Master Indeed

I am coming to the end of part one (of two) of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. After having described the divided brain, he is now at the stage of explaining in detail why the right brain is the master and the left brain the emissary. Here is one of many restatements of the central thesis from p. 177:

There is a tendency for the life sciences to consider a mechanistic universe more ‘real’, even though physics long ago moved away from this legacy of nineteenth-century materialism, with the rather odd result that the inanimate universe has come to appear animate, to take part in mind, while the animate universe appears inanimate, mindless. Science has to prioritise clarity; detached, narrowly focussed attention; the knowledge of things as built up of detail over the the bigger picture. Like philosophy it comes at the world from the left hemisphere’s point of view … There Newtonian mechanics rules; but it ‘frays at the edges’, once one pans out to get the bigger picture of reality, at the subatomic, or at the cosmic, level. Here uncertainty replaces certainty; the fixed turns out to be constantly changing and cannot be pinned down; straight lines are curved: in other words, Einstein’s laws account better than Newton’s. Straight lines, such as the horizon, are curved if one takes a longer view, and space itself is curved — so that the rectilinearity of the left hemisphere is a bit like the flat-Earther’s view ….

Naturally, one must rely on language to describe hemispheric worldviews, so it is no surprise that McGilchrist uses metaphors from science to support his argument. He points out, however, that while the left hemisphere can understand conflicts between Euclidean and elliptical or hyperbolic space (among other things, e.g., Schrödinger’s cat or the wave vs. particle debate), the right hemisphere is far more comfortable dealing with flow, flux, ambiguity, and paradox. Those problems are not resolved in the right hemisphere, exactly, but they no longer matter so much.

This calls to mind an early scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo admits that things feels off, or subtly wrong somehow. He can’t pin it down, but he can sense it somehow. This is why the right brain is the master: it gets it more fully, if perhaps imprecisely. (“What is it, exactly?” asks the left brain. “Who cares,” answers the right brain, “let’s dance!”) Yet we strain and struggle to fix reality in our minds via the left hemisphere due to habits of mind developed, learned, and institutionalized over centuries. So the wrong way of viewing the world has gained the upper hand, at least temporarily (some 6,000 years perhaps, which is almost nothing in the larger scheme of things).

I was delighted to discover (on two different blogs on the same day, a good instance of how something suddenly goes viral) an RSA Animate video of McGilchrist summarizing his findings, which is a shorter, animated version of a longer version (available elsewhere on YouTube) delivered behind a podium with some supplemental media.

His message is very clear to me, but I’m currently reading the book. As I watched the video, however, I was struck that the tantalizing visual distraction and cleverness of the illustrator (using animation within the animation) overwhelms the spoken message. It’s basic media theory: the medium is the message, and here, despite using MiGilchrist’s book as the ostensible subject, the dominant message becomes about the illustration (or the illustrator).