The left hemisphere generates divisional attention. It divides things, and the attention it produces is fundamentally dualistic in nature. It divides up the world into stark lines and certainties, opposites, this and that. It has no time for subtlety, for contour, for flavour. It's all about division, and certainty.
Why? Why divide? Well, it's actually pretty straightforward. In order to interact with things, there have to be things to interact with. That's what the left hemisphere is doing. Chopping and slicing all incoming data into ‘things’. In McGilchrist's words,
»The values of fixity and clarity are added by the processing of the left hemisphere, which is what makes it possible for us to control, manipulate and use the world.«
This is interesting enough, but it goes a little deeper — because for whatever reason, the divisional, dualistic, manipulative world-view of the left hemisphere seems to constantly be working to take control. To rework everything into its divisions, to edit reality itself to reinforce those divisions, protect them, entrench them, and spread them.
And indeed — it's even stranger than that. The left hemisphere is not, for want of a better word, honest, which is quite a weird thing, if you think about it.
The left hemisphere is not creating these divisions in a purely dispassionate way, to aid manipulation of the world. It's not just chopping things up for accuracy's sake. Indeed, accuracy seems almost wholly incidental to its work. It constantly ‘loads the dice’, as it were, for a different agenda. And what is this agenda? It seems to be to defend and promote the divisions it has already made.
We'll look at this in more detail in a second, but a good way to think about it is that the left hemisphere of the brain is like a person who is a pathological liar, who's only real agenda is to protect their lies, and profit from them.
What is actually happening in reality is only of use to a person such as this inasmuch as it helps sustain their lies. When what is happening helps their lies, it is greedily seized upon. When it doesn't help their lies, it is utterly ignored, rejected — and potentially even attacked.
Indeed, if you think about such a person in real life, those kinds of patterns, that kind of thinking — that's left hemisphere thinking. Or rather — left hemisphere dominant thinking. No real interest in reality, but huge interest in their own stories, their own tales. One might almost say, their own image.
So, fully one side of the brain, it would appear, has very little interest in reality, which is a very strange thing to say, but is borne out by experiment. This ‘lying side’, however, has a great deal of interest in what it is saying and in protecting and promoting that.
Another thing about the left hemisphere is that the kind of thinking that it generates has a very specific, and very interesting quality. Certainty.
The left hemisphere, dishonest as it is, has a relentless hunger for certainty, and speaks only in absolute and certain terms. Total certainty, certainty that brooks no doubt or further investigation. Certainty is prized by left-hemisphere thinking, prized massively over accuracy. In fact, left hemisphere thinking doesn't really seem to prize accuracy at all. It just wants to build and sustain certainties, regardless of whether or not they are true. As and when those certainties clash with what's actually going on, it knows exactly which side it's on, and it isn't the side of the angels.
Nonetheless, left hemisphere thinking, for all its dishonesty, is the home of logic. Logic is a strikingly left-hemisphere thing, absolute certainties leading to absolute certainties. And so it might seem that the left hemisphere is the ‘rationality’ part of the brain. Indeed, this is how the left hemisphere is commonly spoken about, and understood.
But if you wanted to say that, you'd also have to say that rationality might not be quite as rational as it says on the packaging.
But actually, even that's not really enough. In a fascinating section of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist opens up some very interesting theories about left hemisphere thinking's evolutionary origins. And he makes a very strong case that what we're looking at in this, most seemingly logical and rational of hemispheres, is not that of logical processing.
Its origin is manipulation. Manipulation of the environment. And manipulation in the truest sense of that word — manipulation comes from the Latin word for ‘hand’.
Logic isn't really at the centre of left-hemisphere thinking. It just looks that way. What's really at the centre of it, is grasping. Grabbing. Handling, taking, manipulating. It is, in fact, so closely linked to the physical manipulation of things that most people are right-handed, and that's why, because the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and is far more naturally adept at manual dexterity.
Dualistic thought that is fundamentally grasping in character, that has only an incidental interest in what is real, and is fully focused on maintaining and defending its own divisions, stories and certainties at all costs, especially the cost of truth. This is the fundamental character of left-hemisphere thinking.
Another interesting aspect that McGilchrist explores is the fundamentally abstracted nature of the divisions drawn by the left hemisphere. This might sound very strange, because it might seem more likely that the hemisphere most concerned with interaction would want concrete specifics, not abstract generalities.
But then, you have to think what kind of interaction this hemisphere has evolved for. Manipulation — but in what way? Instead of taking each situation as it comes, the left hemisphere works to build abstract systems of iron rules that can be systematically used to exploit the world around it.
This is of course, an incredible boon — it is what makes cars and planes and computers possible. And it would be a terrible thing to lose — as some people do when they suffer very specific brain injuries.
But it would also be a terrible thing to be held in thrall to. A deadened world, a deadened life of deadened things, inert, abstracted, cold and analytical. And herein lies the problem — that the left hemisphere has one more crucial trick to play. It is ambitious.
Always moving to dominate, to impose its way of thinking over the right hemisphere, to subsume all experience and human living within its divided, dishonest, cold, abstracted, analytical and hungry gaze.
And the most crucial point of McGilchrist's work about this hemisphere is that it does dominate, and has dominated, and will dominate. It seems to have some ‘hold’ over the right hemisphere, as a puppeteer holds the strings of a puppet.
Pulled away from any relationship with the outside world, left-hemisphere thinking cannibalises itself, making divisions inside divisions, making the experience of life progressively shallower, more empty, less colourful, less alive. What replaces depth and richness is stark division, petty drama, and constantly repeating patterns of the same thing, the same thoughts, over and over. Stifled of freshness and newness, life becomes cold and hard, worn out, old, played.
That's what the left hemisphere does. It doesn't just ‘do’ things. It dominates. It dominates a human's perspective, it is voracious, and always looking to ‘take charge’, to assert this divisional, this and that, black and white, colourless and nuance-free perspective over the human experience of living.
Left-hemisphere thinking isn't problematic — but left-hemisphere dominance is. Very much so. And the left-hemisphere is relentlessly dominant. It has some hold over the right, some hook embedded, a kind of leash, if you will. And all it needs to do is tug. And it isn't coy when it comes to that.