Free PDF: Differences between the Hemispheres Presented in Two-Column Format
With an Introduction to the Hemisphere Hypothesis
Primer: Understanding the Hemisphere Hypothesis
The brain consists of two halves: the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. In a healthy person, they work together constantly and do many of the same things. Both halves are necessary for a healthy existence (e.g., the right hemisphere controls the left hand; the left hemisphere controls the right hand).
But the left and right hemispheres attend to the world differently. Our attention affects the world, which in turn affects us.
If we pay attention to the world with the left, we get a world that looks like the left. If we pay attention to the world with the right, we get a world that looks like right. It’s a “vicious circle.” The Matter with Things (Perspectiva Press, 2022), 26.
We are meant, in the final analysis, to attend to the world with the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere’s way of attending to the world is expedient. It’s meant to help the right hemisphere govern properly by bringing to the right hemisphere good information and handling mundane chores. It’s meant to be the servant — the emissary — of the right.
The person with a well-ordered soul will attend to the world with right hemisphere primacy. If a person attends to the world with left hemisphere primacy, he or she will have a disordered soul.
It’s that simple.
The Modern World is Way Too Tilted to the Left Hemisphere
The modern world is “Left Hemisphere Gone Wild.” The left hemisphere, which is meant to be an emissary for the right hemisphere, has usurped the right hemisphere’s master role. McGilchrist used a fable by Nietzsche to explain it:
There was a wise spiritual Master who looked after a small community so well that it flourished and grew. Eventually the Master realised that he could not take care of all his people’s needs on his own; more importantly, he realised that there were certain matters that he not only could not, but must not, become involved in, if he were to preserve his overview. He therefore appointed his brightest assistant to go about and do work on his behalf. Though bright, this emissary was not bright enough to know what it was he didn’t know. He became arrogant and resentful of the Master: ‘What does he know?’, he thought. ‘I’m the one that does the real work round here, I’m the one that really knows.’ And so he adopted the Master’s cloak, and pretended to be the Master. The emissary not knowing what it was he didn’t know, the community declined, and the story ends with the ruin of the community, including both the Master and the emissary.
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. The right hemisphere, however, knows what it is that it must not get involved with. In the story that is why the Master (the right hemisphere) appoints the emissary in the first place.
The left hemisphere has been in control for a long time now and is apparently trying to shut out the right hemisphere altogether by blocking its ways of attending to the world, almost like some eerie artificial intelligence shutting down humanity. His bestseller from 2009, The Master and His Emissary, starts with science; proceeds through the millennia of western philosophy, literature, and history; and ends with a science fiction dystopian vision that, unfortunately, isn’t fiction.
We Need to Put Our Right Hemispheres Back in Control
McGilchrist’s message seems pretty clear: Each of us needs to struggle to regain control of our right hemispheres.
As more people form their lives to assert the right hemisphere’s hegemony, society can start to escape the dystopia that we all sense is engulfing us but don’t know how to escape.
If we want to reassert the right hemisphere in our lives, we need to understand how the two hemispheres view things differently. We can then try to emphasize the right hemisphere's attributes and quell the left hemisphere’s.
In other words, we need to “raise awareness” about how the two hemispheres attend to the world so we can use the right hemisphere to attend to the world, which will, in turn, allow us to deploy the left hemisphere properly.
The Table’s Scheme
The scheme is pretty obvious: The left column refers to how the left hemisphere pays attention to things, and the right column refers to how the right hemisphere pays attention to things.
If items in the hemisphere columns correspond by location and color, they’re the corresponding alternatives of one another and are best read together.
Bolded words are designed to allow the reader to glance through each column and quickly identify the attributes of each hemisphere.
Additional notes are provided after the table, primarily to emphasize what the table neglects: the two hemispheres work together and need one another. The table, taken by itself, would lead one to believe the two hemispheres are antagonists, and that’s not the case. Or, rather, shouldn’t be the case, if it weren’t for the left’s usurpation of the right’s leadership, which is a main point of McGilchrist’s work: modernity is the ascendancy of the left hemisphere, but the left hemisphere isn’t supposed to be ascendant.
