‘Who sets his sights upon the whole, has calmed the tempest in his soul.’
Friedrich von Schiller, Homage to the Arts1
In Are We Possessed by One Side of the Brain?, Academy of Ideas argues that ‘most people rely too heavily on one side of the brain, which is leading to a peculiar worldview, and a pathological way of being that is characterized by stubbornness, a lack of empathy, a desire for power, and an overall disconnection from reality.’ The piece goes on to explain that the locus of this lopsided dependence lies on the left side of the brain, the hemispheric home of the ‘narrow and precisely focused attention’ that allows people to devote most of their mental energy to ‘specific elements of our environments, in order to manipulate them’.
This argument borrows much from a pair of books written by neuroscientist (and one-time English professor) Iain McGilchrist. (The more recent of these two books, The Matter with Things, which weighs as much as a full-grown house cat, expands upon the ideas laid out in its monotomic forerunner, The Master and His Emissary). Indeed, Are We Possessed by One Side of the Brain? owes so much to the recent writings of Dr. McGilchrist that it might well be described as a summary of his most recent writings.
Marvelous to say, the article makes no mention of one of the great engines of this tendency: the circumscribed, reductionist, object-focused thinking required for success in conventional classrooms. Stranger still, at no point in the two thousand pages that Dr. McGilchrist devotes to matters related to cerebral lobes does he touch upon, let alone engage, the contribution made by sustained schooling to the triumph of left-brained thinking.2 Strangest of all, the latter concludes The Master and His Emissary, with a description of a dystopia that looks a lot like the intra mural world of my experience.
‘We could expect, for a start,’ he writes, ‘that there would be a loss of the broader picture, and a substitution of a more narrowly focussed, restricted, but detailed, view of the world, making it perhaps difficult to maintain a coherent overview. The broader picture would in any case be disregarded, because it would lack the appearance of clarity and certainty which the left hemisphere craves. In general, the “bits” of anything, the parts into which it could be disassembled, would come to seem more important, more likely to lead to knowledge and understanding, than the whole, which would come to be seen as no more than the sum of the parts.’3
For Further Reading:
To Share, Subscribe, or Support:
‘Denn wer den Sinn aufs Ganze hält gerichtet, Dem ist der Streit in seiner Brust geschlichtet.’ Friedrich von Schiller Die Huldigung der Künste: Ein lyrisches Spiel (Tübingen: JG Cotta, 1805) page 20.
Neither the index to The Master and his Emissary nor the guide to subjects appended to The Matter with Things contain entries for ‘classroom’, ‘college’, ‘education’, ‘school’, ‘teacher’ or ‘university’.
Iain McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary : The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), page 428
My daughter (who btw is a university prof neuroscientist) once told me that the recipe for success in school involves making the correct assessment about one vital topic: is the instructor the sort of person who’ll reward a clever idea from outside the framework constructed in class or is he or she the sort who simply wants one to regurgitate what they’ve been fed. Not sure if this is strictly relevant but it did pop into my head when I read your piece …
“Neither the index to The Master and his Emissary nor the guide to subjects appended to The Matter with Things contain entries for ‘classroom’, ‘college’, ‘education’, ‘school’, ‘teacher’ or ‘university’.”
What an astonishing omissions! One wonders if his time as a professor has given him a serious blind spot. One of the things I learned long ago, partly by watching/listening to the series The Western Tradition by Professor Eugen Weber, was that no matter how fascinating the specific subject or area you were studying, there was a vast mosaic it fit into. Moreover, the only way to really grasp the relative importance of your area was to step back occasionally and look at the larger picture, which is a humbling experience.