McGilchrist, 2024 - in conversation with Dr. Andrew Davis and Dr. Matthew Segall)

Such a response, from scientists and laymen alike, absolutely reflects the fragmentary, reductive; ultimately left-hemispheric approach to truth that plagues most of modern intellectual life. Furthermore, it should be clear that this way of entirely missing the actual point is far from limited to McGilchrist’s field of neuropsychiatry. There is, very clearly, a similar sentiment echoed across the life sciences.

As the renowned vanguard of synthetic and developmental biology Dr. put it in a 2025 interview, also with Dr. :

“Sometimes when we show some of these things that we’ve discovered—and I want to be clear it’s not just me, right, I have a lab full of amazing people that work on this stuff—somebody says: ‘oh, well that’s cool but you should stop talking about all this philosophical stuff; you don’t need it; any of these ideas: just do the experiments.’ And that just doesn’t work because, the reason we were able to do these experiments and somebody else didn’t do them decades earlier, is precisely because of these ideas. I want these ideas to be generative of new discoveries.”

What is clearly underemphasised in contemporary education is just how harmful the cultural schism between philosophy and science actually is. Science and philosophy interdigitate; informing and illuminating each other, as they have done for millennia—and as they must continue doing if genuine progress is to be made.

There is one particularly influential scientist (whom you may be familiar with) that constantly emphasised the co-constitutive nature of philosophy and science. He once wrote, in a letter to the physicist and philosopher Robert A. Thornton (1944):

“So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”

On another occasion this scientist claimed that, without philosophical thought, he “would have contributed nothing to science.”

His name was Albert Einstein.

So how could it be that science and philosophy’s love affair is so often disregarded by the intellectual West?

To get to this source of this hubris is precisely what McGilchrist, and Alfred North Whitehead before him, spent decades working on. ‘Who the hell is A.N. Whitehead?’, you may be wondering. A good and important question.

Many of you will have heard of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). The Nobel-prize winning Briton is—according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy—widely considered one of the two greatest logicians of the 20th-century. (The other being Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorems I will hopefully refrain from erroneously analogising.) As the author of numerous quintessential texts, Russell also greatly understood the importance of engaging with the practice:

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophise, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given.2

From 1900 to 1913, Russell co-authored Principia Mathematica, 3 volumes of foundational mathematics, said to be some of the most ‘influential and significant foundational works of the early 20th century.’ His co-author and teacher?—Alfred North Whitehead. We will return to him in due course.

The apparent chasm between science and philosophy is a profound error which, Dr. McGilchrist argues, may be traced back to the period which held the scientific revolution. This is a story for the next article but, briefly:

Scientism saw its emergence in accord with a narrowing of focus secondary to a preoccupation with utility and power: ‘which are effectively the only value goals of the left hemisphere.’ In the western 17th century, a receptive, open attitude ‘went out the window for science—as the ambition was that we’d soon know, understand and be able to manipulate everything’—which brought about a ‘neurotic concern with certainty’ characteristic of the left cerebral hemisphere.3

A major issue with this inversion of attentional dominance is that, from an evolutionary standpoint, the left hemisphere’s function was to ap-prehend—in the original sense of the word4 ; freeze, model and thus manipulate—the world. Its function was not to com-prehend5 or understand the world contextually, which—you guessed it—is thought to be the role of the right hemisphere’s attention.

The issues following the ascendancy of left-hemispheric thinking related to epistemology and ontology (how we know things and what we think exists) are omnipresent and will be explored at length in the next part of this series. As for now, I’d like to focus primarily on the social and political problems that these shifts in attention are ultimately related to. It should be clear that nothing McGilchrist says is to suggest that, somehow, a change in the brain is the cause of changes in culture. More accurately, it is changes in culture which are reflected in changes in the brain: it is a ‘reverberative’ system; the culture we inhabit changes the way we use - draw on the potential of - our brains.

Another misconception I want to forestall, before moving on, is thinking ‘a brain [hemisphere] cannot do all those things that people do.’ McGilchrist is well aware of this. Singling out a particular hemisphere is simply quicker than spelling out ‘a person relying on their left/right hemisphere would’, over and over.

The point stands: in the world of the left hemisphere, things are ‘closed down as far as possible and as quickly as possible,’ whereas the trend of the right hemisphere is the opposite: ‘to open things up to possibility; to act as, as V.S. Ramachandran called the right hemisphere, ‘the devil’s advocate’.’6 The left hemisphere, responsible for speech, thrives on confabulation: it has a confident answer for everything, yet only considers information that corroborates its own narrative and never admits to its errors. We need the right frontal lobes to inhibit the left hemisphere from prematurely espousing one’s point of view (and, of course, this is a statistical tendency; the division of labour is graded—but more often than not, patients with right frontal damage will lack this regulatory ability).

The general consensus across neuroscience is that the left hemisphere narrows its attention to familiar and highly specific things it can manipulate, while the right provides a much broader and open attention to the living environment.

But many seem to think it goes much, much deeper than that.

Considering I quoted philosophy’s head of PR, Alex O’ Connor, earlier in this series, I figure it can’t hurt to do the same now:

Good old from , in wrapping-up an interview recorded earlier this year, asked Alex: “what do you think, on your estimation, is the best idea you’ve encountered in the last year?”

O’Connor’s response:

“I want to say split-brain stuff—I’ve actually been thinking about split-brain stuff for longer than a year, but in the past year I’ve really begun to try consider the implications of the hemispheric/lateral divide of the brain for senses of self, personhood, consciousness, and that kind of stuff. I can’t exactly give you an idea there, I’m working my way through McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things—his, sort of, magnum opus, two-volume, 3-part philosophy. And he sort of says: I can’t really tell you what I think, I kind of just have to take you with me. We’re going to walk through some stuff, stop here and there to look from some vantage points, and hopefully by the end you’ll kind of get what I’m driving at.

I think he’s driving at something really important.

Most people agree that our brains are the centre of our conscious experiences—whether the brain produces consciousness or not—the brain is where it all happens, the brain is where we (if we are anywhere) seem to sit.

And the fact that there are like, two of them! Consistently, in every single nervous system we’ve ever studied, there’s an asymmetrical divide — even nematodes with like 308 neurons have an asymmetry in them. There seems to be some deep, deep evolutionary reason to keep them separate, to the extent that when the brain grows, the corpus callosum doesn’t grow. So the corpus callosum actually relatively shrinks as the brain evolves — it seems there is a really good reason to keep them apart.

Mammals are the only creatures that have corpus callosums, other animals just don’t even have that connective tissue. That’s got to mean something. And the fact the brain is the centre of everything we ever experience, ever; the centre of thought, of experience, of love, of passion, of art, of music—the fact that there are two of them, that seem to be in this kind of symbiotic relationship where sometimes they rub up against each other and sometimes they work together—that’s got to be like… so significant. And the reason I want to get through the rest of The Matter with Things is to unlock what that significance is.”

I think he’s absolutely right—and now I want to show you why.

§2: A Schizophrenic Age?

As O’ Connor pointed out, when we’re talking about hemisphere differences, we’re not just talking about the brain. A lot of people - and even neuroscientists - get stuck in a third-person analysis of data rather than engaging with how these attentional differences verifiably show up in the real, embodied, first-person lives and minds of human beings. Psychiatrists and neurologists know all too well that McGilchrist’s hypothesis maps onto the actual behaviour and perceptions of patients with hemispheric insults because they’ve seen it with their own eyes.

Many of my more psychologically-oriented peers on Substack would be familiar with the South African neuropsychoanalyst Dr. Mark Solms, whom, in 2021, published a remarkable and groundbreaking exploration of consciousness and affect, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. For those who aren’t familiar with him:

McGilchrist had a conversation with Dr. Solms (and philosopher/M.D. Dr. Hyman Schipper) in 2024: here’s what he had to share about McGilchrist’s work, on record, after decades of researching—and treating—neuropsychiatric patients:

“What Iain said about the differences between the left and right cerebral hemispheres: all of it is absolutely correct. I’m actually astounded by how correct it is because, after all, Iain is a psychiatrist (not a neurologist)! People who work with these patients, like myself, not only can confirm everything that you’ve said from the literature, but from clinical experience…

…The right hemisphere syndrome, so rich in its phenomenology—and especially in its emotional and personality change phenomenology—its all just entirely ignored, because if all you have is a hammer: then everything looks like a nail. {I was pretty enthralled to hear him say this, as I only heard this particular interview after I had written the introductory epigraph to this post}. Iain’s description of the differences is entirely up to speed—and beyond what my field has gotten onto. He takes it beyond the mere neurology or neuropsychology and links these differences with many of the major problems of our time. I think that too is a splendid contribution, and much to be welcomed—because what’s interesting about the brain is that it’s us! So it’s obviously relevant to everything else that’s going on. So I hope you know, I’m not schmoozing you Iain, when I say what I’ve just said. I really mean it.”

The hemisphere hypothesis operates on many different levels, and, as Solms made clear, McGilchrist is absolutely right (and far from the only neuroscientist who is) applying their research to less empirical; more human realms. Solms’ critiques of reductive materialism and our decontextualised, ‘hyper-cortical’ zeitgeist are remarkably similar to McGilchrist’s, despite their areas of research being considerably different. Before we explore that, though, I want to clarify what Solms meant by his assertion: ‘the right hemisphere syndrome, so rich in its phenomenology—and especially in its emotional and personality change phenomenology—its all just entirely ignored because: if all you have is a hammer: then everything looks like a nail.’

For those unfamiliar: phenomenology is a philosophical tradition developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) which aimed to ‘bracket’ indirect suppositions (of the external world) and place focus on the structures of consciousness that are directly available to us. So when Solms refers to the phenomenology of a patient with right hemisphere insults, he’s speaking to the first-person experience of that patient.

Professor Solms, like McGilchrist, is suggesting that many neuroscientists are oblivious to the significance of lateralised syndromes because the bureaucratic, hyper-analytical mentality preferred by the left hemisphere entirely ignores that which cannot be manipulated and made objective. When over-relying on the type of attention that attempts to make everything explicit, depersonalised and categorical, it’s easy to neglect the insights we can gain from the natural, relational way we normally use to understand the world.

The thing about phenomenology, of course, is that it cannot be explained by—or reduced to—any objective framework. As the cognitive scientist Professor Donald Hoffman explains: ‘not a single subjective experience—not one—has ever been explained in terms of brain matter.’ Sure, we can measure correlations between neuronal activity and states of consciousness, but we essentially have no idea how we would even begin to explain, in purely physical terms, the qualitative taste of strawberries. Many academics believe that we will never be able to fully explain conscious experience in terms of anything other than itself, suggesting ‘it just is… what it is.’

If you’re new to—or generally interested in—this topic, I can recommend my friend Disha’s lovely article:

Disha’s Substack

your understanding of consciousness is probably outdated.

For as long as I can remember, my view of the world remained fairly simple and consistent: every phenomena to occur can be explained in terms of physical processes. Anything that could not be explained through this paradigm would be thrown out. I found metaphysical tendencies, belief in God, or any notion referring to something being “bigger than us” st…

Read more

4 months ago · 109 likes · 38 comments · Disha

Something unique, perhaps worth reiterating, about McGilchrist is that before he spent 14 years training as a consultant psychiatrist, which included a foundational medical degree from Oxford as well as specialised psychiatric training, he was actually a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford—where he was employed to teach English literature and conduct further research into philosophy. I bring this up because McGilchrist himself has noted on several occasions that his literary background deeply informs his medical practice, especially when trying to understand the “mental worlds” of his patients. He was thus able to pay a unique kind of holistic, non-reductive attention, which, in his own words, is a very special cognitive function:

‘attention intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.’7

Attention is, in other words, the way we dispose our consciousness towards the world. “No neurologist in the world would dispute that the two hemispheres attend differently... And no philosopher will dispute the fact that attention changes what it is you see.”8 If we’re always attending with the values of the left hemisphere; on the hunt for what is “certain”, “efficient” and immediately explicit, we’ll inevitably find a world of lifeless fragments which get their value from what we can take from them. But, if we pay closer attention to the broader experiential arc, we may find that the world is already whole, multi-dimensional and even inherently valuable.

An intelligent young woman I know, who briefly studied schizophrenia in Spain, once told her class that humans tend to overcompensate for what we cannot control by vehemently controlling another, more manipulable (even mental) aspect of our lives. What hemisphere theory might suggest is that this pattern is reflected in the neurology of the psychotic disorder schizophrenia.

During McGilchrist’s time as a psychiatrist he found that schizophrenia is characterised by an overcompensation—“an overdrive”—of the abstracting left hemisphere, in “attempts to make up for a complete inability to understand, in the normal way we have gifted to us, in the faculties of the right hemisphere.” Observe the following image (below the next paragraph.)

In accordance with the temporal hierarchy of attention, it first ‘presences’ itself to your right-hemisphere, whose global attention subsequently guides the left-hemisphere’s local attention for further analysis.9 ‘The exception to this is in schizophrenia, where the right-hemisphere-dependent ability to see the whole at once is lost; then the figure becomes just a mass of Es and 8s’:

“One of the crucial differences in schizophrenia - and in schizotypy - lies in the mode of attention, whereby the whole is built from the parts.”10

The attentional hierarchy can, fascinatingly, be inverted in normal individuals as well.11 The left hemisphere’s refusal to acknowledge the left half of the world (which may explain why schizophrenic patients often find themselves ‘locked-in’ or ‘hyper-focused’ on a detail within their right visual field) “accounts for the fascinating phenomenon of ‘hemi-neglect’ following a right-hemisphere stroke, after which the individual is completely dependent on the left hemisphere to bring his body and his world into being.”12

The phenomenon demonstrates very clearly the significance of attention because, in these cases, “there is nothing at all wrong with the primary visual system: the problem is not due to blindness as ordinarily understood.” Yet, patients find themselves entirely ‘neglecting’ the left side of their world, body and visual field. All the more fascinating is that “if one temporarily disables the left hemisphere of such an individual through trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, the neglect improves, suggesting that the problem following right-hemisphere stroke is due to release of the unopposed action of the left hemisphere.”13

The left hemisphere is a master of denial. It ignores so much, yet is not even aware it is doing so:

McGilchrist’s eureka moment; what really got him thinking about hemisphere theory in the first place, was apparently somewhat of an accident. One day, while he was still in training, he happened to attend a lecture given by Dr. John Cutting, who was discussing his recent work, The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders (1990). There were three things that struck McGilchrist ‘very forcibly’ at the time:

“That the left hemisphere understands more literal language, and the right hemisphere alone understands metaphor, irony, tone of voice; the manner in which things are said. Secondly, it understands unique cases, whereas the left hemisphere tends to have already aggregated whatever it is into a category. And thirdly, the right hemisphere was just more in touch with the body than the left.”14

When the right hemisphere isn’t functioning properly, the body is reduced to something like a compendium of drives as the flowing sense of a continuous self is no longer held together—despite an increase in reflexivity; thinking about thinking—the self-referential trait of the often-delusional left hemisphere. Cutting, like Solms, is familiar this phenomenology (he’s even written on it in relation to Max Scheler’s phenomenological philosophy) because he spent a lot of time sitting at the bedside of patients who had right hemisphere ‘insults’ and noticed how significantly these deficits changed their lives, in a way that a “hurried doctor wouldn’t notice so much.” They found it especially interesting how it was much harder to rehabilitate somebody after a right hemisphere stroke, despite ‘left-stroke-patients’ losing speech and the ability to use their right hand. It appeared, for ‘right-stroke-patients’, much more of themselves and ‘their world’ escaped them.

Cutting and McGilchrist eventually got to chatting about the importance of the normal asymmetry in the brain—the master [RH] must keep the emissary [LH] in check—how this was lost, and sometimes reversed in schizophrenia—and how this results in a very different way of looking at the world; one lacking an ability to understand uniqueness, which reduces everything to categories or conceptual ‘images’ of real instances.15

Cutting recommended a book by the distinguished, now-retired Rutgers professor of psychology Louis Sass, titled Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (1992). The book showed—very much ‘in a nutshell’—an “extraordinary likeness” between the schizophrenic experience and works of art, literature and philosophy from the modern period. (Those who are familiar with postmodernist literature will know exactly what he’s talking about.) The parallels are so striking that they couldn’t possibly be coincidental, but, at the same time, we couldn’t all have developed schizophrenia… right?

What hemisphere theory later revealed is that we became, to a considerable extent, unable to incorporate into our vision of the world what is offered to us by the right hemisphere. ‘In other words, a vision of the world based on how the left hemisphere sees it – which is very bizarre, as much modern art, of course, became.’ The significance of this was, and is, almost impossible to understate. McGilchrist also highlights particular interest in that we can find descriptions of most contemporarily-recognised mental illnesses within ancient texts—yet this is far less true of schizophrenia; its prevalence is thought to have emerged around the 18th century, as capitalism began moving workers into cities. Nowadays, the positive correlation between industrialisation and schizophrenia (and thus, even, left-hemisphere over-drive) is rather obvious, with a plethora of meta-analyses linking the two, e.g.:

“The risk for schizophrenia at the most urban environment was estimated to be 2.37 times higher than in the most rural environment. The same effect was found when studies measuring the risk for nonaffective psychosis were included.”16

It was McGilchrist’s experience in the neurology of patients having typically left- or right-sided symptoms made him question: ‘why is it that certain conditions, diseases and syndromes are known to be preponderantly left- or right-sided?’ He eventually realised, as Roger Sperry had suggested (a point to which we will return), that there had to be some big differences between our two brains that go far beyond what psychologists had concluded in the 1960’s and ‘70s.

His colleagues, funnily enough, begged him not to take that path, suggesting he had a promising career and that hemisphere differences are ‘pop-psychology baloney.’ Fortunately, he kept finding things that were simply ‘far too interesting’ and could not be dismissed in this way.

There are no straight lines in nature.

If you haven’t yet a clear image of what the hemisphere’s respective phenomenologies/takes-on-the-world might be like, I strongly recommend Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk, My Stroke of Insight:

The insights of phenomenology are invaluable…

Like McGilchrist and Dr. Schipper, whom I mention because they were on the other end of this conversation, Professor Solms is “not a materialist.” From the same interview I quoted earlier:

“I think it’s a big mistake to think that any subjective experience is produced by any physiological processes of anatomical tissues, as if the subjective being of the mind is something like the bile that’s produced by the liver. I think that’s an entirely wrongheaded view.

My own view is that of a dual-aspect monist—I’m on Baruch Spinoza’s side {a topic for the next article}; we have two observational perspectives upon the essence of being: one from the third-person external perspective, where we see anatomy, and bodily things; material things. But if you look at it from the perspective of being the organism, or being ourselves, we have a different perspective—which is subjective experience—and it’s every bit as real as the external perspective.

So for me, the interesting thing is, what can we infer from both of these perspectives?Remember, the [experiential] second perspective has been sorely neglected by neuroscience—so, what can we learn from observing this part of nature from the outside, and then what can we learn from observing this part of nature from the inside—and then we have to draw inferences about something more fundamental—which we used to call the soul. It’s neither material nor ‘merely’ our experience: it’s something far more fundamental… that’s my way of thinking about these problems… it’s not a materialist take at all.

I feel I must clarify that none of this is ‘anti-science’. Solms, who is himself one of the most groundbreaking scientists of our time, is only clarifying what all good scientists already know: that science can only produce a certain kind of knowledge; in other words, science has limits. The left-hemispheric denial of philosophy by people who claim to be ‘scientifically-minded’ is also, in the truest sense, entirely nonsensical because, as one Harvard-trained neuroscientist put it (I recommend the article):

Cognitive Wonderland

Science is Philosophy

Please hit the ❤️ “Like” button at the top or bottom of this article if you enjoy it. It helps others find it…

Read more

2 years ago · 90 likes · 13 comments · Tommy Blanchard

I respect Dr. Blanchard, and have been a subscriber of his Cognitive Wonderland newsletter for essentially the entire time I’ve been on Substack. I’m even lucky enough to share a couple chatrooms with the guy and will happily admit that he is a very knowledgeable cognitive neuroscientist.

