Finally, the end of chapter 2 is nigh. McGilchrist finishes the chapter by drawing attention to several broader differences between the hemispheres in the following sections:
- Meaning and the implicit
- Music and time
- Depth
- Certainty
- Moral sense
Meaning and the implicit
Earlier, McGilchrist associated left hemispheric processing with abstraction rather than context, with attention to the part rather than attention the whole. Alternatively, the right hemisphere processes things in context and considers the whole rather than just the part. Unsurprisingly, it also processes implicit (as opposed to explicit) information and deals more effectively with wider ranges of meaning.
The right hemisphere’s particular strength is in understanding meaning as a whole and in context. It is with the right hemisphere that we understand the moral of a story, as well as the point of a joke. It is able to construe intelligently what others mean, determining from intonation, and from pragmatics, not just from summation of meaning units, subject to the combinatorial rules of syntax, as a computer would. It is therefore particularly important wherever non-literal meaning needs to be understood – practically everywhere, therefore, in human discourse, and particularly where irony, humour, indirection or sarcasm are involved. Patients with right-hemisphere damage have difficulty understanding non-literal meaning. They have difficulty with indirect meaning, such as is implied by metaphor and humour. In fact, those with right-hemisphere damage cannot make inferences, an absolutely vital part of understanding the world: they do not understand implicit meanings whatever their kind, but detect explicit meanings only. (1)
McGilchrist promises to discuss the central place of metaphor for cognition in chapter 3:
The full significance of the left hemisphere’s incapacity for, and the right hemisphere’s affinity for, metaphor will become clear in the next chapter [entitled “Language, Truth, and Music”]. While it does, certainly, mean that understanding of the indirect, connotative language of poetry depends on the right hemisphere, the importance of metaphor is that it underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art. (2)
Music and time
Again, McGilchrist will devote his next chapter to discussing the origins and role of music in our cognitive and linguistic processing, so I will leave lengthy notes on that subject for a future post on that chapter. However, some of his comments regarding time and, more specifically, the way we experience the flow of time, are interesting. He draws a distinction between our experience of temporal succession and the static nature of abstract entities.
Time is the context that gives meaning to everything in this world, and conversely everything that has meaning for us in this world, everything that has a place in our lives, exists in time. This is not true of abstractions and re-presentations of entities, but all that is is subject to time. The sense of time passing is associated with sustained attention, and even if for that reason alone, it is only to be expected that this arises in the right hemisphere. (3)
Previously, McGilchrist discussed the five kinds of attention, sustained attention among them, and the distribution of each across our bihemispheric neurology. He spoke of the left hemisphere as “the hemisphere of representation, in which signs are substituted for experience,” which he reiterates here, adding that the abstractions and re-presented entities that we create for ourselves do not exist in the same way as other things we experience (4). The abstractions are outside of the flow of time; they are static, free from time and space. They are removed from what Bernard Lonergan calls the empirical residue. More on that later.
Depth
Moving from time to space, McGilchrist discusses spatial depth, specifically a lack thereof for people with right hemisphere trauma.
The equivalent of time in the visual realm could be thought of as spatial depth: indeed since Einstein we have come to understand that time and space are aspects of one entity. As it is the right hemisphere that gives ‘depth’ to our sense of time, in the visual realm it is the right hemisphere that gives us the means of appreciating depth in space, the way in which we stand in relation to others, rather than by categorization.
The right hemisphere tends to present the world realistically, with visual detail and in three dimensions, with depth; and an aesthetic sense of the intensity and beauty of visual representations comes largely from the right hemisphere. (5)
The right hemisphere represents objects as having volume and depth in space, as they are experienced; the left hemisphere tends to represent the visual world schematically, abstractly, geometrically, with a lack of realistic detail, and even in one plane. (6)
These remarks extend his previous comments about the right hemisphere’s attention to the living and personal aspects of our experience.
Certainty
There are two senses of certainty that McGilchrist identifies. The first is the “Cartesian” sense of certainty, which is contrasted with ambiguity and vagueness. Descartes sought “clear and distinct” epistemic propositions and principles that were definitive, upon which he could build towards additional certainty. He employed his Universal Method of Doubt to delimit the uncertain from the undeniable. McGilchrist discusses the left hemisphere’s search for certainty, contrasting it with the right’s comfort with ambiguity.
The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things we make are also more certain: we know them inside out, because we put them together. They are not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp. Because the right hemisphere sees things as they are, they are constantly new for it, so it has nothing like the databank of information about categories that the left hemisphere has. It cannot have the certainty of knowledge that comes from being able to fix things and isolate them. In order to remain true to what is, it does not form abstractions, and categories that are based on abstraction, which are the strengths of denotative language. By contrast, the right hemisphere’s interest in language lies in all the things that help to take it beyond the limiting effects of denotation to connotation: it acknowledges the importance of ambiguity. It therefore is virtually silent, relatively shifting and uncertain, where the left hemisphere, by contrast, may be unreasonably, even stubbornly, convinced of its own correctness. (7)
The second sense of certainty is hinted at above. Left hemispheric ways of thinking are stubborn, which makes sense given the forms of data it deals with. It selects particular aspects of the world and reifies them into abstractions which are free from time and space. They are static, isolated entities, which are then categorized, which further contributes to their fixity. These second-order schemata are powerful tools for making sense of our experience of the world, but they are necessarily rigid and limiting. It is no wonder, then, that the left hemisphere is resistant to dealing with new, or vague, data.
