The right hemisphere comes out of all this looking very innocent indeed. And it does indeed have a level of fidelity (to use it in the technical sense of accuracy) that the left hemisphere doesn't have, and actually seems to work against.
It seems strange to say it, but it does seem at least possible that the agenda of the left hemisphere is to rework all incoming information in terms of a story about a coherent, rational mind, and project that story clearly, compellingly, and rapidly.
But the right hemisphere doesn't have this kind of agenda. It's far closer to what we might expect the brain to be doing. It doesn't work in linear process, of course, it's not crunching numbers, or processing things analytically. But it is mapping reality, as best it can. It's not perfect, but it is very good — the accuracy of human perception is extremely high — far higher than the accuracy of human language, for instance.
On top of all this, the right hemisphere is at least honest — which is to say that although it can and will make mistakes, it will not entrench or defend them, but will simply correct them with no fuss. If you are, for instance, half asleep and you see a coat hanging on the back of your door, and think it's a person standing there, and then you look again, and see it's just a coat, there's no conflict or defensiveness to that process. It just happens, and it works fine.
The right hemisphere has the faculty of potential accuracy. It's not magic, and it isn't always right, but it can be accurate, at least in principle, in a way the left hemisphere can't be. Which is because the left hemisphere is reworking all incoming data in order to produce a fundamental fiction — the fiction of mind.
The right hemisphere plays the central role in insight, and in metaphor. In recognising the patterns that underlie and unite experience and reality. The flashes of connection that draw together many things into crystal focus — these are the work of the right hemisphere.
Of course, the left hemisphere, reworking everything in terms of rational processes that never actually occur, steals all the credit — and perhaps there's a clue there. As a detective in a fraud squad might have it — follow the money. In this case, follow the credit.
The left hemisphere spins a story of a rational process, that was done by an individual. I worked this out, I worked that out. Say some connection is made by the right hemisphere, the left will take that connection and cast it as the result of a personal process with linear steps — a process that is clear, easy to talk about, easy to display — and undertaken by the individual.
So the left hemisphere is stealing all the credit of the right. And it does seem, doesn't it, that the left hemisphere is the 'baddie' of the piece, and the right the 'goodie'?
But the first, and most obvious problem with lionising the right hemisphere is that it doesn't put up any kind of fight whatsoever. It is more than happy to let this happen — indeed, it spends most of its time filling things in and fleshing things out at the behest of the left hemisphere. There's no conflict between the two because the right hemisphere has no problem whatsoever with what the left hemisphere is doing, which is to say, lying about the existence of a mind.
If anything, the right hemisphere seems less like a victim, and more like a kind of accomplice, or at the very least, an extremely enthusiastic enabler.
Indeed, partners in crime seems closer to the truth.