But nobody is right all the time. As McGilchrist often puts it: “there is only one certainty, and that is that anyone who is completely certain is certainly wrong.”

Judging from his post on lateralisation, Blanchard seems confident in his belief that McGilchrist’s claims “don’t line up with the evidence,” and that his writing “doesn’t seem thought of very well by people who do research in the areas he is citing.” While I myself am confident that many aspects of the hemisphere hypothesis, like any scientific theory, are imperfect, I am highly suspicious of anybody likening his hypothesis to the folklore of the old ‘left-brained/right-brained’ trope. Perhaps my scepticism is warranted, considering Blanchard has openly admitted to not having read any of McGilchrist’s books, is not a psychiatrist or a neurologist, and, from what I can tell, seems entirely oblivious to the plethora of plaudits world-class lateralisation researchers have garlanded McGilchrist’s philosophy with. For example:

1. Professor Colwyn Trevarthen, who earned his PhD working alongside Dr. Roger Sperry (who won the Nobel prize for their foundational split-brain research) is one of the world’s most distinguished living researchers on the perceptuomotor and cognitive functions of the cerebral hemispheres. In a filmed interview in 2016, Dr. Trevarthen shared his own thoughts on The Master and His Emissary; affirming that it is:

‘The best survey on the left and right hemispheres of the brain that exists – a magnificent scientific survey. It’s a masterpiece… and his main thrust is extremely important. This is a historically important book, and I am sure he will last. He will be revered in future generations – there’s no question.’

2. Professor Onur Güntürkün, who was awarded Germany’s most prestigious science award (the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Preis) in 2013, precisely for his research into hemispheric lateralisation—interviewed in Die Zeit, and in a filmed interview in 2016—also applauded:

‘I believe that, at a deep level, McGilchrist is right. In the hemispheres, with their differing components and capabilities, lie different facets of the personality …’ [On The Master and his Emissary] ‘I think there are only two options. In thirty years it will either be the bible of neuroscience –or it will be forgotten. I don’t think there is any other option.’

3. Writing in Laterality, Professor Lesley Rogers—world authority on lateralisation in animals—also confirms that:

‘Every point made is referenced … The evidence in support of these conclusions is presented fully and extremely well … the breadth of the author’s knowledge is nothing less than extraordinary.’

These are statements from, quite literally, some of the world’s leading experts on lateralisation. “The future bible of neuroscience?” “Nothing less than extraordinary?” “There’s no question he will be revered in future generations?” That’s seriously high praise for a guy whose work ‘isn’t thought of very well by his peers’. If the hemisphere hypothesis actually ‘didn’t line up with the evidence,’ would Professor V.S. Ramachandran—another world-renowned neuroscientist who has made groundbreaking contributions to the field—have extolled that the hypothesis is:

‘A marvellous and highly original synthesis of ideas on how the division of labour between the two brain hemispheres can provide key insights into human nature – it’s odd that such an important subject has been neglected’?

I somehow doubt it. Professor Norman Cook, who authored The Brain Code: Mechanisms of Information Transfer and the Functions of the Corpus Callosum, also suggests McGilchrist’s work is:

‘A wonderful book – broad in scope and full of incisive detail. It should be required reading for any serious student of human psychology. For researchers involved in hemisphere studies, the historical/cultural context provided by McGilchrist is essential background.’

Furthermore, Professor Todd Feinberg, neuroscience of laterality researcher, and Professor of Neurology & Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY, thought his book was:

‘Stunning … It’s a masterpiece.’

And this isn’t even to mention his latest book, of three times the length; the magnum opus The Matter with Things—which, according to Dr. Jürg Kesselring, Professor of Neurology at University of Bern, and Neuroscience Center Zürich, is:

‘Undoubtedly the best and profoundest description of the anatomy and function of our two brain hemispheres and of the different ways of our “being in the world” … a great achievement and an enormous gift.’

I could list dozens more of these, but I will conclude with a corroboration from Professor Dr. Oliver Schultheiss—a psychologist and neuroscientist who has been studying lateralisation for over 25 years:

‘this [his lab’s findings] is consistent with McGilchrist’s hypothesis, based on a large neuropsychological literature, that individuals who get stuck in a left hemisphere information processing mode (as opposed to those with a right hemisphere-favouring mode and/or a fluid interhemispheric information exchange) have a peculiar maladaptive mindset… characterised, for instance, by reality distortion through denial of expectation-violating information, an inability to deal with ambiguity, a tendency to view and treat others as mere tools for the advancement of one’s interests and goals, and a profound lack of empathy.’17

One can choose to believe whatever they would like. Personally, though, when I see my two favourite neuropsychologists—Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Professor Mark Solms—in what is, essentially, complete and utter agreement; on a topic they both have extensive experience with: I get the feeling that they may be onto something. The patronage of all these other great minds behind them only adds to that feeling.

It should also be clear that mind of Dr. Solms is far from a source that lacks credibility. He is in ongoing collaboration with UCL’s Professor Karl Friston (literally the world’s most cited neuroscientist), whose influential Free Energy Principle18 formalised (laid the mathematical framework for) Solms’ groundbreaking hypotheses in affective neuroscience.19 Their 2018 paper on consciousness from the perspectives of ‘physics and physiology’20 continues to be a big influence on research in both neuropsychoanalysis and active inference. Solms is also credited for ‘resurrecting’ the study of the unconscious mind by discovering its precise neural correlates, which allowed him to integrate Freud’s foundational theories with modern neurobiology. (More on that in the next section.)

Lastly, Dr. Solms has collaborated extensively with another one of the most respected and influential neuroscientists of the last century, Professor Jaak Panksepp (RIP)—who, after reading The Master and His Emissary, also claimed it’s not only the “best book on laterality I have ever read, with profound implications for the nature of consciousness”, but “the best book I’ve read in the past decade”, period. To me it is clear that Solms and McGilchrist’s extensive clinical experience and ‘philosophical insight’, as Einstein would have it, truly lacerate them with that ‘mark of distinction which separates a mere artisan or specialist from a real seeker after truth.’

They both suggest that modern neuroscience made a massive error by ignoring the subjective, emotional brain in favour of studying vision and intellect, and they both agree that the presumptive, categorical and over-confident modality preferred by the left-hemisphere is far too pervasive, not only in neuroscience and academia, but in our individualistic neoliberal culture as a whole:

“the Western world view has become over-dominated by thinking associated with the brain’s left hemisphere, the side that is “detail-orientated, prefers mechanisms to living things and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity.”

There is no question that this should concern all of us. The rest of this series will continue to expand on why that is, but, if you are interested, and would like to read some of McGilchrist’s writing first-hand, I suggest the following post (sorry Dr. Blanchard):

The Matter with Things

The laziness of the left hemisphere mindset

The following post came to my attention on the substack of Matt Whiteley. His post has much to commend it, above all for conveying the necessary truth that there are limits to what science can tell us. Holding this point of view is not, of course, anti-scientific, but exactly the reverse. It's because I respect science so greatly for what it…

Read more

5 months ago · 345 likes · 65 comments · Iain McGilchrist

Before I move on, I want to share one last ovation, from Professor James Wright, Honorary Professor of Psychiatry at University of Auckland, winner of the Royal Societies of Australia’s Eureka Prize for Interdisciplinary Research, and one of the original researchers with Nobel Prize-winner Roger Sperry at Caltech:

“McGilchrist's remarkable book brought to mind a conversation with Roger Sperry, when I was a research fellow at Caltech in the ‘70s. Sperry, already famous for his work on hemispheric specialisation, and with California's New Age abuzz with ill-considered attributions to left and right hemispheres, was, also, not at all happy at any existing attempt to define the differences in the hemispheres’ functions. Roger felt that the cognitive tests of the time, which tended to show the right hemisphere's overall inferiority to the left, were missing something – something really important that was not captured by standard procedural tests. I feel sure that he, like McGilchrist a literary scholar turned biologist/psychologist, would have applauded McGilchrist's book, capturing as it does so much outside the range of a narrowly conceived cognitive science, and doing so without loss of rigour.”

So, yes, the hemispheres model reality in significantly different ways—and I don’t think anyone familiar with the literature would confidently argue otherwise. These models are incompatible, yet complimentary, which explains why so much of the corpus callosum’s function is inhibitory rather than acquiescent; it enforces lateralisation by ensuring that the hemisphere specialised for the given moment/problem dominates and suppresses the contralateral hemisphere which handles subtler, complimentary aspects of the task.

It should be clear, therefore, that McGilchrist is not suggesting we’d somehow be better off if the whole planet left-hemisphere stroke: both modes of attention are essential to the proper functioning of a human being. Problems begin to arise, however, when we disproportionately follow the logic and motives of the emissary; disregarding the Gestalt whole that reveals itself to us through the master. As Professor Panksepp put it, ‘the supposedly “non-dominant” right hemisphere, deeper in both feeling and wisdom, has long guided the best of human life, often to be undone by the chattering and confabulating servant on the other side. This is a profound analysis of the divisions within our higher mental apparatus that have been writ large in the history of our species.’

Both Doctors Panksepp and McGilchrist seem to suggest that something - the world itself? - has been ‘unmade’ by the tyranny of the left hemisphere. The subtitle of The Matter with Things is, after all: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. I now want to uncover the ‘unmaking’ to which they refer as well as the mechanisms through which neoliberal capitalism both causes and exploits it.

If you’ve enjoyed this essay so far, consider sharing it with a friend, and, if you have any questions—feel free to post a comment. I write these articles so these interesting and important ideas can gain exposure, knowing that an educated population holds the power to organise and meaningfully change their systemic conditions. I greatly appreciate your support and ask for no alms; subscribing is completely free :)

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

§3: Gestell & The Metacrisis—The Emissary’s World

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (§115)

There is a lot that can be said about the philosophical and historical foresight of phenomenological figures like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. How Ponty ‘predicted’ predictive processing deserves an article of its own… If you want to read more on Ponty, click here, and, to read more on predictive processing, see my essay All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun.

As for Heidegger—I wrote, in my last article:

“This fragmented and manipulative sort of relationship with the world has become more and more common, ultimately resulting in a mass desacralisation of Being (Sein) and our life-worlds (Lebenswelten). In 1949, arguably the most influential philosopher of the early 20th century, Martin Heidegger, wrote a prescient analysis on technology and its role in shaping this firmly left-hemispheric relationship to human-being, or being-there (Dasein.)”

There are, I would argue, few works which demonstrate the elucidating role of philosophy more clearly than Heidegger’s exploration of ‘The Question Concerning Technology.’ In the 77 years since the essay’s publication, Heidegger’s doctrine defining the essence of technology as Gestell (Enframing) has been ‘unconcealed’22 as one of the most prescient and significant philosophical contributions of the modern era.

To illustrate why many believe this be to the case, I will draw on evidence from Guy Debord, Mark Solms, Professor Byung-Chul Han, Dr. Mark Fisher and Dr. Iain McGilchrist.

The Industrial Revolution and the technology that it made possible moved us from a population of roughly half a billion people to eight billion people, increasing resource consumption per capita by roughly 10,000%. That’s 16 times the population and 100 times the resource consumption per population. Just a few hundred years ago, without our advanced technology, such extractive growth would not be possible, and neither would anthropogenic omnicide.

In a conversation between McGilchrist, Vervaeke and Schmachtenberger exploring ‘the psychological drivers of the Metacrisis’, the polyrcrisis was defined as a frame that suggests, ‘rather than just focusing on just climate change, or just coral, species extinction, or nuclear warfare, we have to focus on all these issues and recognise that they can inter-effect each other; one of these issues getting worse can cascade into other ones and even a solution to one can make the others worse.’

For instance, the answer after World War II to ‘how do we not have nuclear war?’ was mutually assured destruction (‘MAD’) [the Cold War] and the Bretton Woods global financial system. This post-war order allowed us to narrowly avoid nuclear warfare between superpowers, but was also a large part of what led to the six-continent supply chain and exponential growth connected to a linear materials economy which have pushed us to - and beyond - the planetary health boundaries.23 (In 2026, researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre found that seven of the nine major global limits have been breached, concluding that humanity continues to operate well outside the safe zone for life-support systems.) As Greta Thunberg put it, “we are systematically destroying the life support systems that our civilisation is built upon.”

The metacrisis lens goes a step further than the polycrisis framework, examining the underlying dynamics that give rise to these crises. It asks: how is it that, even with the precipitous cliff in sight, we continue barreling down the path the Industrial Revolution set us on? There is clearly something about our society, at this exact historical juncture, making us blind to the actual context in which we live through.

And how could we not know by now that context is everything? Why have we abandoned the right hemisphere’s wisdom—deciding that what is good in the abstract must always be good and that we need more of it, all the time? Why have we abandoned relation; interconnexion, and the moral sense intrinsic to our nature as human beings? We have the technology and resources to provide for the biosphere and every life it contains, yet billions are malnourished and we are wiping out entire species every day: 10,000 times faster than the natural extinction rate. Something is obviously terribly wrong with our sociopolitical system and our dispositions towards the world, and it has to be discussed. In the graceful words of the late American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty:

“At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.”24

I wholeheartedly agree but, as the young essayist and political activist Zina Ikeme put it, ‘we’re not going to get anywhere as a society if we don’t accept a couple truths about capitalism and how it works.’ I want to briefly walk through her lucid examples before anything else, because we all know there are still an unsettling amount of people who believe that our current socioeconomic order is perfectly adequate.

It should be known to everyone that capitalism values accumulation of wealth at the top; that is, over life and human wellbeing. This is a verifiable fact: as a system, we allow people to die more often, and for everyone to have poorer quality of life, so that a couple privileges can exist for a couple people who exist in the ‘1%’. For example, in the US, there is enough food to feed roughly 136% of the population. Thanks to capitalism, though, 133 billion pounds of food is wasted every year because it is thrown away. If Walmart, for instance, were to give around 15% of its food surplus away for free - a lot of this food being already unsellable - they could lose 3-10 billion dollars of potential profit. Walmart makes almost 300 billion USD from food sales annually. According to our current socioeconomic system, then, that 3-10 billion dollars that is already going to waste is worth more than the human lives 3-10 billion dollars of food would save.

The housing crisis is caused by the exact same problem. There are 28 to 30 vacant homes for every homeless person in the USA. Thanks to free market capitalism, though, housing—a supposed ‘human right’—is commodified, so even though there are more than 50 million vacant homes, we allow the markets to drive up prices such that landlords can make millions instead of thousands in the sale of these potential homes. Even though these landlords are making millions, up to billions of dollars from the current homes they’re renting out, there’s nothing we can do… ‘what if one of these homes are a multi-millionaires third beach home?’ We couldn’t possibly expect them to give it up for free, right? It is this privilege provided by a society lacking functional wealth tax or redistribution that has people dying on the streets single every day.

It doesn’t take a genius to grasp how profoundly immoral and unjust all of this is. Most people know these things happen. Relatively few, however, are aware that neoliberal capitalism is not our only option; nor is it ‘the natural state of things.’ As Professor of economics Clara Mattei put it:

“Capitalism is far from spontaneous… It requires the constant, violent enforcement of those policies of austerity to preserve the system in place.”

Unfortunately, for the uneducated masses, Capitalist Realism continues to be the defining doctrine of our age. Dr. Mark Fisher coined the term in his 2009 book of the same title, inspired by Žižek and Jameson’s famous observation that ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ Dr. Fisher then questions:

Is there really no alternative?

How is it possible that there seems to be no other option? In my opinion, we need to be asking ourselves: why do even high school students—who have never thought about, in any meaningful sense, what such a system entails—feel disposed to defend and support a socioeconomic system that is literally defined by the exploitation of the entire planet and its population? Might this have to do with the fact that - at least in the English-speaking system - students are taught absolutely nothing of critical theory throughout their entire “education”? In whose interest is this lack of real education?…

I’m sure many of you have seen the vile, disturbing; genuinely psychotic clip of techno-fascist billionaire Mark Andreessen exalting the fact that he - and other billionaires - have ‘zero introspective ability.’ He also declares, with hilarious confidence (just look at the video), that introspection itself is a ‘Freudian invention of the 1920s’ which is ‘detrimental’ to humanity. Elon Musk, the world’s only trillionaire, publicly agreed: calling introspection “a recipe for misery.”

Socrates warned us, over two thousand years ago, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Have we not learnt anything from his hemlock execution; from the accusation that his reflections were ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’?

I cannot, and should not need to, passively express just how palpably insipid, frankly delusional and fundamentally inhumane these people’s claims are. It is so obvious that they do not have the interests of humanity at heart—yet we allow them to hold more power than anybody else on the planet. Other techno-fascist billionaires, like Peter Thiel (co-founder and chairman of Palantir, intimately tied to the US/Israeli military)25 literally hesitate to answer - live on camera - if it is in their interest for humanity to continue existing.26

It should be known to everyone that it’s precisely these racist, myopic and utterly mindless tech-capitalists who stand in the political and financial pulpit of the ‘AI’ industry. If you have not yet read Dr. Adam Becker’s urgent 2025 masterpiece: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity—please do. It’s a ‘freely accessible’ masterclass of science communication; truly, an all-you-need-to-know guide on ‘AI’ and its developers, authored by an astrophysicist who has spent close to a decade examining the techno-deterministic propaganda and hubristic social agendas of those sitting at the forefront of the AI movement—the ‘TESCREAL bundle’.

These pseudointellectual gargoyles use the allure of the supernatural in combination with profoundly pseudoscientific rhetoric to push their transhumanist agendas which are, verifiably, thoroughly rooted in 20th-century eugenics and science fiction novels.27 LLMs do not morph into AGI, and ChatGPT is not ‘intelligent’,28 let alone ‘conscious.’29 Indeed, ‘AI’ can be argued to be the exact opposite; as the pinnacle of left-hemispheric reproduction. McGilchrist is currently giving one of his most important series of lectures on this topic, wonderfully illustrating both the danger of widely implementing these technologies as well as the incredible capabilities of the human mind. It also should be known that, as Dr. recently noted:

“Ordinary people do not get a meaningful vote on whether these systems are deployed, built into workplaces, or embedded into everyday life. Pretending that “we collectively” determine the outcome is absurd. It disguises a massive imbalance of power and spreads responsibility onto people who have almost none.”

It is, in the end, undeniable that neoliberal capitalism is failing the planet in almost every way imaginable—yet our fragmented society continues to support it. I now want to examine, beyond purely material reasons, three key things contributing to this upholding of omnicidal delusion.

Separation Perfected: The World as Bestand and Representation

French philosopher, filmmaker and political activist Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) remains a key piece of critical theory for understanding how systemic exploitation is not only homogeneous but homogenising.

The society of the spectacle to which the title refers is one, with modern conditions of production, that creates a world apart from reality ultimately belonging to ‘the autonomous movement of the non-living.’ The reality of the spectacle, ‘due to the very fact that this sector is separate […] is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalised separation.’30 It achieves this ‘unification’ by reducing citizens to the status of homogeneous observers, often, while simultaneously providing a false sense of bidirectional communication. As I am drawing out the meaning of Debord’s Spectacle, it may help to understand it as being characterised by a social relation between people that is mediated by ‘images’. Dr. David Guignion, host of the Theory and Philosophy podcast—which I strongly recommend—provides some useful examples:

“we can think of it [the Spectacle] as television and forms of entertainment that are big-budget type things, and not just spontaneous eruptions of communal joy in a carnival type setting […] it’s where different people with no attachment to each other come together, don’t talk to one another, and then leave.”31

The spectacular relation exists far beyond just television and film screens, of course. In Nazi Germany, for example, spectacular propaganda images ‘united’ much of Germany against the jewish people by depicting them, and other minorities, in a caricatured, one-dimensional manner.

