Here's an exchange between Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, and Wayne Miller, coauthor of the new Top Brain, Bottom Brain. Dr. McGilchrist was kind enough to post the exchange on his Web site. if you are interested in the brain, you will want to read this short conversation.
It begins:
Kosslyn and Miller are researchers I admire. They are quite right to take issue with what they call dated and crude ideas of hemisphere difference. So do I. ‘Dated’ and ‘crude’ are by definition bad. Agreed, management jargon about almost entirely fictional differences between the hemispheres are a hurdle one has to get over: I wrote a book taking such ideas to task. But that is quite different from suggesting we would be wrong to think in terms of hemisphere difference at all.
They write, as if it is some revelation, that ‘the brain doesn’t work one part at a time, but rather as a single interactive system, with all parts contributing in concert, as neuroscientists have long known’. Who, one feels like asking, do they think their readers are?
It is not that they are wrong to point to ‘top-bottom’ differences in the brain: in fact the idea is so plainly right, and has been known to be the case for so long, that I cannot imagine who it is they think might disagree with them. ...
Click to read the rest.
H/T: Bonnie Badenoch.
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