The Bifurcated Brain

One of the best ways to keep everybody angry, and thus to let us share in the modern experience, is to use words in a left-brained sort of way.

I refer, of course, to Iain McGilchrist, the writer who has given us the most thorough and accessible account of our two brains. For we, like the other senior animals, have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. Both are in use for ordinary consciousness unless one or the other has been cancelled by some horrific accident.

McGilchrist is an abnormally intelligent neuroscientist, an influential psychiatrist, and was a credible English professor in his earlier Oxford life. He remains the master of several disciplines in the humanities.

It is rare that we find such a crossover to scientific authority. The intellectual world now seems to specialize in one or the other: science or socialism.

But he is not spouting scientific bafflegab. He really does demonstrably know what he is talking about. And he is not one of those tedious “new atheists” either.

Left and right brains had been frequently treated in pop literature, before, which was crudely aware of the cerebral hemispheres, generally in a silly, pop-fashion way, that often confused one hemisphere with the other.

Because McGilchrist isn’t a flake and is conversant with physiological research (he has trained as a doctor), he can actually be considered an authority. Nor is he innocent of epistemology and metaphysics.

Read his book The Matter of Things (2021), some 1500 reasonably entertaining pages, or his earlier magnum opus, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009). Of course these books will require attention, as anything would, which tracks back to the scientific revolution and explains its limitations. As mere collections of quotations from Western thought, they are formidable.

What McGilchrist establishes is that the left brain provides the factitious, unimaginative, and naturally arrogant mental order, which was used by our swamp ancestors to identify “stuff” – specifically, food — by ruthlessly excluding all other objects in the environment.

It is machine-like, especially in the sense of showing no curiosity, and no remorse, except in the context of its limited function as complement to right-brained thinking. But it is essential to human and most other forms of life, and one can’t get rid of it without dying.

But if one thinks nature and the human mind function like a machine, or in some other deterministic way, one already suffers from left-brained thought and is one of nature’s aspiring automatons.

It remains the natural method of bureaucracy, of mechanical “progressive” advance, and of systems of censorship and blind power. Indeed, bureaucrats might be expressly defined as “persons we could do without,” just as they contrast with more intelligent forms of life.

This may sound like a prejudiced political statement, but I beg the reader to study the sciences surrounding “brain lateralization” in order to form his own (hopefully right-brained) conclusion; or rather, “impression,” for the right brain is never so sure of itself.

It cannot be, for the right brain is left to investigate such awkward things as beauty, goodness, and truth, and so far as we are finite beings we cannot know their perfection, or final extent.

Conversely, when we were limited to the left-brain functions, we could not know that the transcendentals were even possible. They are irrelevant to the task of finding food, after all, or even to identifying poisons.

If one were a Communist, however – that is, a heroic left-brained revolutionist – one would inevitably have the opinion that nothing else is important. We call this “scientific materialism,” and in fact it kills you.

But the right-brained exist for another purpose (in addition to keeping the left-brained from killing themselves). Instead of locating food sources, it is necessary for several other purposes, and must continuously survey everything else. Even while eating, the right brain will be working on a coherent escape plan, should its activity be violently disturbed.

For nature does not consist simply of eating, or amoral sex. It does involve eating regularly, but alas, occasionally, to being eaten.

A good right brain is, consciously or unconsciously, constantly at work, paying attention to the immense variety of things. It not only enhances one’s chances of survival, but gives one something to do besides pigging.

People need this even more than their pets. Or else they stay in bed all day, getting hungry.

Indeed, the business of paying wakeful attention is just what the whole brain was designed for, if the reader will permit a teleological understanding of things. More than one item has a purpose in the Divine plan, and in the design of creatures, we may reasonably surmise.

The right brain, by attending to “everything else,” might be identified as the cosmic embodiment of prudence; and now that we are over on the right, we might sometimes entertain some “supernatural” concepts, such as Faith and Reason.

These are part of the everything else that I mentioned above. They are among the things that provide the right-brained with something to do, on very many levels; two of its enchantments, as I like to say. Ultimately, even our religion and philosophy, or other feints towards profundity, are outgrowths from this “everything else,” although not until they are noticed.

Reason and faith ultimately reside here, and both may be served, or understood, by every part of the intellect.

Note that, even at its best and broadest, faith cannot be grasped in a left-brained way. It is not something we can identify and capture, like a piece of chocolate fudge. It is better aligned with loyalty, easily entering into the profound.

And reason is not simply logic, as the left-brained prefer to insist. All the other faculties of the brain are involved in determining what it is, and what it is not.

Be reasonable!

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