Subjects of the spectacle are encouraged not to encounter what comes to presence in the world as unique instances to be understood via reciprocal communication—rather, the spectacle promotes a relation to the world, a targeted people, or even a concept, mediated by its own constructed representations. In other words, it provides artificial consensus via the production of determinate ‘images’ designed to stand in for the actual group, thing or idea as they exist in their proper contexts. The spectacle facilitates atrocities in this manner by compressing embodied encounters into conceptual images—not at all unlike the left-hemisphere—stripping them of their moral weight, vitality and nuance.

These images are still controlled by the same crowd. We just don’t call them Nazis anymore—though that, too, is seeing a return (see §4: Disordered Totalitarianism without Metaphor, below).

Consider for a moment the popular Western conception of Marxism, socialism, and other anti-colonial movements. After decades (centuries) of constant misinformation and propaganda campaigns, an idea such as communism—originally defined by Marx as a stateless, classless society—has been caricatured as state totalitarianism, with even socialist community organisation being represented as an eternally inefficacious endeavour. The popularity of these beliefs are very much indicative of a spectacular society for Debord, as only the spectacle; media, consumer goods, and mass images which form a distinct part of society while appearing represent the whole, could make ideas so vapid in veracity not only acceptable, but pervasive in ‘the unified deceived gaze and false consciousness.’ I’ll provide some examples to be clear.

The tropical state of Kerala, India, which is now home to over 30 million people, inaugurated the world’s first democratically elected communist government in 1957. Following the Communist Party of India’s inauguration - led by E.M.S. Namboodiripad - they ardently pursued sustained land redistribution and investment in education and public health services. Unsurprisingly, aristocratic rightists and casteist religious organisations were violently opposed to these reforms, so, in a characteristically-capitalist ‘murder of democracy’, the party was dismissed from governance in 1959.32 Declassified U.S. State Department and CIA documents later confirmed America’s covert funding of the ministry’s opponents during the ‘liberation struggle’; an illegal involvement which would be the first of dozens in which the US sabotaged democratically elected socialist governments, frequently, to implement merciless dictators aligned with their own interests:

Fortunately, Kerala’s Namboodiripad was reelected in 1967 while he was leading a Left coalition known as the Saptakakshi Munnani (United Front), which marked the beginning of 32 years of left-wing governance between then and 2026. In those years, the marxist Left Democratic Front (LDF) and Communist Party of India successfully dismantled the feudal ‘jemni’ system, brought about near-universal literacy rates, and generated life expectancy and infant mortality rates dramatically superior to India’s national average—despite the state having a lower GDP per capita relative to the rest of the nation. Their socialist governance has proved that direct public investment can significantly improve quality of life even without massive GDP growth, and they did it without violence, censorship or authoritarianism.

The Marxist ideology was also central to the ending of Apartheid in South Africa, with the ‘Tripartite Alliance’ responsible for the liberation of Black South Africans consisting of the South African Communist party, Nelson Mandela’s ANC and the Marx-inspired Congress of South African Trade Unions (est. 1985). The glaring contradiction in the imperial settler regime, exploited by the marxist alliance, was that their economy relied almost entirely on Black labour while Black South Africans were simultaneously denied basic social and political rights. To make a long story short, it was internal mass-mobilisation against the exclusionary regime’s economic production which directly weaponised the oppressed class in a case wherein union organisation was explicitly aimed at the regime itself. Even within American walls, it was the Marxist CIO union and Communist Party which organised arguably the single most consequential U.S. labor action of the 20th century: the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). The ‘Flint’ strikes against General Motors from 1936-37 were in this way responsible for massive growth in the wages of industrial workers, the introduction of overtime and the 40-hour week, as well as employer-paid health insurance and pension standards which would influence American policy for decades to come.

The spectacularly perpetuated idea that the neoliberal model is the only functionally viable option neglects, quite clearly, the entirety of human history. Believe it or not, for roughly 200,000 years, indigenous communities who cooperated with each other and their land survived, and thrived, without colonialism or its ugly little cousin, capitalism. Indeed, as McGilchrist was writing The Matter with Things, he investigated what life was really like as a peasant right up to the Ancien Régime. Earlier this year he shared some of the findings he was ‘amazed to discover’, ‘said very frankly by the writers’,33 which point out how:

“We were taught to think that things were very, very bad before machines came along. But actually, it was the Industrial Revolution that caused people to be exploited very, very harshly; it was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution that people really worked grindingly hard and unforgiving hours…

[He cites E. P. Thompson’s thesis from Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism (1967) which established that, before the modern period, labour was task-oriented, following natural and agricultural cycles. In other words, we worked (harvested, fed, etc.) to the rhythms of what genuinely needed doing—not according to rigid schedules imposed by factory owners—which meant our labour was typically punctuated by long breaks, communal meals, drinking and so on. This corroborates Juliet Schor’s argument from The Overworked American (1991), citing labour-calendar records to suggest that industrialisation actually increased both working hours and intensity in comparison to the medieval baseline.]

So the idea that life was miserable until machines came along and “liberated” us is the inversion of the truth. And even if the fruits of labor got moved elsewhere to the lord of the day, they still experienced truth, beauty, and goodness, and they also had food, because it was possible before capitalism for a small community to live on not that much labour. It’s only with the advent of capitalism—when people thought, ‘Ooh, I can get rich by making more than I need and selling it’… the idea of exponential increase, meant—that people started to work very, very hard. So it was with capitalism in the 18th century and industrialisation that things began to get really, really grim.”

Clearly, the Spectacle plays a crucial role in rationalising our economic system and all the objects and social relations it produces. It lends a sense of coherence to a society that is more alienated and fragmented than any before it, as well as providing a zone of ostensible gratification away from the capitalist society and the exploitation found within it:

The spectacle will emphasise the quantity over quality, and it will normalise a perpetual struggle for survival despite having attained the means to supply for all people; it is how capitalism makes itself digestible and glossy, covering up its ugly face characterised by the oppression of all life. For Debord, its propensity for global expansion is thought to have led to the globalisation of values we see today in our ‘interconnected’ world. Of course, the international adoption of the White-European language and cultural exploitation did not occur because of some inherent superiority to their alternatives in unifying the people of the world. Rather, they were produced by centuries of Colonial expansion and economic encroachment towards all nations.

What Debord’s analysis importantly reveals is how modern capitalist production replaces lived human experience with a separate, passive world of images and commodities that seem to govern themselves. As we are reduced to observers and ‘sight’ is prioritised above ‘touch’, society becomes entirely shaped by the needs of the market and mass media instead of the genuine needs of real human beings. He asks us to consider how, in the first stages of the modern economy, we saw being subordinated to having, and then, in an internalisation of its own logic, capitalism’s developed form subordinates even having to ‘appearing (to have)’.

As commodities take on a meaning entirely separate from the conditions which produced them - by erasing the labour and humanity that went into the creation of these objects - they become almost life-like, something to be fought for. In one spectacular stroke, objects are imbued with organic qualities that change value and we ourselves are objectified, becoming latent capital to be used by those who own the means of production. In the attention economy this trend is only exacerbated. Consider, for example, Netflix’s declaration that their main rival is the ‘pesky human need to close your eyes and sleep’.34 We ourselves, as observers under commodity fetishism, are transformed into products in consumerism.

After this metamorphosis we had to develop new ways of understanding people, watching as statisticians, epidemiologists, semiology and cybernetics emerge—to grapple with the transformation of humans into objects that can be studied—and understood—entirety from a third-person perspective. From these perspectives, as Debord would have it, all humans can be understood similarly; becoming a homogeneous phenomenon on the world, encouraging regulation not only by institutions but through the self-regulation of ourselves. (Hold that thought for a moment.)

“The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of production rests… What creates the abstract power of society creates its concrete unfreedom.”35

The spectacle is the system which offers abstract freedom from our lives under capitalist alienation and exploitation, encouraging people to buy cars, TVs and telephones for individualisation precisely because we are easier to exploit when separated from our nature as relational, dynamic and fundamentally affective creatures. For those who did not read my article on affective neuroscience, in 2013, Professor Solms published a groundbreaking paper titled ‘The Conscious Id’ which flipped Freud and mainstream neuroscience on their heads to suggest that:

“the upper brainstem is intrinsically conscious whereas the cortex is not; it derives its consciousness from the brainstem. These facts have substantial implications for psychoanalytic metapsychology because the upper brainstem (and associated limbic structures) performs the functions that Freud attributed to the id, while the cortex (and associated forebrain structures) performs the functions he attributed to the ego. This means that the id is the fount of consciousness and the ego is unconscious in itself.”

As I mentioned earlier, Professor Solms later co-authored work with Karl Friston on foundational free-energy and homeostasis models, proving that the cortex’s job, via free-energy [surprise, or prediction error] minimisation, is to cognitively model and constrain the conscious drives of the brainstem so we can carry out active inference. He elaborates, in his conversation with McGilchrist:

“I also agree that ultimately what the cerebral hemispheres are doing is not the beginning and end of the brain. They are in the service of deeper forces, and you yourself acknowledge that Iain. For example what you attend to is what matters to you; in other words it has to do with affect and motivation. To use the felicitous title of your earlier book, The Master and His Emissary, the master is the brainstem—those arousing, affective, motivating, driving forces; and then the cognitive cortex does what it can (and must) in the service of our organismic needs.”

What this means, in essence, is that computation and abstraction are necessarily grounded in the affective ‘feeling’ of our being. After positing the brainstem (an ancient, stalk-like region encompassing the lower base of the brain) as the primary driver of consciousness, Solms acknowledges that the relationship between the computational cortex (the calculating, outer layer of our brains) and the affective brainstem is ‘felicitously’ analogous to the relationship between the left and right cerebral hemispheres. What’s all the more interesting is that none of this disproves McGilchrist’s hypothesis (as Solms knows, “what Iain said about the differences between the left and right cerebral hemispheres: all of it is absolutely correct”). Contrarily, this paradigm shift actually illuminates, from a separate neuropsychological perspective, why these clinicians feel that late-stage capitalism and its artificial images have ‘enframed’ us in an alienated, ‘hyper-cortical’ state of engagement.

Returning to Heidegger’s declaration that Gestell, or the essence of modern technology, ‘is an all-encompassing view of technology, not as a means to an end, but rather a mode of human existence’ accompanied by our modern understanding of neuropsychology, it becomes clear which ‘mode’, exactly, he was referring to. Accepting Professor (Emeritus of Neurology at U of Bern, & Zurich) Kesselring’s lauding that the hemisphere hypothesis is “undoubtedly the best and profoundest description of the different ways of our ‘being in the world’,” the resonances between Heidegger’s conception of Gestell and the world as conceived by the left hemisphere modality reveal themselves as truly striking:

“Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.”36

Translated, what this German jargon reveals Heidegger to have foreseen is that our obsession with extraction, in the technological age of neoliberalism, is the retrocausal result of a mode of attention (of revealing; ordering and ‘being-in-the-world’) which conceives of experience, and every ‘thing’ within it, as Bestand; ‘standing-reserve.’ This ‘mode of ordering’ does not see the forest as a living whole to which we are inextricably connected, it only sees a fragmented collection of trees we can use to maximise efficiency. ‘Bestand’ is active when the earth is revealed as a coal-mining district or the soil as a mineral deposit.37 Those who read my last article may remember that:

“not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical. The left hemisphere’s principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used. It is therefore natural that it has a particular affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive. The left hemisphere codes for tools and machines.38 References to tools and actions of grasping activate the left hemisphere even in left-handers, despite the fact that they habitually use the right hemisphere/left hand to grasp objects and use tools in daily life.”39

Now I ask you: how much of our everyday lives is mediated by man-made mechanisms? And how much of contemporary socialisation is mediated by artificial images which fail to directly reference natural reality?

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard made the observation, in his Simulacra & Simulation (1981): that ‘everywhere, socialisation is measured by exposure to media images. Whoever is under-exposed to the media is desocialised or virtually asocial.’ This clearly reflects Debord’s earlier observation that, in late-stage capitalism, our identities are displaced onto and into the spectacle: ‘it is the map of this new world, a map that exactly covers its territory.’ As such, those who are socialised under the spectacle must internalise its logic to survive, such that the proletariat (working-class) subject has no option other than trading their ‘concrete freedom’ for the ‘abstract freedom’ projected by the non-living’s images. Considering that the autonomous movement of the non-living produces these images with the sole purpose of maximising its market power (by objectifying us as homogenised consumers and observers), the constructs it promulgates inevitably lack verisimilitude. As such, these representations may be preferentially attended to by the left hemisphere, known to be “more at home dealing with distorted, non-realistic, fantastic – ultimately artificial – images.”40

The left hemisphere sticks to its familiar narrative. Its purpose is to maximise mechanical efficiency though collapsing the raw, ambiguous world of the present into a simplified, unambiguous model it can conceptually navigate and act upon. To that end, it doesn’t make room for what it doesn’t know—as Heidegger writes, when Gestell holds sway, “it drives out every other possibility of revealing” such that everything which comes to presence in the natural world is pre-categorised as Bestand; an ‘enframed’ object to utilised as a tool for our own gain in the capitalist society. In this sense, experiential possibility is prematurely collapsed into the ready-made representations provided by the spectacle, which is why, for Debord, and Dr. Marshall McLuhan, sight is the sense that opens us up to abstraction: it is “the opposite of dialogue.”

The fact many of these insights emerged decades before the internet was widely implemented is a testament to their foresight and accuracy as, with its introduction and global implementation, came significantly increased potential for optimisation, self-surveillance and alienation—as well as infinitely more ways to market oneself as an atomised identity. As we internalise the system which atomises and individualises the human being, according to Debord, we see a fundamental negation of what it means to live: its focus is purely on the positive. It is easier to sell an image of ourselves or the world this way. Accordingly, in Professor Byung-Chul Han’s contemporary analysis of our ‘achievement society’, he writes, ‘because Otherness is disappearing, we live in a time that is poor in negativity,’ positing that the neuronal illnesses of the 21st century are ‘pathological conditions deriving from an excess of positivity.’ He elaborates, in The Burnout Society (2010):

“Clearly, the drive to maximise production inhabits the social unconscious. Beyond a certain point of productivity, disciplinary technology […] hits a limit. To heighten productivity, the paradigm of disciplination is replaced by the paradigm of achievement […]; the positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should. However, the Can does not revoke the Should. The obedience-subject remains disciplined.

[He continues, on the next page…]

Burnout, which often precedes depression, does not point to a sovereign individual who has come to lack the power to be “the master of himself.” Rather, burnout represents the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive productivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”

As we are presented with more and more options and opportunities - of which few are genuinely available to us - we find ourselves in a perpetual state of capital-induced abeyance. To maximise wellbeing in a society does not mean maximising choice; on the contrary, our freedom is reduced by the illusion of unlimited choice. The increased prevalence of possibilities not only makes it harder to choose, but harder be satisfied with—the chosen. So now I ask you: all of the above considered, is the impetus behind the post-industrial emergence of schizophrenia—and the increased prevalence of other conditions reflecting right-hemisphere-deficit—not somewhat obvious?

The capitalist burnout society, the emissary and a cancer all share the same ideology, striving for boundless growth in necessarily bounded systems. According to Dr. Han, “The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” He goes further, to suggest that, because we have internalised the unwarranted optimism (‘excess of positivity’) and lack of groundedness characteristic of neoliberalism and the left cerebral hemisphere, our exploitation is no longer experienced as ‘immunological’, or coming from an external source. For Han, when the Foucauldian disciplinary paradigm gave way to the paradigm of achievement, our experience of self-exploitation took on an ‘auto-immune’ structure, commencing an internal ‘neuronal war’:

“Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.”

The dominant neuroses of our time (BPD, Depression, ADHD and Burnout Syndrome), then, can be considered the result of an unbounded fragmentation which facilitates the neglect of the brainstem’s affective signalling on a civilisational scale. In other words, because we have allowed the systematising, detached and goal-fixated modality of the cortex to reveal our emotional instances (of exhaustion, grief, etc.) as obstacles to optimisation, rather than internal warning bells that something is existentially wrong: we have become mastered by the Gestell’s internal logic of productivity—while at the same time believing that we are the masters of our own sovereign worlds. Perhaps this makes sense of McGilchrist’s diagnosis:

“This book [The Matter with Things] argues that if we are wreaking havoc on ourselves and the world, and if even our best intentions lead to paradoxical outcomes, it is because we have become mesmerised by a mechanistic, reductionist way of thinking […]: that of the left hemisphere. We have become blind to what the subtler, more intelligent and more perceptive right hemisphere sees. Consequently we no longer seem to have the faintest idea who we are, what the world is, or how we relate to it. Indeed there is a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all, but exist in a simulacrum of our own making.

Affect is not simply a fantastical realm of mental experience which has little to do with our existence in the physical world—in the same way that mental illness is not somehow less real than physical disease. The sentient subject is literally constituted by affect (Solms & Friston, 2018); our affects (there are at least 7 primary-process-affects, according to Panksepp) are an extended form of allostasis, ie. they exist to signal how well an organism is meeting its needs.

Burnout, for Han, is what happens when a culture persistently overrides these internal sense-making signals, to the extent that our actual needs go permanently unmet while the productive needs of the capitalist system continue being slaved towards. Now it should be clearer why Han calls the neurosis of our time a ‘war turned inward.’ Our affect, or ‘the master’, to use McGilchrist’s analogy, is not being defeated by any external enemy, but repressed by its own ‘emissary’ (in the form of cortical optimisation). Perhaps inevitably, this dynamic creates an alienated society with a suppressed emotional core that extracts, produces and sells purely for the sake of production itself. The end result is an inattentive, unfulfilled working class which, given the option to artificially fulfil their needs through the determinate world of the spectacle and addiction, chooses escapism. As the author and physician Dr. Gabor Maté warned, in his When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (2003):

“Settling for the view that illnesses, mental or physical, are primarily genetic allows us to avoid disturbing questions about the nature of the society in which we live. If “science” enables us to ignore poverty or man-made toxins or a frenetic and stressful social culture as contributors to disease, we can look only to simple answers: pharmacological and biological.”

I think the evidence presented more than substantiates the claim that capitalism has overstayed its welcome. It came, did some good, a whole lot of bad—and now it’s time we organise ourselves and work towards something new. The alternative?

§4: Disordered Totalitarianism without Metaphor

Now that we have explored the potential causes of a left-hemisphere-dominant culture, I want to evaluate further the effects such a culture might have on the psychologies of our zeitgeist, heeding V.S. Ramachandran’s reminder:

McGilchrist is far from the only neuroscientist to have noticed how the left hemisphere seems to works towards ‘maintaining the status quo.’ Professor V.S. Ramachandran, known for his ‘dual-hemisphere model’ of defence mechanisms (among other things), similarly found that:

“The left cerebral hemisphere is largely responsible for creating a coherent belief system, in order to maintain a sense of continuity towards our lives. New experiences get folded into the pre-existing belief system. When they don‘t fit, they are simply denied. Counter-balancing this is the right cerebral hemisphere, which has the opposite tendency. Whereas the left hemisphere tries to preserve the model, the right hemisphere is constantly challenging the status quo. When the discrepant anomalies become too large, the right hemisphere forces a revision in our world view. However, when our beliefs are too strong, the right hemisphere may not succeed in overriding our denial.”

Because the left hemisphere doesn’t make space for what it does not know, it mistakes its apprehension of the world for the final stage of processing, when really it should be working ‘its necessary effects at an intermediate stage.’ Individuals who get stuck in its binary mode of engagement, much like Bertrand Russell’s ‘man who has no tincture of philosophy’, betray a fascinating distaste for ambiguity—projecting a flat, utilitarian world wherein nuance is subservient to the corroboration of one’s own ‘spectacular’ narrative. They simply deny the possibility that there is more to be known beyond what they have already made explicit.

