The Divided Brain
A Primer
How our brain operates has a direct relationship to how we construct reality, how we understand and interact with the world around us. This understanding, necessarily, has direct relevance to mass psychosis, brainwashing, and such topics as we are exploring in this substack. If we are to understand why people around us are falling for government propaganda, for instance, we need to understand some basics about how their brains are responding or are conditioned.
Iain McGilchrist, in his wonderfully detailed book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), describes the asymmetry of the brain and the very different natures of the left and right hemispheres. This horizontal understanding of the mental system, as opposed to a vertical “top-down/bottom-up” perspective, gives us insight into the distinctly different yet complementary functions of the two hemispheres1. In short, the right hemisphere handles broad attention (what we attend to comes first to us through the right hemisphere); is good at making connections so that we can appreciate the wholeness of dynamic structures and relationships that change over time; is attuned to emotion; is empathic, intuitive, and moral. In contrast, the left hemisphere has narrow attention; is good at deconstructing things into parts; and has an appreciation for static, decontextualized, inanimate structures and abstractions.
If you have the time and inclination to read this 500 odd page paperback, you will have a good appreciation for how the ideologies and thought processes of the Western world, thought all it’s transformations, relates to a left- or right-hemisphere bias.
In this “primer” I’ll lay out the fundamentals so we can explore in more depth and detail, just how the different perspectives of our hemispheres shape the way we respond to propaganda and how the propagandist (probably by intuition) takes advantage of these differences.
McGilchrist (2009) summarises the “two worlds” of the hemispheres in this way:
The brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one [that of the right hemisphere], we experience—the live, complex, embodied world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and re-forming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other [that of the left hemisphere] we “experience” our experience in a special way: a “re-presented” version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power. (p. 31)
Allan Schore, a famous psychologist in the realm of affect neuroscience, explains that the early-maturing right hemisphere is the locus of attachment formation and essentially the gateway to affect regulation later in life—so much so, indeed, that developing an expanded capacity for right-hemisphere processing (an emphasis on right-brained affective skills rather than a left–cognitive bias) is central to clinical expertise (Schore, 2012). In a similar vein, Badenoch (2008) warns therapists to be grounded in right-brain engagement with clients or run the risk of being disengaged from the regulating and integrating influence of right brain-to-right brain connection with clients. She further encourages therapists to widen their window of tolerance, be conscious of implicit vulnerabilities, and develop mindfulness to be present with both the client and self. There is a place for left-brain focus when thinking about specific interventions, but as McGilchrist admonishes, the left should remain servant to the right hemisphere as master.
Below is a summary of the characteristics of each hemisphere. As you read through the list, think about our capacity to be biased toward one way of ‘being’ over another, according to these hemispheric characteristics.
Left Hemisphere
Less white matter—prioritizing local information transfer within regions, reflected in an in- creased ability to localize attention and enhancing its self-referring nature.
More reliant on dopamine.
Superior in the expression of anger.
Highly focused attention to detail; local, narrowly focused attention—sees “parts”.
Attends narrowly to the right field of view, the right side of the body, the right side of objects (demonstrated in what is known as “hemi-neglect” following a right-hemisphere stroke).
More engaged with the known, the learned, the expected; prefers what it knows—“grasps” what is in focus and has been prioritized.
Efficient when routine is predictable.
Finds solutions perceived to fit best with current knowledge or schemas
Processes information in an increasingly focal way that suppresses information not immediately relevant.
Suppresses the right-hemisphere ability to make distant associations among words or objects (and the broader scope of attention in general).
Takes a local, short-term view.
Identifies things by labels rather than context; does not deduce from context like the right hemisphere—in conversation takes things more literally and has difficulty understanding implied meaning. Things are decontextualized and interpreted by an internal logic.
Proficient at abstraction—storing and manipulating information in abstracted types, classes, categories, and representations that are impersonal, fixed, and equivalent. Recognizes objects in a category in a generic, non-specific way, but not the uniqueness of individuals.
Codes non-living things and has an affinity for the mechanical.
