British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has summarized for us the differences between the hemispheres of the brain, putting the lie to outdated popular notions of “Left=Reason, Right=Creativity” and so on. His work, which extends the solid research of many others and includes studies of his own patients, as well as numerous subjects who experienced damage to one hemisphere or the other, demonstrates that the two hemispheres of the human brain (all mammalian brains, really) don’t exactly do different things – they do the same things differently.
Primarily, each hemisphere generates a version of reality. The job of the right hemisphere is to capture a ‘big picture’ portrait of that reality, while the job of the left is to create an in-the-moment snapshot, focused on an immediate task. The reason for this division of labor is simple: the survival of all creatures requires two simultaneous missions – 1) eat, and 2) don’t get eaten. The left hemisphere handles the immediate, tactile job of obtaining and consuming food; the right monitors the environment for threat and opportunity, as well as adding Past and Future to the left’s Present.
That’s simple and clear, we can agree. But it’s also enormously complex, once we dive in.
The resulting tendencies in cognition, emotion, and behavior become clear when one hemisphere takes the lead:
Left Brain
Intense focus, the purpose of which is success in gathering food quickly and efficiently;
Focus on the moment, the immediate task at hand;
Literalism - one term, one meaning, to avoid confusion and ambiguity;
Knowledge - information essential to task completion;
An algorithmic approach to values – consequences, not circumstances, because outcome is the immediate priority;
Anger is the primary emotion, as input from others is a distraction, not a help, and threatens task completion;
Awareness of itself: the left brain is unaware of the right brain, because awareness of the right brain would overburden and distract the left from its mission.
Right Brain
General awareness, because tracking events in the environment requires the broadest possible attention;
The past and future, because awareness of both informs the brain’s search for threat and opportunity;
Metaphor - This is like That is the core of learning, to improve performance over time;
Understanding - The incorporation of knowledge into a broader framework, so that new information breeds increased competence;
A holistic approach to values – circumstances, not consequences, because performance improvement is the long-term priority;
Empathy is the primary emotion, because a global awareness of the environment includes sensitivity to the emotions and behaviors of others as learning opportunities;
Awareness of itself, awareness of left: the right brain is constantly aware of both its own operation and the activities of the left, because global awareness is its function.
(It’s important to note, reviewing the lists above, that they are about functionality – and not just functionality, but survival. They are, each and all, essential to staying alive and thriving in a very dynamic world. As such, we can’t look at any one of them and say it is good or bad – just essential.)
Put simply, if we generalize these cognitive and behavioral tendencies to contemporary human society, we see the Left Brain features as those defining the extremes of the political Right, and the Right Brain features as the extremes of the political Left. Right is Left and Left is Right, when it comes to sociopolitical tendencies and division of brain function.
Left World, Right World
In a recent podcast interview, McGilchrist was asked what the world would be like if everyone on the planet was Left-Brained, or if everyone was Right-Brained.
Left:
“Well, obviously, we would lose sight of the big picture,” he replied. “That's the thing I've emphasized throughout. There'd be an emphasis on the details, instead. There would be a great emphasis on predictability, organizability, anonymity, categorization, loss of the unique and an ability to break things down into parts but not really see what the whole is like. There'd be a need for total control because the left hemisphere is somewhat paranoid. After right hemisphere damage, people often develop a paranoia, and that's because one can't understand quite what's going on and one needs, therefore, to control it. Anger would become the key note in public discourse. Everything would become black and white.
“The left hemisphere needs to be decisive because, don't forget, it's the one that's catching the prey. It's no good at going, well, yeah, it could be a rabbit, but it might not be. It's going to go, I'm going to go for it. So it likes black and white. It doesn't like shades of meaning. So in this world, we would lose the capacity to see grades of difference. We would misunderstand everything that is implicit and metaphorical and have to make rules about how to achieve it.”
And if the whole world went Right-Brained,
“The right hemisphere, if it were really without the left hemisphere, would see a lot of connections between things and would see a broad picture, but it might not be so good at focusing on details,” he said. “Emotionally, the timbre might be somewhat melancholic and sad. Because I think it's one of the aspects, I'm afraid, of the right hemisphere's realism and sympathy, a capacity for empathy, that it does feel suffering. We would not be able to make calculations in the same way. Most arithmetic calculations are made by the left hemisphere.
“So we would be good at coming up with ideas. We might not be good at actually sort of carrying out the nuts and bolts and getting it working as a machine.”
Is any of this seeming familiar?
Sure enough, McGilchrist commented on how the world we live in today is leaning increasingly toward Left-Brain thinking:
“I think what I observe is an overemphasis on predetermined systems of algorithms,” he said, “The sense of social alienation. The way in which we live divorced from the natural world, which is a very new phenomenon. The insistence on extreme positions, which is what the left hemisphere understands, not a nuanced argument about the pros and cons of every single thing.
“Meaning comes out of living in a consistent culture where there is a sense of connection with one's past. And not just one's own past, but the past of the people who made you who you were, with the other people in the society to which you belong and to the world at large. The natural world and things that are just simply beyond our ken, the transcendental. These are very important things that the right hemisphere's much better equipped to understand, and I feel the loss of them in modern life is grievous.”
Full circle
This new understanding of how the brains we are born with define the people we become, our thoughts, our viewpoint, our behavior and emotions, can generate tremendous insights into why the world has become as confusing and disheartening as it has in recent decades: as we increasingly huddle into clusters of like-mindedness, we set up high-gain loops of Left Hemisphere Thinking and Right Hemisphere Thinking – Right-wing extremism and Left-wing extremism.
And the lessons of McGilchrist’s research should inform not only our insights but our compassion: did you choose your dominant hemisphere? Did you choose global over local, or literalism over metaphor, or any particular focus? Or is it just how your individual brain rolls, the play of the genes you were born with?
And even if you had chosen, even if you had woken up one day and said, “I’m gonna be a Lefty Brain!” or “I’m feelin’ like a Righty!”, isn’t it agonizingly clear that whichever way you lean, we need both sides – working together closely! - to survive?
The long-term success of humankind requires that we get in touch with our own minds, understanding why we think and feel and act as we do – and, just as importantly if not more – why others think and feel and act as they do.
Put another way, understanding Left Brain/Right Brain can lower the judgmental attitudes we are currently indulging in, and restore some of the natural balance that nature has laid at our feet.
By the very science we have just reviewed, this step will be much harder for a left-brained person. But the response of the right-brained person should not be a withdrawal of their natural empathy, or (worse yet) to begin echoing the left brain’s intense (and perfectly natural) self-indulgence: all this does is diminish the right-brained person’s ability to maintain the big picture.
The best thing we can do, in restoring nature’s balance, is to un-cluster ourselves, socially – if right-brained people spend more time with left-brained people, and vice versa, each begins to strengthen the other, and we all wind up stronger in the long run.
Otherwise, there won’t be a long run.
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