This is, obviously, an extraordinarily maladaptive mindset—one which, Professor O. Schultheiss might argue, only increases in intensity during stressful situations.41 At the same time, these individuals, failing to incorporate the bigger-picture, implicit insight of the right hemisphere, chase conscious goals totally misaligned with their underlying psychological needs, which causes frequent states of ‘stressed motivation’.42 Schultheiss has also linked this chronic friction directly to elevated cortisol release and severely compromised immune function, making these individuals all the more prone to both physical illness and depressive symptoms.

So much of this pathology, Han and Gabor Maté argue, is rooted in the same unprocessed trauma and chronic stress conditions which give rise to the pathologies of ADHD, BPD, anomie and addiction. It is therefore no surprise that all of these conditions reflect the same breakdown in hemispheric integration we’ve seen emerge throughout this essay. Let’s consider BDP as our first example.

Dr. Alan Schore, working out of UCLA Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, suggests like McGilchrist that the right brain is dominant in the early development of attachment and stress-regulating systems, therefore its access is vital for healing in therapeutic contexts. Dissociative conditions such as Borderline Personality Disorder, known to emerge preponderantly from early developmental trauma, are in this way telling of what a psychology which has repressed the empathic right hemisphere’s relational understanding might look like.

These individuals, sharing the isolated and hyper-analytical left hemisphere’s preference for binary categorisation, often find themselves unable to reconcile the positive and negative qualities of themselves and others. We have seen already that the right hemisphere, with its capacity to experience reality as a flowing spectrum of interconnexion, is necessary to interpret the “grey areas” of human behaviour, and crucial for holding together a realistic and continuous sense of self. It should therefore come as little surprise that patients with BPD often experience periods in which they can only conceive of themselves as either purely good or completely evil. Also characteristic of the paranoid left hemisphere’s brittle modality is these patients’ inability to hold emotional nuance, which frequently manifests in extreme, decontextualised reactions. One might find this pathology not entirely unlike another disorder clearly marked by the fragmenting left-hemisphere’s detached attentional style, which also has its roots in the neurodevelopmental interplay between genetics and environmental trauma: ADHD.

It was Gabor Maté’s wonderful book, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder (1999), which helped me understand how AD isn’t essentially a biodeterministic neurological defect but a developmental adaptation to early relational environments. In his groundbreaking work, Dr. Maté (M.D.), who is himself affected with ADHD, built on Dr. Schore’s research to posit that the neural circuitry responsible for attention modulation, impulse control and emotional self-regulation develop postnatally; that is, they’re not ‘fixed’ from birth but shaped directly by the quality of early attachment. Chronic stress, parental depression, anxiety and other forms of insufficiently attuned caregiving all contribute significantly to the disruption of a developing infant’s capacity to regulate arousal and attention.

Of course, this isn’t to deny the influence of genetic predispositions or temperament—the important point is that these predispositions don’t always cause ADHD without unstable emotional contexts. That many parents exhibit the same impulsivity, emotional reactivity and overall difficulty sustaining right-hemispheric engagement as their ADHD children is a much-to-be-expected finding, as the developing right hemisphere requires consistent co-regulation to mature its capacity for contextualised attention and affect regulation; something a psychologically unstable caregiver simply cannot provide. According to Maté, the key temperamental trait of ADHD is a heightened level of emotional and sensory sensitivity which can cause neurodivergent subjects to absorb the subtle tensions, environmental stressors and psychological baggage of their emotional atmospheres more readily than their neurotypical counterparts. In this light, the tendencies of distractibility and ‘spacing-out’ may be downstream manifestations of a nervous system which has adapted itself to an environment wherein total immersion and attunement was not considered safe and/or consistently available.

Unsurprisingly, I believe the divided brain phenomenology can offer incisive insights into many of the seemingly amorphous elements of the ADHD experience.

Conceiving of the AD symptomatology, like McGilchrist, as an attentional default or preference towards the left hemisphere’s modality illuminates both the restless condition of these subjects as well as some ways in which they might go about reintegrating the sustained, affective embodiment of the right hemisphere. Consider for a moment, if you were to over-rely on the emissary’s attentional style (narrow, object-focused and restless in its grasping for the next discrete detail), how problematic it might be to rest in the master’s broader field of contextual awareness; the type of attention which facilitates prolonged presence in an ongoing situation, relationship, or unfolding task without the persistent need for novel stimulation. Dr. Maté’s clinical description of the ADHD mind, which details a struggle to stay with what is already present as well as a tendency to reach for what is novel, urgent and immediately stimulating, clearly has many points of resonance with this theory.

For reasons including those discussed above, the ‘scattered’ aspect of ADHD attention is suggested to be a protective, psychological defence mechanism against genuine, sustained affective engagement, ie. feeling. Often, and especially for those undiagnosed, these subjects posses unnecessarily low self-esteem, perhaps due to spending most of their lives wading through institutions—which mediate the majority of socialisation in the developmental years—designed with only neurotypical brains in mind. This can result in further alienation, the common belief that they are insufficient or ‘not enough’ as they currently exist (a consequence of failing to incorporate the right hemisphere’s understanding of the whole, in which all human beings are inherently valuable), and a significantly increased likelihood of developing severe addictions (again, to escape their underlying psychologies).

Central to the healing process of this attentional maladaptation, therefore, is genuinely reconnecting, sitting with, and processing the affect they’ve been perpetually distracting themselves from. By restoring the right-hemisphere’s primacy, even temporarily, these subjects can experience the profound, embodied and value-laden whole of regulated experience (not just the emissary’s isolated parts), which emerges from the right brain’s capacity for poignant, enduring, relationally-attuned presence. In this way, healing many of AD’s harmful aspects is less about rigidly controlling one’s symptoms and more about restoring the underlying relational and affective capacities which were disrupted in the first place; finally reframing the belief Professor Han observed in our neoliberal neurosis: that we always need to be doing more. Those who do not make meaningful efforts to resolve their developmental trauma and maladaptive belief systems will inevitably continue being led astray by the paranoid left hemisphere’s fragmentation, exhibit its narcissistic tendencies and fear emotional intimacy - especially with themselves. In turn, these subjects will develop harmful addictions to seek temporary solace from their own unprocessed stories and subconsciously take a withdrawn, nihilistic perspective on themselves and the rest of humanity. Of course, it is not only those diagnosed with psychiatric conditions who need to process their traumas and reintegrate the embodied wisdom of the right hemisphere into their lives—but I hope that much goes without saying.

Other than ADHD and BPD, there are two psychiatric disorders in particular which have provided us with incredibly rich insight into both the human condition and the respective “worlds” of each hemisphere (and how they relate). The study and treatment of these conditions have gifted us psychological wisdoms in such abundance that McGilchrist decided to dedicate a whole chapter of The Matter with Things to their exploration, titled:

What Schizophrenia and Autism can tell us.

The conversation below is a marvellous dialogue between the physicist-turned-neuroscientist Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín and Dr. Iain McGilchrist on exactly this subject. I cannot recommend it enough. There is simply no way I could distill all their insights into this one section.

These conditions are extremely useful in trying to understand ‘what it’s like when the world is largely deprived of whatever it is the right hemisphere can bring to experience’, due to there being a lot of very good records of what patients with these disorders actually have to say. Schizophrenics, in particular, visit psychiatrists regularly - often over decades - which is helpful to us as, in McGilchrist’s words, ‘psychiatrists think it’s important to write down the very words of the patient.’ The same cannot be said for victims of right-hemisphere stroke, typically treated in neurology wards and acute medical wards until they’ve begun to be able to mobilise—at which point they are dismissed from the service.

Just to state the obvious, schizophrenia and autism are not the same disorder, nor are they unitary conditions; ‘there are many different types of schizophrenia and there are many degrees of severity. Equally I think there are autisms not just one autism.’ That in mind, on page 392 of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist explains:

“Both exhibit a reduction in pre-attentive processing and an increase in narrowly focussed attention, which is particularistic, over-intellectualising and inappropriately deliberate in approach. Both rely on piecemeal decontextualised analysis, rather than on an intuitive, spontaneous or global mode of apprehension. Both tend to schematise – for example, to scrutinise the behaviour of others, rather as a visitor from another culture might, to discover the ‘rules’ which explain their behaviour. The living become machine-like: as if to confirm the primacy of the left hemisphere’s view of the world, one schizophrenic patient described by Sass reported that ‘the world consists of tools, and . . . every-thing that we glance at has some utilization’.43”

Both of these conditions got their name from the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who first coined the term ‘autism’ (literally ‘stuck in the self’) to describe a symptom of severe schizophrenia (etymologically ‘a scattered mind’)—so it is no surprise that they are intimately related. If you’ve been keeping up with the pattern so far, it should also be no surprise that both of these conditions exhibit irregular lateralisation.

For those who don’t know, the two cerebral hemispheres are structurally asymmetrical: the right frontal lobe is larger than the left, and the left posterior cortex is larger than the right. (Some people have said that this is to do with the development of language, but those who have read TMaHE know it’s more complicated than that.) I bring this up because of something absolutely fascinating McGilchrist found when he was involved in imaging the neuroanatomy of schizophrenic patients: that the normal asymmetry was either reversed or absent in their brains.

All the more fascinating is that these subjects ‘often seem to use their right hemisphere for a task that most of us would be using our left hemisphere for, and vice versa’, which leads McGilchrist to suspect that there is a rather anomalous assortment of lateral function in schizophrenics; ‘not at all the same as the ordinary individual’. This means we should be cautious of functional brain imaging when studying these patients, as ‘one may see things happening on the right side of the brain and say “that’s, as it were, the right hemisphere”… it is obviously physically the right hemisphere of this subject, but for them, that might be much more like our normal left hemisphere.’

Lastly, I want to emphasise that the brains of those disposed to develop schizophrenia also consistently exhibit disrupted myelination, the process where the axons of our neurones get wrapped in a sheathe of the protective fatty substance known as myelin. These ‘myelin sheathes’ are extremely important because they allow nerve impulses to travel up to 100 times faster along a white matter (highly myelinated, hence its white appearance) axon than an unmyelinated grey matter path. Unsurprisingly, the left hemisphere contains a higher proportion of grey matter (where info is locally analysed) relative to white matter—whereas the right hemisphere, with its focus on connecting the information of different brain regions, contains more white matter. In McGilchrist’s words:

“The long tracts in the brain that are myelinated become the ways whereby we integrate information from one part of the brain to another very, very rapidly—something which seems to be important in generating our sense of a continuous world. This process of myelination doesn’t happen in the same way in schizophrenia, so the business of holding the world together even at the neurophysiological level is likely to be impaired.”

While the jury is still out on ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), it is suspected that the real problem is centred around the corpus callosum; the biggest band of white matter in the nervous system, connecting the two hemispheres. During infancy, autistic children tend to develop comparatively large corpus callosums relative to neurotypical children of the same age—however, in older children, adolescents, and adults with autism, the overall volume, area, and thickness of the corpus callosum are frequently reduced. Reductions in size often correlate with challenges in social interaction, communication, and motor coordination, though we are yet to develop a clear picture in this area of research.

What we do know is that ‘if the hemispheres are too connected their ability to function is impaired, and if they are not connected enough information becomes too segregated and the picture becomes too divisive.’ It is known that schizophrenics also frequently exhibit volume reductions and shape changes in anterior and middle portions of the corpus callosum—and that complete or partial absence of the corpus callosum (agenesis) is associated with a higher likelihood of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses, including both autism traits and schizophrenic psychosis.

As McGilchrist points out, there are various conditions which could in themselves either increase facilitatory transmission between the hemispheres or increase inhibitory transmission between them. The jury is still out on which of these is going on—which is why, having looked at the anatomical differences, it is important to come back to the phenomenology.

During a psychotic break, subjects typically lose their ‘intuitive, grounded sense of being an embodied soul experiencing the world’, and feel as if their status in world has been reduced to something like an ‘observing mechanism’. In 2007, the legal scholar and psychoanalyst Professor Elyn Saks shared a vivid report of her own experience during a schizophrenic episode which illustrated quite clearly the discordant nature of the illness:

“Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One’s centre gives way. The centre cannot hold … Random moments of time follow one another. Sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings don’t go together. No organising principle takes successive moments in time and puts them together in a coherent way from which sense can be made.”

As these subjects lose their capacity for integrative imagination (something we’ll come back to momentarily), there becomes no way for them to construct a coherent picture of the world in which irrelevancies can be detected and excluded. As a result, every detail stands out as equally important and demands attention in its own right, generating ‘an overload of distracting fragments.’ Not dissimilarly, Dr. Temple Grandin, a very well-known spokeswoman for autism, says she is ‘overwhelmed with a mass of details’, describing her mind as working like ‘a google search engine on the entire universe’ producing too many details without any coherent overview. In the report of another schizophrenic patient they declare:

“Everything seems to grip my attention though I’m not particularly interested in anything. I am speaking to you just now but I can hear noises going on next door and in the corridor. I find it difficult to shut them out and it makes it more difficult for me to concentrate on what I’m saying to you. Often the silliest little things that are going on seem to interest me. That’s not even true; they don’t interest me but I find myself attending to them and wasting a lot of time this way. I know that sounds like laziness, but it’s not really.”44

McGilchrist recalls having had patients of his own whose attention, while they were trying to talk, was constantly focused on some ‘entirely inanimate object—usually over in the right field of vision; for the left hemisphere—a piece of a radiator or a piece of a door lock’. Yet another patient describes:

“I was surrounded by a multitude of meaningless details … I did not see things as a whole. I only saw fragments: a few people, a dairy, a dreary house … They did not stand together in overall context … My impressions did not flow as they normally do. If I had not continuously reminded myself where I was going, I would just as gladly have stood still somewhere.”45

Already, in these few descriptions, so much is revealed. This business of being too distracted - by the pieces - to see the whole, as Dr. Gómez-Marín comments, ‘sounds strange, but also increasingly familiar with respect to our culture—at least Western modernity’. I doubt many of us in this digital age find it difficult to imagine a state in which we are constantly bombarded with a mass of details that make no sense, or to imagine our attention incessantly gripped by things we don’t want to be gripped by. At another level, Professor Saks’ account of there being ‘no organising principle [that] takes successive moments in time and puts them together in a coherent way from which sense can be made’ is very indicative of left-hemisphere-dominance—which ‘actually causes most of the problems in thinking about time’—as it tends to ‘substitute its flow for a thin series of slices, ie. stasis, multiplied, rather than movement’.

We’ll look at the philosophical implications of this idea in the next part of this series, but for now I want to emphasise one key problem with the left hemisphere: ‘it thinks it needs to stitch together elements of experience that, if the right hemisphere were properly working, would not seem like ‘elements’ of experience; they would be one continuous, inhabited flow.’ Eugen Bleuler, the first describer of schizophrenia, noted that these subjects often lose their boundaries in space and time, as their internal fantasy worlds override relational reality. For example, ‘one patients describes a friend’s body as erupting through his. Another one describes other people’s faces feeding into him’. Yet another recalls ‘other people’s bodies intermingling with hers.’

Clearly, there is a loss of Gestalt perception, deficits in contextual understanding and difficulty discriminating important from unimportant stimuli—all of which are ‘very much right-hemisphere-related deficits’. What’s easy to miss, however, is that this loss of global integration is also at the root of the elaborate yet bizarre belief systems these subjects so often espouse: ‘the basis of delusions, in fact, is a loss of intuition and common sense’. As GK Chesterton put it, the madman is not the man who has lost his reason—but ‘the man who has lost everything except his reason’.

Alienated from the physical body in time and space, the schizophrenic becomes untrusting of the common sense notions which ground us as social beings. Instead of relying on the intuitive modes of apprehension we naturally use to understand the world in a coherent way, they confabulate logical systems that explain what they’re experiencing: ‘that someone from mars is controlling their mind with a special ray machine, or that the person next-door is tapping into their conversations and actually intercepting their thoughts.’ These explanations are, in a way, logical—at least for people who are experiencing thought insertion and other reality distortions—but most of us would recognise they are completely irrational.

This brings us right to the doorstep of yet another fascinating commonality between the left hemisphere and schizophrenia: the inability to recognise their own incoherence. The emissary’s ignorance of its own incongruence is so extreme that many patients who have suffered a right-hemisphere stroke are often quicker to argue, for instance, that their paralysed left-arm belongs to their brother, or a nearby patient, as opposed to acknowledging that there is indeed something wrong with their own bodies. Anosognosia, this condition wherein subjects are explicitly unaware of their own impairments, is—unsurprisingly—very common in schizophrenia as well.

Similarly, in ‘autistic’ thought (autism, in origin, meaning a profound detachment from the relational world which—for Bleuer—denoted a defensive escape from pain and/or dissatisfaction), subjects fulfil their desires and unconscious psychological needs through literal self-absorption. In other words, by prioritising their ‘mental’ lives; hallucinations and fantasies over the ‘external’ world, they feel as if they can bend existence to their wills and disregard the conflicting evidence of their psychosis.

Nowadays, of course, autism is better understood as a separate, life-long neurodevelopmental condition which is extremely varied in both nature and intensity. That said, subjects diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, it is true, typically find it challenging to spontaneously understand the world in a relational manner. As McGilchrist writes, on page 72 of TMaHE:

It is not just the capacity to interpret emotional signals, in a functional or utilitarian sense, that is mediated by the right hemisphere. While the capacity to interpret other’s minds, even to appreciate what they must be thinking and feeling – the capacity that is missing in autism – is lost in a right-hemisphere stroke, it is more than that too: it is the capacity positively to empathise.46

Without the ability to actively infer the emotional states of others, it is typical for these subjects to rely on fully-explicit abstractions to navigate the world—which, as we know, is the left hemisphere’s specialty. The nature of this categorising modality might explain these individuals’ preference for ‘black-and-white’, ‘matter-of-fact’ thinking—which brings us to my next point: that the desire for absolute certitude, achieved, of course, only in alienated conceptualisation, is more deleterious than we realise:

From the Dipole to Polarity: The Origins of Totalitarianism

There is this strange tendency in the words of those who rely on the emissary’s cognitive modality, as Gómez-Marín notes: ‘you hardly ever hear the word ‘maybe’ being said.’ The great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin—a close friend of the wunderkind Schelling and MLK’s beloved G.W.F Hegel—embodied this disposition to such an extent that, once he developed schizophrenia in his 30s and retreated to his reclusive tower in Tübingen, he actually invented his own word, Pallaksch—which meant either yes, or no—but never maybe; meaning it meant nothing at all.

A dipole is, in McGilchrist’s words, ‘two things that appear to be opposite but are inextricably conjoined and codependent, like the north and south poles of a magnet’. A polarity, on the other hand, is more ‘like the black and white distinction of these two completely contrasting elements; an either/or rather than a both/and’.

According to one internationally renowned psychopathologist, the phenomenologist Bin Kimura, schizophrenia significantly disturbs the Zwischensein (being-between, or inter-being) of the affected subject, which, as McGilchrist put it, ‘results in an unstable switch between two positions: one in which the body loses all its boundaries and other things are flooding in and out of it, and the other what seems like the opposite; another problem of the same inability to establish the right relationship with the world: “I’m completely atomistic, I’m just a self-enclosed machine; I have no contact with reality at all”.’

Gómez-Marín observes that, in these conditions, ‘there is a fantasy of omnipotence, or solipsistic subjectivity, as well as a fantasy of impotence, or alienated objectivity—so here again are two poles which are not integrated creating a strange polarity.’ What’s particularly interesting is that this ‘transmutation of the dipole into a polarity’ is, according to these psychologists and I, ‘very characteristic of modernity’; indeed, as Gómez-Marín suggests, ‘perhaps this is what’s demanded of us when we practice reductionism and scientism… also emphasising bureaucracy’.