Better at identifying simple shapes that are easily categorized.
Interested in the utility of things—machines, tools, man-made things.
Sees one’s own body as an assemblage of parts from which it maintains a level of detachment.
More sophisticated in language and symbol manipulation, with greater vocabulary and more subtle and complex syntax than the right hemisphere.
Right HemisphereMore white matter—facilitating faster transfer of information across regions, reflected in an increased ability to hold global attention.
More sensitive to testosterone.
More reliant on noradrenaline.
More intimately connected with the limbic system—identifies emotions faster and more accurately than the left and is more involved in emotional expression (except anger).
Open to broad awareness; on the lookout in a broad and flexible way with vigilance and global sustained attention—sees the “whole”.
Processes information in a non-focal manner.
Attends to the peripheral field of vision and the entire left–right visual field.
Alert and attentive to the new and the novel—awareness begins in the right hemisphere, grounding and integrating the experience, before being further processed in the left on a more detailed level.
More engaged in the learning of new information—explores.
Outperforms the left when prediction is difficult; more capable of shifting the frame of reference (important for problem solving).
Can associate words or objects that are not closely related; can understand unfamiliar (non-clichéd) metaphor.
Better able to integrate perceptual processes from different senses.
Longer working memory.
Recognizes broad or complex patterns.
More involved in insight and deductive reasoning.
Sees things in context and in terms of relationships; attentive to context in conversation—vital for a sense of humour.
Can recognize the individual and uniqueness within a category, such as recognizing individual faces in the category of faces.
Interested in the personal, the living, rather than the impersonal and non-living.
Plays a primary role in empathy, the theory of “mind”, identification with others, social interaction, and emotional understanding.
Connected with the self as an embodied whole.
Specializes in non-verbal communication, the implicit, subtle unconscious perceptions, emotional shifts, subtle clues and meanings.
Gives an appreciation of depth in time and space.
I won’t give you any more right now - for those new to these concepts this is a lot to take in. Have a think about how people can be more left- or right-hemisphere biased in their thinking and how a society at large may be biased toward the propensities of either hemisphere. It is a revelation, I think, to conceive of the social world in terms of hemispheric differences.
More to come from McGilchrist and my own musings on how this neuroscience and neuro-social-cultural understanding is playing out in our current situation.
Badenoch, B. (2008). Being a brain-wise therapist: A practical guide to interpersonal neurobiology. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co.
It is important to point out that McGilchrist, or I for that matter, is not trying to express the pop psychology notion that some people are left brained and some right brained (i.e. the artist is right brained yet the accountant is left brained). This is a cartoonish and overly simplified summary of some split-brain studies, and like any over simplification of psychological findings it seems to explode in popular culture as a ‘thing’. In fact it became such a ‘thing’ in pop psychology that serious neuroscientists started to shy away from the topic altogether - not wanting to be associated, and thus seen as foolish, with the popular notion of left/right hemisphere characteristics. It stopped becoming a respectable topic to hypothesise on. McGilchrist says…
“This is hardly surprising, given the set of beliefs about the differences between the hemispheres which has passed in the popular consciousness. These beliefs could, without much violence to the facts, be characterised as versions of the idea that the left hemisphere is somehow gritty, rational, realistic but dull, and the right hemisphere airy-fairy and impressionistic, but creative and exciting; a formulation reminiscent of Sellar and Yeatman’s immortal distinction (in their parody of English history teaching, 1066 and All That) between the Roundheads - ‘Right and Repulsive’ - and the Calvaliers - ‘Wrong but Wromantic’. In reality, both hemispheres are crucially involved in reason, just as they are in language; both hemispheres play their part in creativity. Perhaps the most absurd of these popular misconceptions is that the left hemisphere, hard-nosed and logical, is somehow male, and the right hemisphere, dreamy and sensitive, is somehow female… Discouraged by this kind of popular travesty, neuroscience has returned to the necessary and unimpeachable business of amassing findings, and has largely given up the attempt to make sense of the findings, once amassed, in any larger context.”
Most interesting - insightful