I Think It's Our Brains...

(But I'm not a materialist!)

Hi everyone and thank you again for the support, it really helps! I wrote this up, and I’m curious to know what people think. Are our theories and thought processes today ruining our chances for a new humanism? Are we linear thinkers now more than ever?

Erik J. Larson

“Life is probably round,” said Van Gogh.
The great Russian novelist Arthur Koestler agreed, referring to “the nostalgia of things to become spheres.”  Much of western history is a love affair with the sphere, and circles and cycles generally: the end is my beginning, and the beginning my end.  Perhaps no wonder: straight lines aren’t to be found in the natural world.  Individuals and cultures not obsessed with a mechanical viewpoint (machines tend to be rectilinear) see cycles everywhere. The Earth itself is, of course, a sphere, and the celestial objects in the night sky seem to trace circular or elliptical orbits. Space-time is curved.

            If there’s a return in human history as well, we’re left with a nagging question. If human history is cyclical, why can’t we see this? In a culture obsessed with technology and science, we should be better empiricists. We’ve got troves of hyper intelligent data scientists. We should notice the roundness of nature, and the cycles in our own lives and in our history.

            Modern lateralization research comes to the rescue—or at least, it is one intriguing possibility. We have, says McGilchrist, come to see ourselves and the world around us as machinery. As mentioned above, he marshals an impressive body of experimental studies and evidence to the conclusion that we—or at least the western world—have not just a pronounced left hemisphere dominance but indeed, a “left hemisphere” view of reality. The Enlightenment kicked it off and, discounting the brief period of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, it’s even more true today. McGilchrist is sometimes gently dismissed as trafficking in metaphors rather than evidence, but he’s rarely dismissed out of hand. He thinks we’re in a left hemisphere world quite literally.

Until recently, studies of differences between the two hemispheres of the human brain, so-called “laterality research,” have been stigmatized by the neuroscientific community because they’ve been taken up by pop culture. Pop culture accounts of hemisphere differences are mostly fictional and often misleading. Water cooler references to “left brained” and “right brained” people became a kind of trope beginning in the 1970s and played fast and loose with available studies of hemisphere differences.  Serious neuroscientists avoided the topic.

Today boasts an ever-increasing trove of experimental results from studies on patients with brain lesions, as well as methods of deactivating one hemisphere to see how the other interprets and reacts to pictures, sounds, and events. The evidence compiled is voluminous, and McGilchrist sees it as path to understanding different periods of history. The hemispheres have a different “take” on the world—a seemingly mythological pronouncement that has abundant empirical support. How we process and interpret the world today and particularly since the Industrial Revolution is profoundly skewed toward the left hemisphere. Skewed, that is, toward machines.

Machines are rectilinear, not spherical or curved like the natural world.  The left hemisphere prefers rectilinear—it wants a straight line toward a goal. It’s about grasping and amassing stuff. It prefers a destination. It understands by breaking something into parts, then putting them back together. It likes puzzles, in other words, not mysteries. It likes “onward and upward” views of human progress. It likes the angular and rectilinear parts of a machine.

The right hemisphere sees the whole first, the Gestalt, not the parts. It sees individuals rather than labels or categories. It’s poor at decontextualizing events or scenes to analyze them in separation. It prefers context. Weirdly, it has a strong preference for circles, and spheres. It’s uninterested in the mechanical. It prefers metaphors, narratives, and analogies. It’s the “Master” in McGilchrist’s opus (taken from a story originally from Nietzsche).

During the Enlightenment, our thinking tilted away from the holistic, historically sensitive Renaissance and ancient Greek world to one more filled with abstractions: liberty, equality, Newtonian space, the universal clock of time. The Industrial Revolution tilted us even further towards left hemisphere dominance. The round world of Van Gogh became sequential processing, puzzle solving, reductionist and mechanical.

So, where do we go from here?