There’s obviously a lot to unpack here, but I hope you will stay with us, as underlying these seemingly abstract observations might lie the key to abandoning the fantastical certitude of Pallaksch, in favour of, as it were, a more wisdom-clad disposition towards man and the world.

Due to binary ways which we are taught to think in the West, many at the outset of their philosophical journey tend to bounce from one extreme to another; to collapse the dipole into polarity. After being force-fed efficient, ‘objective’ and immediately explicit summaries of just about everything under the sun, modern man has - to a large extent - lost his ability to digest the dialectic. Consider, for example, Nietzsche’s famous declaration that “there are no facts, only interpretations”. To our consciously deliberate modality this aphorism makes little sense; the left hemisphere, which is always trying to close everything down to a certainty, simply cannot reconcile the conflicting elements of the proposition. As the greatest of all pre-Socratic philosophers put it:

“They do not understand how a thing agrees at variance with itself: it is an attunement turning back in itself, like that of the bow and the lyre.”47

Put another way, the left hemisphere fails to recognise that two things which contradict one another can be true simultaneously. A huge problem with this, as Niels Bohr (the Danish philosopher and physicist who revolutionised our understanding of the atom and quantum theory) remarked, is that ‘it is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth’. This is a story for the next instalment of the series, so if you are interested and don’t want to miss out:

Subscribe now

Because the left hemisphere thinks that its confabulated nonsense is the full story, it fails to understand that the human mind can operate on multiple levels of conceptualisation. An interesting parallel which elucidates this is, believe it or not, latent in Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems—which, much to Bertrand Russell’s dismay, showed that there is a permanent gap between what is true and what can be mathematically proven in a (consistent) formal system. In Sir Roger Penrose’s words:

“What struck me as most remarkable — and reassuring in a way — was that your understanding of why the rules (proofs in a computable system) work enables you to transcend the use of the rules. Only with external understanding we can see why the Gödel theorem is true.”

In essence, this means conscious understanding can transcend the logic of a single system; that Nietzsche’s observation, ‘there are no truths, only interpretations,’ can indeed be ‘true’ because the normative statement [LH?] is understood in context and in depth by our meta-cognitive faculties [RH?]. Again I have to stress that many of these hemispheric analogies are not strictly settled neuroscience—which is the whole point. As McGilchrist writes towards the end of TMaHE:

“I share Wittgenstein’s mistrust of deceptively clear models: and, as Waismann said, ‘any psychological explanation is ambiguous, cryptic and open-ended, for we ourselves are many-layered, contradictory and incomplete beings, and this complicated structure, which fades away into indeterminacy, is passed on to all our actions.’48 I am also sympathetic to those who think that sounds like a cop-out. But I do think that things as they exist in practice in the real world, rather than as they exist in theory in our re-presentations, are likely to be intrinsically resistant to precision and clarification. That is not our failure, but an indication of the nature of what we are dealing with. That does not mean we should give up the attempt. It is the striving that enables us to achieve a better understanding, but only as long as it is imbued with a tactful recognition of the limits to human understanding. The rest is hubris.”

I also have to stress that this doesn’t mean the hemisphere hypothesis is ‘purely’ metaphorical. It would be extremely strange if revolutionary neuroscientists like Panksepp, Solms and Ramachandran described his work as ‘the best they’d read in a decade’, providing ‘key insights into the nature of consciousness’ itself, if the philosophy was not thoroughly grounded in the best of our empirical neuroscience. Of course, there will be plenty of individual findings which negate elements of his theory, but that much is to be expected, and should not diminish the value of his work on the whole, as it might for a schizophrenic or autist. On that note, I also want to strongly emphasise that the elements of these disorders which I have highlighted in this section are not representative of the human beings affected with these conditions in their entirety. In fact, there are many aspects of ASD and ADHD, in particular, which reflect an enhanced, as it were, ‘right-hemispheric’ sensitivity (a topic I will touch on another time). It goes without saying that we should not underestimate the self-awareness and empathic capacity of these individuals any more than we should with the average Joe. Again, two opposing ideas can coexist. Such is the birthplace of nuance, veridicality and genuine insight.

Finally, I want to finish-off this section by demonstrating that, by neglecting metaphor; the organic world and the wisdom humanity has cultivated hitherto, we are edging ourselves closer to both totalitarianism as well as a culture that is, verifiably, increasingly characterised by the psychiatric conditions we have discussed thus far.

As we have seen, when the dipole collapses into a polarity, ‘either one or other extremes is open to us’. In schizophrenic psychosis, this manifests as being ‘sceptical to the point of paralysis about matters that must be taken for granted if one is to function at all, yet gullible enough to espouse enormously improbable belief systems that are clearly delusional—which parallels quite clearly with our modern condition in that we are taught to doubt our intuitions about everything’ to the point that, as one renowned philosopher of science, Princeton’s McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus Bas van Fraassen has put it, people genuinely believe that electrons are ‘more real’ than the electron microscopes they used to conceptualise them.

As Solms and McGilchrist would have it, we’re too busy sceptically scrutinising our own analyses (and, of course, self-exploiting to meet the needs of the capitalist system) to get on with the business of actually living the life that is not so alienated from our ‘ensouled’ nature. Yet, at the same time, ‘we’re gullible enough to swallow all kinds of improbabilities which, in the future, if there is a future for humanity, they will look back on (our age) as the most hilarious, most absurd that ever existed.’ This is pretty clearly demonstrated, e.g., by the growing amount of Singularitarians—led by the likes of Ray Kurzweil—who believe humanity is less than two decades away from a technological ‘singularity’ in which we will be able to reconstruct the atomic structure of the universe (using super-intelligent ‘microbots’, of course) so we can all live happily ever after in a perfect, computational simulation. And how could you forget the existence of a tech-trillionaire like Elon Musk, who would rather spend billions trying to move humanity to Mars as opposed to genuinely helping prevent the destruction of the only directly habitable planet in the galaxy.

For McGilchrist, these ludicrous notions fashionably enjoined on us suggest that ‘once the theoretical mind is untethered from the body and from the community in which it’s grounded and from which it receives its intuitions, there simply is no longer any solid base for discriminating truth from untruth’. This decontextualisation, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari pointed out in their two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), is the modus operandi of our economic system. According to the philosopher and psychoanalyst, respectively, capitalism and colonialism ‘deterritorialise’ social, cultural and physical relations from their traditional contexts such that they can be ‘reterritorialised’ and governed by the logic of the coloniser. In our cybernetic age our separation from the cultural processes and ancestral practices which have given our lives meaning for thousands of millennia is essentially inevitable, which makes us increasingly susceptible to, as we’ll see in a moment, totalitarian narratives; dogma and propaganda.

Again, in all of this, we see that loss of coherence brought about by the collapse of a central narrative which is characteristic of schizophrenic disorders; indeed, we know that during psychotic episodes ‘persons may feel thrown away from their natural seat and can only contemplate themselves from the outside or from a third-person perspective’.49 To McGilchrist this indicates we ought to be at least moderately cautious of the modern tendency to take an ‘inappropriately exterior view of our own selves’, knowing that ‘devitalisation is characteristic of left-hemisphere-dominance; a sense of separation, unreality or deadening, which is inherent in a stance or attitude of disengagement’.

It is a natural reaction to want to distance ourselves from the—I don’t think it’s controversial to say—unprecedented existential angst which weighs on us as we are confronted by postmodernism’s disorienting smorgasbord of perspectives without any grounding mythology to guide us. As prediction-making organisms who constantly need to internally model our place in the world, we are inherently uncomfortable with uncertainty. From this it likely follows that during periods of anxiety and isolation we are far more susceptible to those popular notions which promise to lend our identities some form of certitude; some inkling of our standing with respect to the rest of the world.

This emotional collapse into dogma has never been benign. The banality of evil—otherwise known as the death of critical thinking—is largely responsible for fascism, the bizarre identity politics of the 21st century and, crucially for our purposes, the peculiar, hyper-rational view on man and the world which sees itself reflected right down to the finest details in a clinically-recognised form of madness. Nobody would deny it is incredibly ‘useful to be able to stand back,’ as McGilchrist affirms, ‘but of course a science inculcates in one that the only way to view anything is from the outside, not from experience; to measure it objectively in some way, and always write ones reports in the third person’.

Reductionism has led us to the point where it is a genuinely commonly held belief that all purpose, value; truth, goodness and beauty we experience is ‘merely’ an illusion, a position which at its core is defined by the antithesis of scientific inquiry; scientism. If you’ve been paying attention, such a view may even sound to you quite like something a person affected with a psychiatric psychosis would espouse. For instance, one subject recorded in the article Values in Persons With Schizophrenia (2006) suggests that “man is merely a heap of memories in a standard hardware”. Another patient says “I am a camera”—which incidentally was the prose imprinted on very the first page of Christopher Isherwood's 1939 novel, Goodbye to Berlin [“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”], which McGilchrist notes as ‘the beginning of that modernistic thing of being a detached observer.’ Indeed, as the authors of the paper (above) also affirm, the ‘essential features of the value system of persons with schizophrenia are a disdainful refusal of the ordinary way of being and the taken-for-granted understanding of reality’. One of the consequences, as McGilchrist points out, is that ‘their internal thought processes seem more real than anything they could observe in the world around them. So, abstractions, in some sort of ghastly travesty of Platonic philosophy, come to appear more real than the real world instances from which they are derived.’

This is demonstrated very clearly by a patient of the French psychiatrist and phenomenologist Eugène Minkowski, who thought that ‘sex could be reduced to mathematics’, and that chemistry was not abstract or precise enough. Another of Minkowski’s patients, when asked to write about his life, only mentioned objects; walls, boxes, bolts and boltholes. ‘Not one living person entered his description; his whole life was made up of solid and immovable objects.’ Evidently, what follows from the predilection for mechanism, as McGilchrist points out, is a ‘positive distaste for nature’:

“Nature [for these subjects] is something rather repellent; sort of mucky, inaccurate, imprecise—and probably a waste. ‘What’s it there for?’ One patient describes “nature is nothing”, and she places herself irrevocably outside the world… experiencing nature as exclusively a complex network of tools (which is absolutely fantastic)! It’s that exaggerated concern with utility, and a distaste for anything that’s natural and spontaneous—which is the realm that the right hemisphere can understand but which the left hemisphere is at sea with. And so such patients not only have very little intuitive or instinctive sense, but reason that intuition and instinct are probably things we ought to try to do without. Not all patients: some actually very movingly say “there’s something very important in being a human being, it’s absolutely central, and I haven’t got it”. It’s really rather sad and rather moving that some patients see that other people are able to make sense of things but they’ve lost the faculty to be able to do that.”

It should be clear by now that we cannot solely rely on rigid, linear analyses of the world in our striving towards a genuine understanding of it. As Nietzsche wrote, “genius resides in instinct; goodness likewise. One acts perfectly only when one acts instinctively. Even from the viewpoint of morality, all conscious thinking is merely tentative. His insight, as so often, is beyond impressive. What’s more, considering that the majority of communication (and life) transcends the use of explicit language, it should come as little surprise that scientific insight, too, is not bounded by its logic. As McGilchrist reminds us, ‘Kekulé seized the shape of the benzene ring, the foundation of organic chemistry, when the image of a snake biting its tail arose from the embers of his fire’. Likewise, ‘the structure of the periodic table of the elements came to Mendeleyev in a dream’, and, for Einstein: ‘the words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in the mechanism of my thought’.50

The ability to instinctively form connections on the primordial basis of the whole, to see the forest for the trees, as Einstein saw it, is absolutely paramount in moving beyond the serial reproduction of the left hemisphere, as he said himself: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” Furthermore, there is an extremely striking parallel between his famous quote: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift” and Roger Sperry’s observation based on the split-brain research which won him the Nobel Prize:

“The main theme to emerge... is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.”

That ‘intuitive mind’ quote often attributed to Einstein, I should note, was actually authored by the natural scientist Robert E. Samples in an attempt to highlight the pith of Einstein’s philosophy. Regardless, I am confident he would agree with McGilchrist that, while science and reason are absolutely essential, there are countless neglected wisdoms offered to us by the imagination and intuition which ‘may be very true, but difficult to articulate or to reach in terms of science and reason’. An obvious example is art, though a more striking instance is the modern confusion surrounding the ability to co-create one’s path; that perception of solipsistic impotence which so frequently captures the imagination (or lack thereof) of subjects with schizophrenia. The common claim that neuroscience plainly disproves free will reflects to me that we have become increasingly alienated from the corporeal common sense of our right hemispheres, having instead deferred our rationale to the reductive, abstract and genuinely simplistic conclusions based in the fully-explicit models of our power-hungry cerebral emissaries.

Due to scientism and the capitalist consciousness it helps facilitate, the imaginative act of interpretation has become so rare that even ‘neurotypicals’ exhibit the same failure to grasp the whole that we have seen throughout this essay in many forms of autism and schizophrenia. The alienation and addiction to fully-explicit ie. determinate images which my generation in particular is shrouded by is so extreme that—to give a personal anecdote—upon asking some of my friends to engage with the following art piece, multiple responded with something along the lines of “what is it”, though not at all in a curious manner; it was more like a complete inability to engage with their own intuitive imaginations. This seems to me a rather dangerous disposition. Without the imagination, there is nothing to prevent the immediate closure of the world; nothing which allows us to take a step back and recognise that perhaps there are realities which cannot be exhausted by one’s current explanatory frameworks.

As McGilchrist points out in a conversation with Dr. Mark Vernon, the modern world, in its weariness of the imagination, tends to equate it with fantasy, when in fact it is the exact opposite: fantasy is what takes us away from reality; imagination, on the other hand, ‘is the only chance of getting into the depth of reality’. Without it, Scheler’s insight that ‘our feelings are not necessarily in us, but we are in them’ is profoundly lost, and along with it goes the integrative synthesis which unites self, other, parts and whole into one coherent experience. As the reader has probably come to expect by now, it is yet another capacity which is greatly limited in many forms of autism and schizophrenia—with one patient even admitting: “I’m actually deluding myself into thinking I could think. I was actually searching my memory bank… Non-mechanical thinking? I can’t conceive of that anymore.” It has been suggested by McGilchrist, and many other psychiatrists for that matter, that these are tendencies,51 ‘if nothing more’, increasingly represented in our culture and in ourselves. Of course it is just my opinion, but I believe we ought to lend some credence to the suggestions of medical doctors who have diagnosed, worked with and treated patients affected by these conditions for their entire lives.

I believe the words of Dr. Gabor Mate may be relevant:

“That even open-minded people may have difficulty coming to terms with this diagnosis is only to be expected. Our usual mode of thinking about illness (or anything else, for that matter) is not comfortable with ambiguity. A patient either has pneumonia or does not; she either has some illness affecting the mind or does not. There is a popular discomfort with any condition of the mind perceived as “abnormal.” But what if illness is not a separate category, if there is no line of distinction between the “healthy” and the “nonhealthy,” if the “abnormality” is just a greater concentration in an individual of disturbed brain processes found in everyone? Then perhaps there are no fixed, immutable brain disorders, and we could all be vulnerable to mental breakdowns or malfunctions under the pressure of stressful circumstances. We could all go crazy. Maybe we already have.”

In this light, perhaps we should be weary of McGilchrist’s observation that:

“A culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere’s world attracts to itself, in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar. People with certain autistic traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology and administration which have, during the last hundred years, been immensely influential in shaping the world we live in, and are if anything even more important today. Thus a culture which already has some prominent autistic characteristics attracts to positions of influence individuals who will help it ever further down the same path. This is not the only vicious circle involved. Increasing technologisation and bureaucratisation of life help to erode the more integrative modes of attention to people and things which might help us resist the advances of technology and bureaucracy, so that in this way they aid their own replication.”

“The opposite of life is not death; the opposite of life is the machine” is in my eyes one of McGilchrist’s most trenchant diagnoses. I believe that conceiving of the brain, mankind or the cosmos in its entirety as fully-determinate and mechanical objects is a misguided and literally psychotic analogy for understanding the nature of organic matter and the ‘mind-at-large’ for a plethora of reasons. Not the least of which, as the Belgian Professor of Psychology Mattias Desmet points out, is that if we consider people, societies and even the universe itself as some sort of computational machine, it naturally follows that it can, or should, be controlled, led and/or governed by technical experts. I should also note that Desmet is a scholar of the remarkable historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who, in her seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), wrote that “there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits. […] In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” In essence, she highlights that the role of propaganda in totalitarian regimes is found in the construction of an entirely logical, self-contained yet completely artificial world which collapses the distinction between truth and untruth. In the most terrible actualisation of left-hemisphere usurpation, by weaponising propaganda such that a society begins to prefer a perfectly coherent narrative over the realistic subtleties of any given political situation, the totalitarian state is able to insulate its subjects from outside information (which, of course, is the very capacity which McGilchrist and Ramachandran have located in the right cerebral hemisphere). What distinguishes the ideologically captured subject from the man of imagination, as it were, is the ability to remain in an unfinished and open relation to the Other; to see a presence in the world as both itself and more than itself—a capacity lost when a population can only adhere those popular narratives which, as Arendt put it, explain “everything and nothing”.

For Professor Desmet, we have already completed Arendt’s preconditions for totalitarianism to emerge: generalised loneliness and social isolation, a lack of meaning in life, widespread free-floating anxiety and widespread free-floating frustration and aggression. He suggests that, once these four conditions are active across a population, the system is primed for a catalyst—meaning that if the government or mass media begin to introduce a single narrative pointing towards a specific ‘enemy’ or crisis, the floating anxiety of the population anchors onto that scapegoated object which causes the masses to eagerly accept Draconian regulations, hyper-strict government controls and outright absurd ideas. As Arednt warned, the general public often fails to recognise that they’re descending into totalitarianism because they associate it strictly with concentration camps; the final, fully-formed stage of a process which starts simply in everyday compliance and technocratic overreach. Perhaps this is where we are headed. Only time will tell.

§5: Wisdom in a World in Crisis

There is, of course, hope. If any of this has interested, worried, or sparked any sort of desire in you, especially to do something which might bring us closer to a life of hemispheric balance, I strongly recommend starting with the conversation above. As for the importance of McGilchrist’s work on the whole, I could not put it better than Dr. Rowan Williams:

“There can be no denying that this, like McGilchrist’s earlier work, is a genuinely groundbreaking and exceptionally important challenge to what Mary Midgley, in a book very much in tune with this, called “the myths we live by” in North Atlantic modernity/late modernity/postmodernity. This is the era of “infotainment,” egregious public lies, corrosive cynicism, scientific fundamentalism, the barbaric functionalizing of education, and the Balkanization of public argument.

As McGilchrist’s subtitle tells us, we live in a world that is being “unmade” — not just corrupted here and there, but dismantled as a meaningful, intelligible environment in relation to which we are able to build models of human life that have some dignity and durability. We are losing the capacity to think honestly about ourselves, so it is hardly surprising that we shrink from facing the truth about the physical world we belong to and continue to abuse and unravel it.

In the long run, I imagine, McGilchrist would say that this [The Matter with Things] is an unforgivingly big book because his subject matter is unforgivingly urgent and complex. And he addresses this with an extraordinary blend of detailed clinical evidence, a keen eye for the illusions of popular culture, a style of exemplary simplicity and energy, and a consistent moral passion.”

If you have made it this far, I thank you kindly, and would like to share with you the answer to a question I was lucky enough to ask McGilchrist back in April: ‘What do you think we should do, day by day, to bring this knowledge back to life in our society?’

As Dr. Andrew Davis commented, ‘I’ve often heard you (McGilchrist) say “the left hemisphere says: here’s your list your list—do it; a, b, c…”, but I suspect you won’t answer in that way’… And indeed he did not:

I like to think that the search for those values are what this Substack is dedicated to. And I believe that science, philosophy and the arts can help us get there.