The columns provide an easy reference for the hemispheres’ different attributes. If you want an overview of each hemisphere’s vision of reality, McGilchrist provides it at the beginning of The Matter with Things:
The left hemisphere’s vision of reality: The “world is composed of static, isolated, fragmentary elements that can be manipulated easily, are decontextualized, abstracted, detached, disembodied, mechanical, relatively uncomplicated by issues of beauty and morality (except in a consequential sense) and relatively untroubled by the complexity of empathy, emotion and human significance. They are put together, like brick on brick to build a wall, so as to reach conclusions that are taken to be unimpeachable. It is an inanimate universe—a bureaucrat’s dream. There is an excess of confidence and a lack of insight. This world is useful for purposes of manipulation, but is not a helpful guide to understand the nature of what it encounters. Its use is local and for the short term.”
In the right hemisphere’s vision of reality, things are much more complex. “Nothing is clearly the same as anything else. All is flowing and changing, provisional, and complexly interconnected with everything else. Nothing is ever static, detached from our awareness of it, or disembodied; and everything needs to be understood in context, where, if it is not to be denatured, it must remain implicit. Here, wholes are different from the sum of the parts, and beauty and morality, along with empathy and emotional depth, help us to intuit meaning that lies beyond the banality of the familiar and everyday. It is an inanimate universe—and a bureaucrat’s nightmare. This is a world from which we cannot detach ourselves, since we are part of it and affect it by our relationship with it. The overall timbre is sober and tentative. This world is truer than what is, but is harder to comprehend and to express in language, and less useful for practical issues that are local and short-term. On the other hand, for a broader or longer-term understanding, the right hemisphere is essential.”
Caution
The left hemisphere and right hemisphere columns yield an unfavorable picture of the left hemisphere (and a favorable picture of the right hemisphere). That’s unfortunate, since each hemisphere is good and necessary. It’s important to keep that in mind. McGilchrist’s repeatedly emphasizes this (for fear, I think, that people will think his thrust is to condemn the left hemisphere). Hence, the welcome passage on his website (as of 1/2023) reads (taken from page 93 of The Master and His Emissary):
Our talent for division, for seeing the parts [what the left hemisphere does], is of staggering importance—second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole [what the right hemisphere does].
We must act with both hemispheres to be fully human. The problem is, the modern world has given hegemony to the left hemisphere, and that’s a major problem. At this point, it’s necessary almost to vilify the left hemisphere in order to get people to see the enormous problems its hegemony is causing.
Addendum
A Few Other McGilchrist Themes
“Each hemisphere attends to the world in a different way.” Master, 27.
“[T]he bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold.” Matter, 19.
The hemispheres aren’t incompatible. They allow us “to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time, one narrow, focused, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves.” Master 27.
“At the level of experience, the world we know is synthesized from the work of the two cerebral hemispheres, each hemisphere having its own way of understanding the world—its own ‘take’ on it.” Master, 10.
Don’t ask what the hemispheres do, but how (in what manner) they do it. “Each hemisphere” pays a quite different type of attention to the world; and the type of attention we pay transforms the world we perceive and in which we come to believe we live.” McGilchrist Channel (accessed 12/27/22). See also Master, 20.
“Attention alters us . . . ” Master, 176
Attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. It “can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something—or don’t attend to it—matters a very great deal.” Matter, 21 “Attention is a moral act” because “[a]ttention has consequences.” Master, 133
In a superficial society, consistency (a left hemisphere value) becomes more important than truth, which is nuanced (a right hemisphere value) and not well-suited to soundbites. Matter, 32-33.
The hemispheres “work together most of the time at the everyday level. But that does not at all exclude that they may have radically different agendas.” Master, 91
Thinking is prior to language. Master, 110 Don’t be deceived: language is not necessary for thought. It could even be an impediment. All these transcend language: most forms of imagination and innovation, intuitive problem solving, spiritual thinking, artistic creativity. Master, 107
“Many examples exist of famous scientific problems that were solved without language.” Master, 107
Language functions like money. Money isn’t real, in the sense people want it for its own sake. It’s a medium to connect people and things by establishing a common item of value. Likewise, language isn’t real, in the sense that it is anything. It's a medium to connect people and things by establishing a common stock of reference (which is metaphor). Words aren’t things and money isn’t a thing, but both begin to look like the things they bring together. Master, 115
“Clarity is bought at the price of limitation.” Master, 181
The left hemisphere can support only a mechanistic view of the world, with the result that it sees the workings of the right hemisphere as incompatible, antagonistic, and a threat. Master, 206