So many books, so little time! I actually have a coffee mug my mother gave me that bears that phrase. Well, here's another one to add to my list: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. A review of the book just appeared in Drexel University's The Smart Set. From "Half and Half":
Back in junior high school health class, we were told that the brain has two different hemispheres — the left and the right. The left brain, the textbook stated, is responsible for language, math, and science, logic and rationality. The right brain was the artistic one, the creative half of the brain. But that's not quite true. Neuroimaging and experiments on patients with split brains and brain damage to only one hemisphere have allowed a much more detailed, and fascinating, accounting of how the two parts interact with the world, and how they combine to become a unified consciousness (and, in some cases of mental disorders, how they occasionally don't). Iain McGilchrist has combined scientific research with cultural history in his new book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World to examine how the evolution of the brain influenced our society, and how the current make up of the brain shapes art, politics, and science, as well as the rise of mental illness in our time — in particular schizophrenia, anorexia, and autism.
That eighth-grade level science textbook was kind of correct. While the left brain does contain much of the language center of the brain, a person cannot understand context without the right hemisphere. Metaphor, irony, and humor are all processed by the right brain. When engaging in face-to-face conversation, it processes facial expressions to add depth to the meaning. Most
activities, from painting to mathematics, are processed by both the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. The differences between them have to be defined in a different way. The left brain brings precision, focus, abstraction, rationality, and fixity. The right brain has a more open view of the world. It provides context, whether finding humor in a punch line or bringing a sense of history to a question posed to it. In a healthy, functioning brain, the right hemisphere sends information about a situation to the left hemisphere, which "unpacks" the information using its tools to find clarity, and then it vocalizes the response, either in thought or expression.
Click to read the rest.
Note (added December 31, 2009): This post The brain and culture: "The mind's great conflict spills over onto the world stage" contains an essay adapted from the book.
Note (added January 2, 2010): Another review of the book: "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist" (The Guardian).
Comments