In the next instalment of this series, I would like to explore how the left-hemisphere, in its simplistic and fragmented ‘nothing-buttery’, wants to construe the cosmos as ‘nothing-but’ a meaningless bundle of lumpen particles bouncing into one another with no foreseeable direction. And I would like to offer an alternative vision.

I believe that if we pay close attention to what the brightest physicists, biologists and philosophers of our time really have to say, we may just recounter a universe that is entirely made out of relation, flow, and depth. As David Bohm put it in 1982:

“Thought and matter have a great similarity of order. In a way, nature is alive, as Whitehead would say, all the way to the depths. And intelligent. Thus it is both mental and material, as we are.”

38

Gianotti, 2002; Perani, Cappa, Bettinardi et al., 1995; Martin, Wiggs, Ungerleider et al., 1996; linked by Gainotti (2002, p. 419) to the generation of action words and the observation of actions, concluding that ‘the categories of man-made objects may be chiefly subserved by the fronto-parietal regions of the left hemisphere, because…

“Yes, a key can lie forever in the place where the locksmith left it, and never be used to open the lock the master forged it for.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1946

Wittgenstein’s truism1 is the first epigraph encountered by a reader of Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things—a book which I consider one of if not the greatest I’ve ever touched. I’m certainly not alone in this sentiment:

“The Matter With Things is a work of genius. It is the best book I know of on the science of consciousness, the philosophy of mind, and the cultural, social and spiritual implications of having a brain and mind structured to function as ours do,” wrote Dr. Norman Doidge2 in 2021.

Just the other day, actually, I was listening to a new Within Reason3 episode featuring Sam Harris4, and was elated to hear host O’Connor remark, spontaneously:

“I think that the hemispheric divide of the brain, is, along with Iain McGilchrist, perhaps one of the most significant psychological facts, ever…

Harris: “mm.” (👍)

“In the The Matter with Things, which I’m, sort of, working my way through…”

Harris: “big book, yeah — or books…”

“Yeah, two books, and I mean I think he’s wonderful and hitting on something which is just probably/actually quite revolutionary, I mean, people are unironically, on the back, sort of saying this is the most important book written in the past hundred years, saying he’s the William James5 of our time…”

I wouldn’t disagree. Incidentally, it was Alex’s podcast that introduced me to McGilchrist in the first place—and I still think their interview is a great introduction to the good Doctor’s work:

You can click here if you’d prefer to have a listen.

Who is Iain McGilchrist, anyway?

Dr. Iain McGilchrist is the world’s leading expert on hemispheric lateralisation, as well as a prominent British psychiatrist and philosopher. He is more than likely my favourite living author, possessing an erudition and integrative capacity that is second-to-none. He was born in London about seventy three years ago, and since then has become one of modernity’s greatest polymaths—achieving mastery over fields including philosophy, neuroscience, medicine and literature. In 1974, he was awarded a scholarship to New College, Oxford, where he won the English Chancellor’s Prize and the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize.

He was subsequently admitted to All Souls College, Oxford, as a Prize Fellow, where he would read and teach English, as well as publish work on literary criticism—including his first book—Against Criticism (1982).

At age 27, McGilchrist left academia to study medicine, noting that the academic approach to literature “denatured” the art he loved.

He chose instead to explore the mind-body relationship through a combination of philosophy, psychiatry and neuroscience.

A quick but necessary note.

I’d like to draw your attention to the subtitle of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.

To reduce TMwT’s content to “neuroscience and philosophy” is to miss its point entirely.

For those not already entrenched in philosophy, neuroscience and psychopolitics—this series is likely to be a somewhat challenging read. Though technical, these works are deeply relevant: getting to the pith of real-world issues and ‘what it is to be a human.’

The purpose of his prose lies in sharing a vision which can re-frame the way you think of yourself and the world around you. McGilchrist’s work, as he suggests himself, is a dire reveille. His inter-disciplinary analysis of civilisation’s history suggests that we’re edging ourselves toward collapse, due to an over-reliance on left-hemispheric engagement with the world.

I urge the reader, then, to engage with this series deliberately. This is indeed a long piece, one to which you may need to return or take note of.

If you stick with it, though, you may just learn something invaluable—and what you learn might just change your life, as it did mine.

Please enjoy.

The Master and His Emissary (Yale, 2009)

This newsletter will go on to explore the content of The Matter with Things and more. This first post, however, is primarily centred around The Master and His Emissary; exploring—as the book’s subtitle puts it—the divided brain and the making of the western world.

‘Psychiatrist debunks the left brain/right brain myth,’ the headline proclaims. Always interested to learn more, I read on, only to discover that the psychiatrist in question is – myself. This puts its finger on the nub of the matter. I don’t believe in the left brain/right brain myth: I believe in discovering the truth about hemisphere difference. There can be no question that it would be foolish to believe most of what has passed into popular culture on the topic of hemisphere differences. And yet it would be just as foolish to believe that therefore there are no important hemisphere differences. There are massively important ones, which lie at the core of what it means to be a human being. It’s just that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. When people object that each hemisphere is involved in everything we do, they are right. When they assume that means there are no differences, they are wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does, but how it does it that matters. Each hemisphere is involved in everything, true enough; just in a quite different way.

Before we dive into the hemisphere hypothesis:

It might be beneficial to have an idea regarding its nature. Originally, I planned on forestalling possible misconceptions by deliberating a summary of my own, but, as I was glossing over the preface to TMaHE’s expanded edition (2019)—I noticed that McGilchrist had already provided such a summary himself:

“There are a number of points I could wish to have made more clearly in this book had I been aware at the time of writing of the potential for misconception. Let me address them briefly now.

I do not mean to suggest that the brain causes human experience. Clearly there is a correlation between the brain and human experience. A discussion of what we can know of the nature of that correlation would take me too far from the purposes of this preface. However, my position in brief is that the nature and structure of the brain must be reciprocally related to the nature and structure of consciousness, but does not necessarily give rise to it (rather than, say, transduce it). It might, or it might not.

I also did not mean to imply that the changes in cultural balance were due to there having been gross changes in our brains over the time periods in question (the last 2,500 years). Given that we are evolving creatures, it is bound to be true that our brains have changed at some level, since our brains both mould and are in turn moulded by the culture in which we live. But that is not my point. What I suggest is that nowadays we use – draw on the potential of – our brains differently from the way in which we have used them at different periods in the past, periods which also differ from one another in this same respect.

Nor do I suggest that the causes of such cultural shifts can be reduced to neuroscience. There are many causative factors in play when cultures change, including sociological, psychological, environmental, epigenetic, technological, economic and political factors, all of which are interconnected. I am not attempting to answer the question of what causes changes: just of what patterns are discernible when such changes occur, and how those patterns relate to the possible takes on the world afforded to us by the brain’s bihemispheric structure. Doing so gives us insight into those situations – I believe we are in one now – where the balance is lost. It helps us see what it is we are missing. An argument sometimes brought against the existence of hemisphere difference is that under normal circumstances each hemisphere is always active to some extent. This seems to me scarcely an argument at all – no one could dispute the fact for an instant. It does not, however, prove that the two hemispheres’ roles are the same.

I do say clearly in the book that differences between hemispheres are not absolute, but since I have been misunderstood on the point, perhaps I should emphasise it again. Very few differences ever are absolute, especially in the living world. There is overlap, but that does nothing to undermine the essential difference.

A couple of related points are worth making. I have heard it said that ‘the hemispheres are more like than they are unlike’. It’s hard to know exactly what this phrase means; but whatever it means, sometimes in life it is the differences that count. Donald Trump and Albert Einstein are undoubtedly ‘more like than they are unlike’. An old banger and a new Ferrari are both cars, with internal combustion engines, and are in that sense much more alike than not. But when I am buying one, I am interested in their differences. Nor am I ‘dichotomising’. Nature got there before me, beginning with a remarkable physical division at the core of the brain, which she has since made more robust through mechanisms of interhemispheric inhibition.

Finally:

I caused some confusion by remarking at the end of the book that, while I thought it unlikely I would be shown to be wholly wrong, it would be remarkable if I were shown to be right in every respect. I followed that commonplace observation with words to the effect that, in the worst possible case, the hemisphere distinction at least provided a valuable metaphor, metaphor being how we come to understand the world. That has led some literal-minded people to assume that I do not believe in my own thesis, and that I think the decades spent investigating the neuroscience were irrelevant. It will hardly surprise you to learn that I am not of that view at all.”

Regardless of what the literally-minded readers of the “metaphorical” McGilchrist have espoused, the hemispheric differences explored in The Master and His Emissary are real, robust, and experimentally demonstrable. There are two incompatible yet complimentary ways of attending to the world; developed, split, and preserved by nature herself. Observe the following image:

A corpus callosotomy is a surgical procedure typically carried out for the treatment of severe epilepsy, involving a severing of the corpus callosum; the nerve fibre bridge that connects the two hemispheres. It is the largest white matter structure in the brain and, without it, the hemispheres cannot communicate with each other efficiently.

In Steven Pinker’s6 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, my attention was brought to a fascinating experiment putative to confirm what I—via Nietzsche— once believed to be the nature of the self (and thereby free will.)

Sperry and Gazzaniga, two of the most significant names in split-brain research (and psychology as a whole), carried out a number of paradigm-shifting experiments in the early 1960s.

In split-brain patients (post-corpus callosotomy), visual information presented to the right visual field is processed only by left hemisphere. Because speech production is a left-lateralised ability, the left hemisphere can say what it sees. The right is not so lucky.

That said, the right hemisphere can point, draw, recognise faces, and follow commands non-verbally.

Gazzaniga’s most famous finding—which Pinker discusses in The Blank Slate—is the left-brain interpreter:

When the left hemisphere is cut off from information processed by the right, it will invent reasons for actions it did not initiate and confabulate explanations rather than admit ignorance. It always ‘preserves agency’. A classic example:

1. The right hemisphere is shown instructions to stand up

2. The patient stands, but,

3. When the patient is asked why he stood up, the left hemisphere replies:

“I needed some air” or “I was going to get a coke.”

It needs to maintain a coherent narrative at all costs.

Pinker uses these experiments to:

1. Exorcise ‘the ghost in the machine’—the Cartesian notion that the mind/soul is a transcendent entity controlling the physical body.

2. Conclude, like Nietzsche, that the self is a narrative construction and that free will is post-hoc rationalisation. (We will return to this point later.)

3. Highlight the issues regarding the idea that language is consciousness.

Being a psychiatrist, McGilchrist noted that the interest is not what is lost (by the severing of the corpus callosum), but what is revealed. He wondered, at the beginning of his research into lateral specialisation, why was it the left hemisphere that confabulates?

After decades of research and the composition of a work analysing over 2500 papers, he had his answer:

The left hemisphere was simply creating a world in the way it had evolved to do. It tries incessantly to impose order; create a manipulable model, eliminate ambiguity, and maintain narrative coherence. The left hemisphere cannot tolerate not knowing; it mistakes the map for territory and is not aware it is doing so: a metaphor we will have to return to time and time again.

It is the right hemisphere, by contrast, that is comfortable with uncertainty. It registers context and anomaly, it can hold multiple interpretations, and it recognises metaphor as metaphor.

The cerebral asymmetry of the brain was already empirically demonstrated by split-brain work; we knew already that the left confabulates and the right detects the joke, lie or contradiction. Due to “pop science”, however, these differences were largely lost to the public. McGilchrist was warned by colleagues not to enter the field of hemispheric lateralisation for this very reason.

There is obviously a lot to say about the hemispheres ipso facto7 this article will not cover the topic in any comprehensive manner. Either way, I will do my best to illustrate how the bihemispheric structure of our minds has the potential to shape the worlds both within and around us.

Evolution and the Non-Living

The evolutionary reasoning McGilchrist puts forward to explain the coming-about of hemisphere difference is relatively simple. A complex organism has two highly salient tasks: to grab, and to not be grabbed.

For this, evolution fine-tuned the hemispheres, who share a generally similar anatomy with many duplicated structures. Though the right hemisphere, as McGilchrist will argue, is ‘the master’, it is not superior at all tasks. The left is, explicitly, much better at doing the grabbing.

Left hemispheric attention involves splitting the world up into already-known, static fragments - primarily - so we can get food. Right hemispheric attention, on the other hand, is holistic—it observes the world for the Gestalt that it is—ensuring that we do not become food. This sustained mode of attention is broad and - importantly - alive.

In fact, as McGilchrist makes clear:

“The right hemisphere prioritises whatever actually is, and what concerns us. It prefers existing things, real scenes and stimuli that can be made sense of in terms of the lived world, whatever it is that has meaning and value for us as human beings. It is more able to assimilate information from the environment, without automatically responding to it, and, possibly as a result, the developing right hemisphere is more sensitive to environmental influences.

At the same time the left hemisphere is more at home dealing with distorted, non-realistic, fantastic – ultimately artificial – images. This may be because they invite analysis by parts, rather than as a whole. But it does appear that the left hemisphere has a positive bias towards whatever is bizarre, meaningless or non existent, though the data here are particularly hard to interpret because most studies have not sufficiently distinguished confounding elements.”

François Lhermitte8, in 1986, described a case which confirmed that the right hemisphere is more concerned with living individuals than man-made objects. The Good Doctor suggests “this flows naturally from its interest in whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, and its capacity for empathy – as well as from its capacity to see the whole, where the left hemisphere sees an agglomerate of parts: there is an intuitive relationship between cutting things up and depriving them of life.”

It is true that both hemispheres code for living things—but the left alone codes for non-living entities. It’s likely this is because living things can be seen as both independent individuals (right hemisphere) and “objects of use” (left hemisphere.)

One study9 found that, regardless of task, living things activated the right middle frontal and right fusiform gyri, whereas non-living things increased activation in the same left posterior temporal area seen for tools and inanimate objects by Martin et al. (1996), Damasio et al. (1996), Mummery et al. (1996) and Mummery et al. (1998.) 10

It could be said, then, that the body is a right hemisphere entity, whereas body parts are the province of the left hemisphere.

“When the right hemisphere is no longer available to bring the left side of the body into being, the left hemisphere may substitute only a mechanical structure of inanimate parts down that side. One patient described by Ehrenwald11 reported that, following a right-hemisphere stroke,

‘where the left half of his chest, abdomen and stomach should be, he’s got only a wooden plank.’ It goes right down to his anus, and is divided into compartments by transverse planks . . . food doesn’t follow the usual path from the stomach through the intestines, ‘it gets sucked into the compartments of this scaffolding and it falls through the hole at the bottom of the framework’. All this is only on the left side. On the right the organs are all perfectly in place.

And Ehrenwald records that it was not just a delusional idea, but a percept: he could see and feel the plank.”

If you have not quite understood why McGilchrist frames the situation as “the right hemisphere not being available to bring the left side of the body into being,” I strongly suggest having a read of my last article, where I introduce predictive processing as a neurological framework clarifying the constructivist position. Moreover, perhaps I should make explicit—in case it is not clear by now—that the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and vice versa, due to decussation.12

Novel things which really exist are not re-presented as representatives of a category—they are present; the work of the right hemisphere. “As they become over-familiar, inauthentic, and therefore lifeless, they pass to the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist goes on to state that, “not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical.” The left hemisphere is concerned with utility and the exploitation of the world as a resource to be used, which is why it has an accord with words for concepts relating to tools, mechanisms, and man-made objects.

This fragmented and manipulative sort of relationship with the world has become more and more common, ultimately resulting in a mass desacralisation of being (Sein) and our life-worlds (Lebenswelten). In 1949, arguably the most influential philosopher of the early 20th century, Martin Heidegger,13 wrote a prescient analysis on technology and its role in shaping this firmly left-hemispheric relationship to human-being, or being-there (Dasein).

There will be more on Heidegger in the next article.

Most of us are right handed. It is typically our left hemisphere, then, which is specialised for rapid motor movement and fine sequential planning. When a right-hander grabs something, their dominant left hemisphere inhibits the contralateral hemisphere, which increases awareness and dexterity for the ‘grabbing hand’ while reducing them for the non-dominant (left) hand.

The hemispheres suppress each other’s activity using inhibitory interneurons, typically via the corpus callosum. Despite being specialised, the hemispheres still work together continuously. Even in split-brain patients, subcortical structures allow for unified consciousness and integrated spatial attention.

As McGilchrist put it, asking “what the hemispheres do?” may be the wrong way of questioning hemisphere difference. He holds that his interest lies in “how they do it”.

It is very characteristic of the left hemisphere, which excels at manipulation and control, to analyse the universe and the living world in terms of parts and pieces—as we would with a computer.

We can understand something which we have made and taken-apart: but you are not a machine.

In the closing portions of Adam Becker’s masterpiece More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (2025), he writes on—amongst other things—engineer’s disease:

“Humanities denial is enabled—and enables—another affliction that’s endemic within the tech industry: “engineer’s disease,” the belief that expertise in one field (usually in STEM) makes you an expert on everything else too. Or, put another way, there’s only one thing that’s actually difficult, and you already know it, so everything else must be easy. Software developer Maciej Cegłowski explains the source of this hubris:

‘As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.… But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.’”

Despite all these ‘deterministic’ systems and the left hemisphere’s futile megalomania:

That line is how Becker ended his timely and trenchant analysis of the TESCREAL bundle’s racist sci-fi hubris14. I thought it was the perfect note to capture the spirit of the book and, funnily enough, during the closing portions of an interview with Anil Seth15, McGilchrist shared the same words verbatim.

I find it interesting that, in seemingly distinct fields, the same mechanistic paradigms are being repudiated—almost as if they are inextricably linked…

There is a similar sentiment shared across the life sciences, as well. In the article linked below, Dr. Chris Earl underlines the importance of understanding metaphor and not jumping to erroneous conclusions (in left-hemisphere fashion.) He even throws in a McGilchrist quote:

“The metaphor we choose governs what is illuminated for us, and what is cast into the shadow, we had better be very careful about the metaphors we use.”

Life is a dynamic system which creates itself in each moment. Machine metaphors do not do nature justice. I strongly recommend Chris’ Substack for insights into biology and its existential implications.

MOL-BIO from Dr Chris Earl

The Selfish Gene and the Problem with Machine Metaphors in Biology

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene popularised a powerful metaphor. We could think of living things as survival machines with the purpose of passing on genes into the next generation. This framing still shapes how we talk about the meaning of life and purpose today…

Read more

8 months ago · 9 likes · 4 comments · Dr Chris Earl

Empathy, Theory of Mind and Addiction

If I imagine myself in pain I use both hemispheres, but your pain is in my right hemisphere. The same neurones in the right anterior cingulate cortex, an area known to be associated with the appreciation of pain, show activity whether we ourselves are hurt or we witness someone else undergoing a similar painful experience. ‘Self-awareness, empathy, identification with others, and more generally inter-subjective processes, are largely dependent upon . . . right hemisphere resources.’ When we put ourselves in others’ shoes, we are using the right inferior parietal lobe, and the right lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in inhibiting the automatic tendency to espouse one’s own point of view. In circumstances of right-hemisphere activation, subjects are more favourably disposed towards others and more readily convinced by arguments in favour of positions that they have not previously supported.”

The left hemisphere literally does not see depth. It can only work with two-dimensional representations of the whole grasped by the right. “It does not see depth in space, it does not see depth in time, and it does not see depth in emotion.” The right hemisphere acknowledges the interconnectedness of things—it is interested in how individuals relate to the environment. It is the “mediator of empathic identification.”

“The equivalent of time in the visual realm could be thought of as spatial depth: indeed since Einstein we have come to understand that time and space are aspects of one entity. As it is the right hemisphere that gives ‘depth’ to our sense of time, in the visual realm it is the right hemisphere that gives us the means of appreciating depth in space, the way in which we stand in relation to others, rather than by categorisation.”