However, the resistance is a bit more extreme than that. It appears that the left hemisphere is adept at fabricating causes and explanations without sufficient evidence.
This may be linked to a phenomenon known as confabulation, where the brain, not being able to recall something, rather than admit to a gap in its understanding, makes up something plausible, that appears consistent, to fill it. Thus, for example, in the presence of a right-sided lesion, the brain loses the contextual information that would help it make sense of experience; the left hemisphere, nothing loath, makes up a story, and, lacking insight, appears completely convinced by it. Even in the absence of amnesia, the left hemisphere exhibits a strong tendency to confabulate: it thinks it knows something, recognises something, which it doesn’t, a tendency that may be linked to its lack of ability to discriminate unique cases from the generalized categories into which it places them. The left hemisphere is the equivalent of the sort of person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admit to not knowing. (8)
John Dewey discriminated primary objects of our experience from secondary objects of our experience. The secondary, or reflective, objects of our experience are those categories, propositions, and formulations that we create to help us make sense of our everyday experience of the world. Dewey is critical of what he calls “intellectualism,” or the tendency to get caught up in further and unending analysis of these second-order objects. They are not the fundamental stuff of the world, but are derived from our thinking and acting upon the fundamental stuff of the world. The impulse to engage in such “rationalism” without returning to the empirical data of experience is replete throughout the history of western philosophy. When that rationalism is coupled with the quest for certainty, one ends up with, for example, the philosophy of Descartes.
Dewey criticism of intellectualism resembles what McGilchrist describes as left hemispheric thinking. I do not think Dewey would be uncomfortable with the term “confabulate” to describe it.
Moral sense
When discussing moral sense, McGilchrist is brief. Perhaps too brief.
He states that the difference between left- and right- hemisphere morality amounts to principles vs. empathy. As I mentioned above, the left hemisphere reconstructs the world according to its own categories. In the case of morality, this reconstruction “misleads us as to the nature of what we are seeing” (9). Morality is not, claims McGilchrist, constructed around rational principles, such as utility or duty, but is an unique kind of experience of values, or kind of valuation, that is irreducible to any other kind of experience.
Our experience of these values is not rational, but intuitive. It is “deeply bound up with our emotional sensitivity to other” (10). “Empathy is intrinsic to morality” (11).
I do not disagree with the distinction between moral rationality and moral intuition. Jonathan Haidt argues much the same, but at greater depth. It is the brevity of McGilchrist’s treatment that I find strange. It seems to me that morality deserves a more thorough commentary.
There is one final passage from this chapter that seems relevant. In a concise summary of what has come before, McGilchrist talks about the way that left hemisphere gets its caught in a reflective feedback loop, entertaining and analyzing its own abstract creations in a manner divorced from additional or new experience.
The left hemisphere’s ‘stickiness’, its tendency to recur to what it is familiar with, tends to reinforce whatever it is already doing. There is a reflexivity to the process, as if trapped in a hall of mirrors: it only discovers more of what it already knows, and it only does more of what it already is doing. The right hemisphere by contrast, seeing more of the picture, and taking a broader perspective that characteristically includes both its own and the left hemisphere’s, is more reciprocally inclined, and more likely to espouse another point of view.
One way of thinking of this is in terms of feedback systems. Most biological systems seek homeostasis: if they move too far in one direction, they stabilize themselves by self-correction. This is ‘negative feedback’, the most familiar example of which is the operation of a thermostat: if the temperature constantly tends to drops, the thermostat triggers a heating system that will act to bring the temperature back to the desired level. However, systems can become unstable and enter a situation in which ‘positive feedback’ obtains – in other words, a move in one direction, rather than producing a move in the opposite direction, serves to promote further moves in the same direction, a snowballing effect occurs. The right hemisphere, then, is capable of freeing us through negative feedback. The left hemisphere tends to positive feedback, and we can become stuck.
This is not unlike the difference between the normal drinker and the addict. After a certain point, the normal drinker begins to feel less like another drink. What makes an addict is the lack of an ‘off switch’ – another drink only makes the next, and the next, more likely. (12)
Notes
(1) McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, p. 70-1.
(2) ibid., p. 71.
(3) ibid., p. 75-6.
(4) ibid., p. 70.
(5) ibid., p. 77.
(6) ibid., p. 78.
(7) ibid., p. 79-80.
(8) ibid., p. 81.
(9) ibid., p. 86.
(10) ibid., p. 86.
(11) ibid., p. 86.
(12) ibid., p. 87.
Dissertating Outloud 