I thought I’d mention this here in case anyone is interested.
A researcher called Iain McGilchrist has been working for maybe twenty or thirty years on a problem which he got interested in, which is the left brain versus right brain differences.
He found that the old notions about left and right brain had been discredited not because there are no differences, but simply because earlier research had come to the wrong conclusions about what the differences are.
The old notions were that the left brain is logical and the right brain is emotional and intuitive, but it turns out that’s not the case. The left and right brains are indeed two very different modes of awareness and perception, and he uses the analogy of a bird searching for food. It has to be able to see and grasp the food, know the thing and pick at the thing and manipulate the thing very quickly and certainty.
But the bird has another problem, which is, how to avoid being eaten, when the threat could come from anywhere. So the bird needs another mode of perception, which is all about the unknown, about things which don’t make sense, about things which are not known to you, nor easily labeled or categorised, things which are about novelty and change. So it’s a very open, unknowing form of awareness and perception, and the bird has to maintain that, all the while it’s doing other things.
So there’s these two very different modes of awareness/perception. One is very clear about what it knows; it breaks the world down into things and then it can grasp at things and knows how to manipulate those things to get them very quickly. The other mode of perception is open, unknowing, non-categorising, with an ability to respond to change and anything which doesn’t make sense.
McGilchrist points out that, these two different modes are actually ancient. If you think about it, the brain is powerful because it makes connections and the more connections it can make, the more powerful it is. So why then would evolution split the brain into two separate halves, which are actually very disconnected?
The part in the middle of the brain which connects them seems to be acting more like a filter to make sure the two parts don’t communicate too much, so why would this evolutionary development actually have been there from extremely early years?
The left/right brain split is, according to McGilchrist, 700 million years old. Practically every brain does it. So there must be some very deep evolutionary purpose or need for its existence, the existence of these two very different modes of awareness/perception.
I found reading his books were actually working really well as pointing out instructions.
To be able to recognize what’s more of a left brain perception and what’s more of a right brain perception.
McGilchrist says that the old ideas about, say, the left brain being the logical part, and therefore the most reliable part, are simply wrong. The left needs to grasp at things in a very specific and manipulative way, but in order to get that focus, it is much more detached from reality. Meanwhile the right brain is much more open, so as to be open to novelty and change and things which cannot be categorised. And because of that, it’s actually more grounded in the environment.
What’s interesting is that both sides do have emotions, but anger and anxiety localize more to the left brain, perhaps because of the loss of control that might be felt by the left brain’s perceptions of needing to control everything, whereas the right brain tends to localize more with depression and these kinds of more weather-like feelings.
So I found it quite interesting as pointing out instructions to identify when I’m slipping into much more of a left brain perception, as well as being able to let go into the unknown and sense being more grounded, and notice, the inherent goodness of the colour blue or red, for example.
One point I found really interesting is that, apparently, because the left brain is so thing-focused and control-focused, issues like schizophrenia are much more to do with the left brain, because it’s a kind of stream of thinking about things that has lost touch with the right brain’s sense of context and perspective.
The right brain is more in touch with context and perspective. The left brain much more isolated, like a little machine. They’re both needed. But if someone gets too heavily stuck in the left brain mode, then they literally lose their ability, not to think, but they lose their ability to put any context around what they’re thinking. As Iain puts it, they don’t lose their minds, they lose everything but their minds (the left brain mind).
McGilchrist also gets very philosophical about how this impacts pretty much everything about our whole civilisation.
Whilst reading through his books and his pointing out instructions, I kept wondering, this part and that part remind me about integral theory; that particular stage, or that particular type, or maybe that particular intelligence.
I get the impression overall that some of what he criticizes about the deficiencies of the left brain (albeit it’s doing what it’s meant to do) sound kind of like a critique of amber and orange, and sometimes when he’s praising the capacities of the right brain, it sounds a bit like a sort of green to integral kind of appreciation.
I haven’t really worked it out myself, but it does seem like different aspects of the spiral and of types and of lines, and so on, would be lighting up with different combinations of left and/or right brain.
Overall, his work… does strike me as a kind of vision-logic experience.
Certainly he does get heavily into unification of polarities and opposites, things which cannot be easily made sense of in logical, straightforward way. The wisdoms around not grasping at everything. The ability to say things which self-contradict. And of remaining more in touch with reality (i.e., our broader perceptual world-building and enacting capacities) and the flow of phenomena.
There’s another link with Integral, and that’s that I think they’re soon doing a seminar with some guest speakers. I think it’s either this weekend or maybe next weekend. One of the guest speakers is Dr. Keith Witt, and one of the other speakers is going to be Matthias Desmet.
Some of you may recognize the name. Keith has mentioned him a few times regarding the theory of mass formation psychosis. I heard about Matthias Desmet a few years ago, particularly around the pandemic, and he was one of the voices that was pointing out some of the heavy psychological issues around the pandemic response.
Overall, the kind of philosophical aspects that McGilchrist talks about, strike me as something more on the vision-logic stage, at least in terms of being able to handle these multi modes of perception and world-building and including them both.
I don’t think he comes across as particularly green meme, if anything he keeps insisting that he does believe that there is actually such a thing as truth. It’s just that the truth has this very open, contextual, grounded aspect to it. (If anything maybe “extreme green” is a kind of hyper left brain version of green values, which go nuts because they’re not using the right brain contextual grounding (ironically)).