One of the most fascinating insights McGilchrist shares in TMaHE is that “empathy is intrinsic to morality.” This is to reject Nietzsche’s ‘total eclipse of values16’, just as he did Schopenhauer17.

In the section titled Moral Sense, McGilchrist details the implicit nature of ethics. Crucially, when we treat morality as something to be understood in analytic retrospection—through the left hemisphere—morals become detached from their embodied nature.

“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. I agree with Max Scheler, and for that matter with Wittgenstein, that moral value is a form of experience irreducible to any other kind, or accountable for on any other terms”

The revolutionary, and vastly influential 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant came to a “derivation of God from the existence of moral values”, rather than the other way around. This insight is everything. Compared to other animals, our frontal lobes are more developed. “Our sense of justice is underwritten by the right hemisphere, particularly by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. With inactivation of this area, we act more selfishly. This is probably related to the right frontal lobe’s capacity to see the other’s point of view, and for empathy in general.”

The fact that morality is intrinsic to ‘human nature’—predominantly via the right hemisphere—is obvious and crucial, yet often neglected. The frontal lobes act as ‘breaks’, able to inhibit the more atavistic drives of the posterior brain regions. The right frontal lobe’s capacity to inhibit our natural impulse to selfishness means that it is also the area on which we most rely for self-control and the power to resist temptation.

McGilchrist links this point with an incredible insight about “a rather fundamental difference between the hemispheres”:

“The left hemisphere’s ‘stickiness’, its tendency to recur to what it is familiar with, tends to reinforce whatever it is already doing. There is a reflexivity to the process, as if trapped in a hall of mirrors: it only discovers more of what it already knows, and it only does more of what it already is doing. The right hemisphere by contrast, seeing more of the picture, and taking a broader perspective that characteristically includes both its own and the left hemisphere’s, is more reciprocally inclined, and more likely to espouse another point of view.”

This idea can be likened to feedback systems and addiction. As you might expect, the LH tends to positive feedback, and often becomes ‘stuck’. The right hemisphere is the one capable of ‘freeing’ us through negative feedback. “This is not unlike the difference between the normal drinker and the addict.” Lesions to the frontolimbic systems, especially in the right hemisphere, are associated with addictive behaviour:

Pathological gamblers, for example, have frontal deficits which are mainly right-sided; by contrast, in cocaine addicts, for example, stimulating the right prefrontal cortex reduces craving for cocaine. And denial, a left hemisphere speciality, is typical of addiction.

There are some fascinating conclusions drawn in volume 1 of TMwT from PET imaging studies—which have shown predominately right-sided orbitofrontal activation while involved in decision-making, such as assessing conflicting possibilities. In a comparison between normal subjects and addicts in a functional MRI task, healthy controls were found to have significant right-sided activation (in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, inferior temporal gyrus, inferior parietal gyrus, occipital cortex and cerebellum): but the addicts, whose decision making was chaotic and irrational, showed a reverse pattern:

“During decision-making, control participants showed relatively greater activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, whereas participants engaged in current or previous drug use showed relatively greater activation in the left orbitofrontal cortex.”

This is a clear example, from Ersche et al. (2005), of how things pass to the left hemisphere once they become familiar and fragmented.

Another popular malediction to be dispelled is this pop-sci notion that the left hemisphere is the logical one while the right is “a little airy-fairy” and concerned only with ‘artistic’ things. Indeed, both hemispheres are involved in both. Also, by most accounts, it is actually the right hemisphere that is more rational—not only in that it recognises anomaly and is more reasonable—but also in that things like IQ, for instance, are mostly dependent on the right hemisphere. It is also responsible for functionally significant aspects of intelligence (as is the left):

“Right-hemisphere damage leaves the ability to use simple tools unaltered, whereas left-hemisphere damage renders the sufferer incapable of using a hammer and nail, or a key and a padlock. However, right-hemisphere damage particularly impairs naturalistic actions involving a sequence of steps – for example, making a cup of coffee or wrapping a present.”

The Asymmetry of the Hemispheres & Differences in Emotional Affinity

The Master and His Emissary is titled after a lost parable ‘allegedly’ written by Nietzsche. (I’ve never seen it and McGilchrist doesn’t remember where he found it). In the story, so it goes, a spiritual master helped a small community flourish under his guidance. Eventually, this leader realises he could not take care of everybody’s needs alone, so he defers some work to a clever but overzealous emissary. The emissary did not know what it was he didn’t know and, over time, he became resentful of the master. He felt as if he was the one really doing the heavy-lifting. “What does he know?”, he thought. When he felt the time was right, the emissary adopted the Master’s cloak and usurped the community’s spiritual leader. Of course, “the community declines, and the story ends with the ruin of the community, including the Master and the emissary.”

As A.N. Whitehead put it:

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge."

“It is the right hemisphere which gives emotional value to what is seen, a topic I will return to later, in considering the way in which the hemispheres influence the meaning we find in the experiential world. In the absence of a functioning right hemisphere our world and our selves become emotionally impoverished. The right frontal lobe plays a supremely important part in personality – in who we fundamentally are.”

The left hemisphere seems to play a role in the expression and understanding of emotion—but specialises in “more superficial, social emotions.” Its focus is more so the willed expression of emotions, principally around the mouth area. Interestingly enough, it is the right hemisphere that is attentive to others’ mouths and, importantly, the interpreting of facial emotions. Prosopagnosia—the inability to recognise and interpret faces—is, for example, very closely linked to damage of the right occipito-temporal region and fusiform gyrus. By contrast, the right hemisphere is “more directly in touch with primary-process emotionality”—an affective concept we meandered around in my last article.

There is also evidence to suggest that the right hemisphere’s attention is captured by stimuli which relate to bonding and empathy, whereas the left preferentially treats “those to do with competition, rivalry, and individual self-belief.”

In The Twin Bodies, McGilchrist points out:

“The right hemisphere is far more closely linked to the physiological changes that occur in the body when we experience emotion. The right hemisphere’s superiority in the emotional realm is explicitly linked to this close physiological relationship with the body. This is a further reason why we hold babies to the left: ‘the emotional impact of touch, the most basic and reciprocal mode of interaction, is also more direct and immediate if an infant is held to the left side of the body’”

We are affective creatures: “Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.” In many respects, feeling is all that there really is for us.

“In keeping with its capacity for emotion, and its predisposition to understand mental experience within the context of the body, rather than abstracting it, the right hemisphere is deeply connected to the self as embodied. Although each side of the brain has both motor and sensory connections with the opposite side of the body, we know that the left hemisphere carries an image only of the contralateral (right) side of the body – when the right hemisphere is incapacitated, the left part of the individual’s body virtually ceases to exist for that person. It is only the right parietal lobe that has a whole body image. Importantly this body image is not just a picture. It is not a representation (as it would be if it were in the left hemisphere), or just the sum of our bodily perceptions, or something imagined, but a living image, intimately linked to activity in the world – an essentially affective experience.”

Understanding ourselves requires attending to that which is not us. Understanding the Other, empathic connection, and sensing the emotional states of others are all made possible by the right hemisphere.

Both hemispheres can carry out complex tasks, but, again, the left specialises in tools, not truthful contact with reality. It is the right, of course, which is related to the latter. This focus is vital for what we tend to value most: our affective experiences and intersubjective relations. What would life be without the people in it and the feelings it gives itself?

I also want to highlight the idea that emotion is handled only by the right is almost certainly wrong. Anger is heavily lateralised to the left hemisphere. It is not like the right—which understands our real position in the world; it is boastful, fanciful and egotistical. Damage to the right hemisphere commonly leads to more deluded behaviour, especially when incurred to the right ventromedial and orbitofrontal corticies.

In fact, McGilchrist recently stated that, in a review of 17 major delusional disorders, 16 of them were associated with deficits predominantly in the right hemisphere. Only one was lateralised to both. It should be clear by now that there are real and significant differences between the hemispheres.

“Attention is a Moral act”

This quote gets right to the pith of McGilchrist’s message. She expands:

To reiterate what I shared in my last post, predictive processing suggests that the brain (and other self-organising systems) maintains hierarchical priors in order to guess what incoming sensation means. In other words, sensory input becomes meaningful only when compared to our predictions; it is prediction error that causes updating of models and motor/body changes.

Precision-weighting determines which priors ‘dominate’. Neither hemisphere ‘contains’ priors but they weigh them differently:

The RH is statistically more ‘permissive’, allowing for a wider range of interpretation as it places less weight on strong (familiar) priors. It is more sensitive to prediction error, making it less likely to filter out data that doesn’t fit a pre-existing model.

Novel info, including when it is related to challenging one’s self-concept, is associated with heightened activity in the right amygdala. It prevents the brain from blindly adhering to old frameworks, and is crucial for updating frameworks as conflicting evidence arrives.

The LH, on the other hand, relies heavily on established, high-probability models. While this allows for extremely efficient processing of routine tasks, it disregards anomalies and is prone to fantasy. It jumps ambiguity, seeking to resolve uncertainty by ‘forcing’ new data into existing categories. This allows for quick decisions but risks being confidently wrong.

It is safe to say that the way we create/attend to our world shapes the errors we acknowledge and even which information is worth learning. What counts as success, what counts as a problem, and what counts as relevant are all products of how significant we deem our priors to be. In turn, the hemispheres can bias perception (how reality appears) and behaviour, hence William Blake’s maxim:

“As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.”

Moreover, if attention shapes experience, and experience shapes institutions—what kind of attentional habits would be reinforced in a society dominated by left-hemispheric modalities? We also need to consider the nature of the education system since the industrial revolution. We do not live in Plato’s republic. Since the widespread implementation of the factory model in the 19th century, foundational institutions have aimed to produce industrial efficiency and compliance. This hardly produces philosophically independent, critical, or emotionally astute thinkers.

I bring this up because, after his extensive discussion of the hemisphere neuroscience, McGilchrist analyses the development of Western civilisation through the lens of the bihemispheric mind. The hemispheres clearly represent different modes of attending-to and being-in the world.

Obviously, not everybody’s brain is structured the same. As underlined in his preface, nature does not work in absolutes. It is a dynamic process; as is the cosmos; as are we. Different periods have different values, and thus different societies draw on the potential of the brain differently.

The way in which hemispheric biases scale culturally is probabilistic. The future is open, and this is not an experimental hypothesis to be proved mechanistically. It should also be clear that he is not literally claiming ‘civilisation is run by one hemisphere.’ Clearly, cultural patterns can reflect dominant cognitive styles.

In any case, the right must contextualise the left—for if it does not: all balance is lost.

Dr. James Willis18, before his death in 2012, had this to say:

“In the second half of the book this fluctuating balance of power is shown to correspond, in a way which is quite wonderfully lucid and convincing, to a series of great cultural swings in the history of Western civilisation. From Heraclitus to Plato, from the Renaissance to the Reformation, from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, and so to Modernism, McGilchrist’s grasp of this vast field, and the depth of his philosophical and artistic insight, is staggering, especially to someone who has just finished a 6-year Open University Humanities degree. To take just one tiny theme from this fabulous wealth of material: swings towards left-brain ascendancy led to the decapitation of statues of saints during the Reformation, to the decapitation of Kings during the French Revolution, and so on. In every case the left brain only understood, and only attacked, the symbol, mistaking it entirely for the reality it represented.”

Those familiar with The Birth of Tragedy (1872), truly, have no other option than amazement upon recognising Nietzsche’s prescient foresight into the hemisphere hypothesis. The Apollonian principle operates via abstraction, a principium individuationis19— while the Dionysian principle represents unity and embodiment. The parallel is striking, perhaps giving merit to what Freud said of Nietzsche:

“[he] had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live.”

Tim Seyrek has already written on ‘why Nietzsche may be the real father of psychoanalysis,’ and, even if I’m a little upset he got to it first, I think it’s a great piece which I strongly recommend.

Tim Seyrek

Why Nietzsche May Be the Real Father of Psychoanalysis — And Why He Fails as a Philosopher

Nietzsche: The Psychologist with a Hammer…

Read more

9 months ago · 159 likes · 17 comments · Tim Seyrek

But more than a philosopher, psychologist, or antichrist20—Nietzsche was a poet.

And that fact is crucial, as will become clear in the following sections.

Nietzsche was also a philologist. By the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, making him one of the youngest-ever tenured professors of the subject.

I bring up these 3 facts because of the resonant declaration McGilchrist put down to wrap-up TMaHE:

“I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world.”

Perhaps I should elucidate this point before I go any further.

Meaning and the Implicit

Almost everything most important to us is implicit, and is deadened by trying to make it explicit.

“Despite the right hemisphere’s overwhelmingly important role in emotion, the popular stereotype that the left hemisphere has a monopoly on reason, like the view that it has a monopoly on language, is mistaken.” Still, language is ‘at-home’ in the left hemisphere. It has a much more extensive vocabulary than the right, as well as more subtle and complex syntax. “It extends vastly our power to map the world and to explore the complexities of the causal relationships between things.”

Its great contribution is symbol manipulation, which has little to do with a greater affinity for auditory material. (Music, as we’ll see, is appreciated predominantly by the right hemisphere.) Its superiority for language stems from its nature as the hemisphere of representation, wherein signs are substituted for experience. This is why sign language, for instance, is left-hemisphere-mediated.

“The specialisation of what is called the auditory cortex is to do with the processing of signs, tokens, representations of things, whether these be verbal or visuospatial. And, equally, the supposed visuospatial bias of the right hemisphere is probably not about visuospatial qualities in themselves, but because this is the main route of perception of the external world, of things in and of themselves, as opposed to their signs.”

The (implicit) meaning of these symbols are the business of the right hemisphere. “It uses language not in order to manipulate ideas or things, but to understand what others mean.” The RH’s role in language is not only receptive but also expressive:

“the verbal expression problems of right-hemisphere-damaged patients can be severe, and it has been suggested that they are almost as severe as those of left-hemisphere-damaged patients.”

What’s more, RH-damaged patients cannot make inferences. Only once an inference is made and begins to be more explicit, the process can be transferred from the right superior temporal gyrus to the left. I want to highlight this passage particularly:

“The full significance of the left hemisphere’s incapacity for, and the right hemisphere’s affinity for, metaphor will become clear in the next chapter. While it does, certainly, mean that understanding of the indirect, connotative language of poetry depends on the right hemisphere, the importance of metaphor is that it underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art.”

This will only become clearer as the series progresses. Perhaps it’s time I give an illustrative example of the phenomenology of the hemispheres:

The question “which is it?”—a duck or a rabbit—is profoundly left-hemispheric. It needs be explicit; its modus operandi is collapsing potentials into particulars; to see either a duck or a rabbit. The problem with this, of course, is that its (obviously) both a duck and a rabbit. The LH can’t see both are true simultaneously.

Better yet, it is both/and and either/or — a characteristic understood by the right hemisphere —> something which gets to the core of hemispheric phenomenology and philosophy as a whole.

It should also be known that subtle unconscious perceptions, which govern our reactions, are also picked up by the right hemisphere. Emotional shifts that are expressed in minute facial changes are mirrored and synchronously matched by the observer’s right hemisphere, within 300-400 milliseconds (at levels beneath awareness.)

Looking at the movements of another’s eyes and mouth activates the right posterior temporo-occipital cortex, and, “it will be remembered that the left hemisphere does not attend to the eyes: this is one reason why the right hemisphere is better at detecting deceit.”

“Because the right hemisphere picks up subtle clues and meanings, and because it can understand how others are feeling and thinking, we rely on it when we judge whether people are lying. Those with right-hemisphere damage have difficulty distinguishing jokes from lies; by contrast those with left-hemisphere damage are actually better at detecting a lie than normal individuals, another instance of the way in which the hemispheres require separation as much as connection.”

Conclusion: Reason, Music and Time

“Problem solving, making reasonable deductions, and making judgments may become harder if we become conscious of the process. Thus rendering one’s thought processes explicit, or analysing a judgment, may actually impair performance, because it encourages the left hemisphere’s focus on the explicit, superficial structure of the problem.”

The literature suggests that mathematical skills are divided between the hemispheres. An interesting finding is that while calculating prodigies appear to use more RH-dependant strategies, making use of episodic memory, general multiplication “activates verbal remembrance of ‘times tables’ in the left hemisphere.”

There is, as well, an interesting relation between the pleasurable ‘aha!’ phenomenon and the right amygdala. Insight is typically a product of noticing the previous incongruity of one’s beliefs, made possible by our capacity to notice an anomaly.

The right hemisphere also has an approximate sense of numbers and their relative size, though it is not as precise as the left hemisphere in this case. This is because the LH is manipulating symbolic values through rules it is familiar with, which allows it to establish granularity even if it doesn’t have an intuitive sense of what these values really mean.

We discussed earlier that meaning is more than words. “Sometimes it is music.”

Music consists entirely of relations. It mirrors the ‘betweenness’ of the flowing, relational reality we find in embodied life. Language freezes these relations, which is not a problem unless the models are taken to be what they model.

Music is temporal, non-propositional, and enacts meaning. It is closer to the real than language, in a sense, because it requires participation. And indeed, listening and reading can be just as much of a creative act as speaking or writing. “It is not just because it exists in betweenness that music is the concern of the right hemisphere”:

“Its indivisible nature, the necessity of experiencing the whole at any one time, though it is forever unfolding in time, a thing that is ever changing, never static or fixed, constantly evolving, with the subtle pulse of a living thing (remember, even musical instruments are present to the brain as living things), the fact that its communication is by its nature implicit, profoundly emotive, working through our embodied nature – everything about music, in short, makes it the natural ‘language’ of the right hemisphere.”

Surveys of music from many parts of the world have suggested that music, like poetry, is intrinsically sad—which is not to say that there is no joyful music. “Such music often appears to be joy torn from the teeth of sadness, a sort of holiday of the minor key.” There is a fascinating stronger affinity between the right hemisphere and the minor key, as well as between the left hemisphere and the major key.

“Language returns us inevitably to the worn currency of re-presentation, in which the unique qualities of everything that exists are reduced to the same set of terms. As Nietzsche put it: ‘Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words deper sonalise; words make the uncommon common.’”

Though we have learnt that speech production is principally a left hemisphere function, it is in song that we see a wide activation of the right hemisphere. There have been many cases where a left-hemisphere stroke has left somebody unable to speak yet he or she can still hum or sing the words of a song without much difficulty:

“A well-known composer and Professor of Music at Moscow Conservatory, Vissarion Shebalin, had a left temporal and parietal stroke with consequent severe aphasia (impairment of language), but carried on composing works of excellent quality according to Shostakovich indistinguishable from his pre-stroke works.”

Professional musicians appear to use the left hemisphere to a much greater extent in the understanding of music, likely due to the adoption of a more conscious, theoretical approach. This makes the discovery that the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach causes a strong right-hemisphere activation even in trained musicians all the more interesting.

“It was explained by the researchers who made the finding on the basis that a range of melodic contours needs to be maintained in awareness simultaneously, requiring the right hemisphere’s greater capacity to hold experience in working memory.”

McGilchrist suggests an alternative explanation, though the former may also be true, in that its impossible to attend to all parts of such music in its entirety. “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man,” said Heraclitus over 2000 years ago. I believe the same applies here.

“Music – like narrative, like the experience of our lives as we live them – unfolds in time. The movement of time is what makes music what it is. Not just that it has ictus and rhythm; its structure extends through and across time, depending on memory to hold it together.”

---

I hope you have enjoyed.

To make clear the ways which we are living through a period of unprecedented left-hemispheric dominance and fragmentation is the purpose of my next article. We will also explore epistemology (the ways to truth) and the history of philosophy more generally as I, like Whitehead, believe “there is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.”

