I’ve been reading the book The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. He is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar that has been involved with neuro-imaging. The book focuses on the the roles of and relationship between brain hemispheres. As a “Right brain-dominate/dyslexic” I’ve always felt that our society was way to “Left brain” and have had many struggles with what I have been calling for many years “a world of animated computer programs”, people that lack empathy, intuition, and humanity. Well, it’s starting to look like there’s some neuroscience to back my feelings.
“The metaphor of the “left-brain/right-brain” divide has permeated pop culture as one of the dichotomies of how we think about and describe ourselves. But this metaphor is rooted in a number of neuropsychological realities of how our brains operate- the right hemishpere(the master), with it’s flexibility and capacity for empathy and abstraction but lack of certainty, and the detail oriented left hemisphere(the emissary), with its preference for mechanisms over living things, its inability to see past the literal, and its propensity for self-interest.”
Would love to hear the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the Integral community on this topic.
Best regards,
Brian