Subscribe now

It will be divided into three sections—the first of which (the one you’re reading right now) focuses on active inference and the Bayesian brain hypothesis. Despite its length, this article is nothing more than a prelude for the two essays I will be uploading in the coming weeks. Enjoy!

Fraser & Buckley’s All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun was strumming in my ear as I withdrew from the warmth contained in the large, red steel door of my apartment building. In less than a moment, I felt the song become irrevocably more poignant, as if the strings of their guitars were doused in teardrops of an angel’s elegy. It took me a good few minutes to come up with that pseudo-poetic simile; it did not take me long, no more than even a moment, to figure out what had caused the song to change the effect it had on me so inexorably. Swiftly after that comprehensive moment, the desire to write on affective psychology surged to the forefront of my now rather chilly cortex.

So what had gone down here? And what is affective psychology?

I’ll tell you what happened: I’d been reading Lisa Barrett’s How Emotions are Made.

Its not just that the book helped me understand the experience, for it had also, in a very important way, caused the experience itself. I hope you enjoy this dive into affective neuroscience and the mind-shaping insights it can provide us.

In §3 of the first chapter in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche1 writes: “Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read between their lines long enough, I now say to myself that the greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions, and it is even so in the case of philosophical thinking; one has here to learn anew…”.

Like Hume’s2 earlier enquiry concerning human understanding,3 Nietzsche’s polemic aims to point out the limits of thought by psychologising thought itself.4 Both accounts anticipate what would be “confirmed”5 over a century later by affective neuroscience: feelings are the arche6 of experience; not thought. Our German friend took this insight and focused on reason and meaning (a story for another time7…).

The term affect can be confusing to those who are yet to come across it. Psychologists use it to refer to the fundamental, underlying experience of feeling that arises from the brain's interpretation of internal bodily sensations. Unlike mood—which is a sustained, long-term emotional climate—affect represents the moment-to-moment "weather" of emotion—which, according to Barrett, is largely determined by the interoceptive network’s prediction of how well one is meeting their body budget (completing allostasis). Affect is measured in 2 dimensions: valence (how pleasant or unpleasant), and arousal (how intense or mild). All those big words should make more sense by the end of this article.

In The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms8 credits Jaak Panksepp9 as the “father” of the field, who, more than any other researcher, understood the origin and power of feelings. I strongly recommend The Hidden Spring to anyone interested in the human mind.

Barrett’s How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (which I also recommend) was published in 2017. In the radical book, by sheer testicular fortitude, and perhaps the scanty aid of one or two experiments, Lisa Barrett deconstructed most of what we thought we knew about, well: how emotions are made. First on her agenda was to underline the mythical nature of emotion fingerprints—the idea that there are concrete, distinct emotions with accompanying bodily expressions that correlate with/ are triggered by discrete neural circuits in the brain (e.g. sadness is caused by an excitation of the sadness network, jealousy by the jealousy network, and so on).

For decades, emotion fingerprints were treated as a given thanks to Paul Ekman’s research using the basic emotion method. While carrying out some graduate work—still aiming to be a consumer of science, not a producer—Barrett was tasked to carry out a corroborating experiment and was dismayed to find that her examinations failed to ascertain acquiescent findings. It turns out that she had not conducted a botched experiment. In fact, it turns out there were multiple methodological flaws in the basic emotion method, which explained countless “odd” instances that objected to the existence of emotion fingerprints and the basic emotion theory. For instance:

Why were there patients with Urbach-Wiethe disease who could experience terror despite a degeneration of the amygdala—the structure supposedly responsible for fear? Why did facial muscles measured by facial EMG not exhibit uniform expressions for specific emotions? Why did the amygdala only increase metabolic activity (become more active) when a face was novel, and why did activity die down once a face became familiar? Why couldn’t Barrett’s subjects reliably identify the discrete states of anxiety and depression from each other in themselves; why was emotional granularity so poor?

Because emotion fingerprints don’t exist.

An neither do emotions—at least they don’t in the way we previously thought.

But we do feel, don’t we? Is there not a conscious experience of emotion we can attest to?

This is where predictive processing and simulation come in.

The Bayesian brain hypothesis posits that the brain operates as a Bayesian inference machine, using prior beliefs and sensory evidence (likelihood) to form updated beliefs (posteriors) about the world. I won’t get into Bayes’ Theorem in this article—but if you are curious about the mathematics of rationality I have footnoted a link to a great explanation of the formula by Dr. Matthew Dorman here.10

In Friston’s active inference, systems like the brain are thought of as prediction engines. It would in violation of his free energy principle for us to simply react to every input ad-hoc. To carry out advanced homeostasis at lower metabolic cost, we simulate—in each and every moment. This is why neuroscientists like Anil Seth describe conscious perception as a “controlled hallucination.” The brain creates a model of the world using priors—using sensory input to refine it—very much unlike how the naive realists11 would have it. It is doing this all the time.

Welcome to neuroscientific constructivism.

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

— Henry David Thoreau

There are 3 types of constructivsm (that is, anti-essentialism—please see footnote12) that Barrett discusses at the start of her book to explain how the brain creates emotions:

1. Social Construction: Social values, cultural context, and shared concepts influence how we experience and interpret emotion. Emotions are not universal, but rather depend on cultural context and shared beliefs that give meaning to social roles and actions. Pluto is not a planet. Crickets are not delicious.

2. Psychological Construction: Complex emotions (jealousy, for example) are constructed from more basic, “primitives” or component parts. These ingredients include core affect (pleasure/displeasure and arousal) and conceptual knowledge (past experience) that the brain uses to categorise sensations.

3. Neuroconstruction: Experiences and environment wire the brain’s physical structure. The brain is not a static organ, but one that develops its neural networks based on past experiences, which in turn determines future perceptions and emotional experiences. Basically what Hegel said in terms of Geist over two centuries ago.

As Barrett noted in her book, these constructivist postulates point back to Kant’s transcendental idealism, though I would posit—as I will in my following article—that these notions are more like a Hegelian, or even Spinozist dual-aspect monism, in light of the processual and conceptual nature of the mind (and matter, as many would have it…). I have written an introductory article on Hegel’s first philosophy linked here (footnote).13

One of the first articles I wrote on Substack14 was actually a short piece (in preparation for a larger essay on Schopenhauer) on Kant’s ethics, his contribution to the history of reason, and, most importantly in this case, his transcendental idealism. The label makes it sound more complicated than it is. I quote myself for explication:

Now that we have a basis for understanding what “consciousness” is, we can explore what shapes how it feels.

The body budget: Barrett’s pop-psy term for the brain’s bookkeeping of metabolic and physiological resources such as glucose, oxygen, immune assets, and more. Allostasis (the anticipatory counterpart to homeostasis) is the process by which the brain predicts bodily needs and issues commands to meet them.

Interoception is the sensing of internal bodily states that informs this prediction/simulation, and it is the interoceptive network that anticipates and monitors these using info from viscera such as the heart, liver, gut, etc. As you might have noticed, there is a circular aspect to this relationship—which is exactly the point of Barrett’s hypothesis:

Emotions are not reactions to body states, they’re actually predictions meant to regulate them. What’s more, once emotions are constructed, they alter the body budget, which then feeds back into future predictions. It is this shared retrocausal element that makes affective psychology the perfect counterpart to Mgilchristian neuroscience and philosophy—a point we will return to in time.

As one might guess, the brain, human, all too human, often misjudges what it was meant to predict, leading to prediction error. These cost varying amounts of metabolic energy. Allow me to reiterate:

There is a physiological cost of revising how an organism maintains itself in the world. There is a biological incentive, beyond social and psychological drives, for minds to cling to certainty and identity. Ever heard of Hannah Arednt or Mattias Desmet…? They might’ve said something about those two very specific things being correlated with this one other thing you also may have heard of: fascism. Lucky for us, biological determinism is nothing to worry about! Right?… I digress, for now.

It is now the time to explore arguably the most significant arbiter determining how we experience emotions: concepts. A concept, in cognitive psychology, is a population of past experiences used to make predictions about sensory input and bodily needs in the present (I am aware this a recurring theme but it’s very important). These are embodied (interoceptive patterns and outward perception), probabilistic (not rule-based, as the left-hemisphere would have it15), context-sensitive, and goal-directed—again, they exist to regulate action and energy.

An emotion concept, therefore, can be understood as a predictive model that links situations, bodily states, and actions that have helped regulate the body budget in similar circumstances before. Barrett provides an illustrative example of how concepts help us simulate reality:

Observe the following image.

When most people view the image above, they do not immediately see the dog at all. The stimulus being present the entire time, but the sensory input is insufficient at first because patches of black and white provide no stable object. What’s missing is a concept—the sensory info has been there the entire time. Without a relevant prior—no stored pattern linking these visual features to a dog—the brain cannot generate a prediction that organises the input into a coherent percept. But, once the concept “dog” is applied, perception changes instantly. We begin to simulate what a dog should look like in this context and use that prediction to interpret the same visual input.

Top-down predictions constrain bottom-up signals (I’ll explain in a moment), allowing the dog to appear from the image. Again, this is not a case of imagination overriding reality, but simply a conceptual prediction enabling perception. We co-create the world we live in with the cosmos (this is a point I will return to in a subsequent article.)

Emotion concepts facilitate prediction in the same way, allowing the brain to simulate what bodily sensations mean in a given context, transforming ambiguous interoceptive signals into a specific experience of fear, sadness, joy, or any other emotion you can conceptualise. Barrett provides a rather amusing example of how these concepts relate to the body budget in context:

One of her co-workers, whom she was not especially attracted to, had asked her out on a date. After some expected meandering, she decided that seeing as she had nothing to do that evening, she would go on the date. At the restaurant, she found herself to be nervous and blushing at the gentlemen—it would appear she was attracted to this man after all… or so it seemed.

As the night was coming to a close, she said goodbye and made her way back to her home. Upon entering her abode, she felt sick—and threw up the dinner she ate only a couple hours earlier. Unfortunately for her date, Barrett then realised what likely had gone down. She posits that her feelings of anxiety during and after the date were most significantly a product of her body budget’s status—not her infatuation with her co-worker.

Perception is not the detection of reality, but the successful (or unsuccessful) application of the right concept at the right time.

Concepts are everything. Just yesterday I was reminded of their power: I was about 3-quarters of the way through King Crimson’s Starless (which I also strongly recommend), when I paused the track for a moment to have a friendly chat with somebody I knew. Once I left, I put my airpods back in, glanced at my phone—and audibly grinned. Without even hitting play, my mind collected priors, recognised that I was about to jump straight back into one of the most intense climaxes in music, and simulated a (rather amusing) emotional response.

The Significance of Priors

Prior to Barrett’s anecdote, I mentioned top-down predictions. What did I mean by this?

Not all priors are equal. Priors differ in level (conceptual - sensory), timescale (momentary - lifelong), and precision (flexible - rigid). I always found this to be one of the trickier parts of the theory to grasp so I will go through this slowly and deliberately.

High-level (abstract), high-precision (high-confidence) priors are concepts such as identity, values, social belonging, and trauma-linked experiences. These types of priors are often hardest to update, the most energetically stabilising, and perhaps most significantly, often defended by action—which we will return to in a moment.

Often, these priors operate unconsciously, shaping automatic emotional reactions before they become “conscious” feelings. Overly strong priors have the potential to “override reality”, causing individuals to perceive emotions or social signals that are not actually present; an individual with social anxiety might have a strong prior that "social situations are dangerous," leading them to interpret a neutral glance from a stranger as hostile.

In Bayesian models, the influence of a prior depends on its precision, or confidence, compared to the precision of incoming sensory data. The mechanics of this are explained clearly in Dr. Dorman’s article, which I linked earlier. To sum it up, though: If sensory data is clear, it overrides the prior. If sensory data is noisy or ambiguous, the prior dominates, leading to a strong bias in emotional experience.

Noting the absence of traditional emotions, Barrett posits “instances of emotion”. In this, she highlights the efficacy of population thinking, originally developed by Charles Darwin in On The Origin of Species for classifying different instances of animal into one species. Knowing we predict incorrectly, we have worked out how we ameliorate our systems:

You could say there are 3 non-exclusive ways we go about correcting prediction errors:

1. Perceptual updating (aka model revision). In this process the brain updates the generative model by synaptic reweighting and changing higher-level priors so future predictions fit the data. For those who take A-level psychology, this is essentially Piaget’s16 schema accommodation. It is slow, costly, and destabilizing, meaning it’s used sparingly.

2. Reinterpretation of the signal (aka error suppression). This is a cheaper process whereby the brain changes how the input is explained without changing the model itself, adjusting the precision (confidence) of sensory input, and protecting “ego.”

3. Active inference (acting to make the prediction true). In this Frinstonian process, the organism changes the world or the body so the prediction becomes correct. Examples include crying, to calm the nervous system, or avoiding ambiguity so as to reduce uncertainty. This is the method often defaulted to because action is cheaper than belief revision.

Importantly, these are non-exclusive. The brain does not simply choose one and only one of these to deal with prediction error. A lot of the time it uses several strategies, even simultaneously, at different levels and timescales. There are other corrective methods but, from my understanding, these are composites or special cases, and can typically be summed up by the 3 I have spoke on. The main point here is that errors are managed, not eliminated; thereby emotion is the felt consequence of this management.

So there are no emotional fingerprints, the brain is a predictive processor, and emotions are regulatory processes shaped by their own regulations.

But there are also no innate emotion circuits in Barrett’s model. Does this not deny the foundations of affective psychology that she builds upon?

Not quite.

Mark Solms, for example, posits that affect is a product of the brainstem. He challenged, using his neuropsychoanalytical method17, the then-standard view that consciousness is a cortical phenomenon (located in the cortex). In The Hidden Spring, he proposes that it is actually the upper brainstem that is “intrinsically conscious,” while the cortex is “intrinsically unconscious” and only becomes conscious when aroused or stimulated by brainstem structures.

He builds off the affective work of the Estonian-American neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp and concurs that the foundational form of consciousness is not perceptual but affective. These primal feelings (affects) are fundamentally about survival and are generated in the brainstem’s PAG (Periaqueductal Gray) as a part of an “extended homeostasis”. I am yet to finish the book but it is proving truly fascinating. If you would like to read some of the books I have referenced, I have left a link to the google drive in which I store all the audiobooks I am listening to here->18.

Solms also writes that Freud19, as controversial a figure he may be in psychology, anticipated these drives a century or so earlier. In a fixing-up of Freudian metapsychology, Solms posits that the upper brainstem performs the functions Freud attributed to the “id” (the seat of drives and emotions), meaning the id is actually the conscious part of the mind, whereas the cortex (ego) is unconscious in itself.

He also cites research by his fellow Björn Merker20 on hydranencephalic children, further diminishing the credibility of the behaviourists and cortex-centric theoreticians. These children, despite lacking most—or all—of their cerebral hemispheres show affective behaviours like preference and aversion in addition to emotional expression. They also show periods of calm and distress, as well as an often-adequate social responsiveness.

Another associate of his, Antonio Damasio’s21, observed concurring demonstrations from decorticate rats. He recalls an anecdote wherein students, upon being asked to identify the “normal” batch of rats out of 2 groups (where one set were lacking a cortex), identified the abnormal group because they were too lively. They retained affective responsiveness, basic learning ability, and even (especially) goal-directed behaviour in spite of their cortical poverty.

Damasio concluded that consciousness does not begin with representation but with—you guessed it (if you’ve been paying attention)—feeling. His posits that the cortex adds temporal extension and symbolic abstraction but that “core consciousness” is brainstem-based and body-oriented.

Barrett does not reject these hypotheses.

When she says there are no innate emotion mechanisms Barrett’s claim is that there are no dedicated, hardwired neural circuits that uniquely and reliably implement specific emotions. There are, however, domain-general networks that participate in many “emotions and non-emotions”, such as the default mode and interoceptive networks.

By our psychological capacities (affective, interoceptive, neuroplastic, degenerative22) we learn that certain bodily states tend to occur in certain contexts, and certain actions tend to help or hurt our situation afterwards.

Social scaffolding and language play significant roles, as cultures and caregivers label experiences and supply emotion categories from a young age, shaping the interpretations of sensation/prediction “available” to us. Language doesn’t exactly create emotion, then, but it does sharpens categorical boundaries which increases conceptual precision, explaining why different cultures have different emotion concepts; which, in spite of our shared physiology, engender different experiences at that higher level. The context in which emotion is interpreted is very significant.

In conclusion I hope by now it is clear that, as clarified by Solms, mammals are fundamentally affective creatures. Barrett makes a point, in the introduction to her opus, to underline that our emotional (affective) circuits are a more ancient piece of the mind than the frontal cortex—the area most developed in homo sapiens. At last, myth is corrected; the error that we are thinkers first, who would act rationally and stoically, if it were’t for those pesky, oppressive concepts called feelings. I hope by now you are beginning to see the insights that today’s dominant theory of the brain is affirming.

So what happened to me two weeks ago during my Jeff Buckley listen?

Using bits and pieces of past experience such as my familiarity with the song, the kinds of bodily states it has accompanied before, and the intimate concepts I have learned to associate with it, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to make sense of the situation I was in. Stepping outside into the cold altered my interoceptive signals; as my skin temperature decreased and my breathing became quicker and sharper, my body saw a rise in allostatic demand. Thereafter I unconsciously used my priors to predict those signals’ cause and significance, shaping ongoing sensory processing and biasing auditory perception and bodily regulation.

The resulting sensations—the chill, heightened bodily alertness, tension and release evoked by the music—were made meaningful as poignancy. That meaning was not read off the music itself (remember the Dalmatian), nor was it a direct reflection of my body state. It was constructed when predicted bodily changes successfully reduced uncertainty about how to feel and what this moment was “about.”

And that’s that!

Coming next: Dr. Iain Mgilchrist’s Hemisphere Hypothesis, process-relational metaphysics, and the psychopolitics of capitalism.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

10

Matthew Dorman

Bayesian Electric Jello

The Good Reverend Thomas Bayes: My Favorite Statistician…

Read more

7 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Matthew Dorman

Do you know why philosophy will never end? (Bare with the brilliant French and German phenomenologists’ granular lexicon for a moment).

“Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of that world. I am, not a ‘living creature’ nor even a ‘man’, nor again even ‘a consciousness’ endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy or inductive psychology recognize in these various products of the natural or historical process—I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished—since that distance is not one of its properties—if I were not there to scan it with my gaze.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception, Preface

Dasein—being-there, or human being—is the being for which its being is a problem in itself3. The question of being pervades the tragicomic life of every source, it is a constituent of the bones in man’s platonic form. To put correctly Descartes’ fabled error:

In the end, man is determined by the limitations that shroud the ground around him and, perhaps from the beginning, Apollo and Dionysus4’ great troubadours were destined defeat by a greater force: the absurd5.

Life is not good

and it is not quite bad either.

It is an inexorable, sleepless creature. But its kind of nice, isn’t it?

Subscribe now

This morning I dreamt of love, of a boundless recognition through an act of a connective convalescence. An impossible possibility; a transmutation of the most profound relationship that I never even knew in the first place. Could I not - know it? A gift of roses and truth; to show her I cared, to tell her that I saw myself in her. From her bloomed a beauty that was truly her own and, in a familiar wave, through the eyes of my own mosaic: I saw her again for what she was. But I could not tell her. And this might have broken my heart - at least for a moment.

It occurred to me: there exists a perennial pendulum within each of us that swings between that which we desire and that which is “best” for us. Humorous how, that which would bring the truest satisfaction is often that which we know, through no true fault of our own, was not meant to be. Today the pendulum was pushed by a muse ever so distant, yet ever so near. Don’t we all have such muses?

What was it that said Rumi?

“Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.”

I returned to our quaint, thrown2 world. Where even the absolute source is limited by its facticité3. I cannot help but to dream.

Could it be that, in the spirit of dreams, life was written?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now