ROSALIND PEARMAIN challenges our current worldview on research methodology, and the relative importance of left-brain and right-brain processes in human understanding and consciousness studies. She references the ground-breaking work of Iain McGilchrist, whose thesis has debunked the old paradigms of the human brain.
We may not all be creating sophisticated experimental designs and calculating how significant results might be, yet each of us encounters new situations each day with our family, colleagues, organizations, and communities. We bring our understanding and our hypotheses, and we modify them as they may be challenged or altered by the response of others.
We keep learning. Life gives us many opportunities to re-search, and to challenge outworn assumptions, not least the kind of unknowns we have faced through the pandemic.
For most of my life, I have been curious about the realms of experiencing, feeling, the non-verbal, and the implicit realms of knowledge. How do we understand the different qualities felt in the presence of women? What elements contribute to change in experiential learning and groups? How does attending sensitively to the relational process support therapeutic change? What is so transformative for young people about some summer school programs? How does meditation contribute to change and growth?
When we hear music, dance, spend time in nature, and meditate, we find ourselves in a flow of feeling alive that is immediate and meaningful. Yet somehow, all this subjective experience is often missing from the way we value knowledge.
On one level, they are felt and known realities, which we can describe and name. They are also vital in the field of psychotherapeutic learning and training. On another level, they are perceived as occupying a zone of impressionistic and unreliable qualitative feeling. Our culture prefers to make “things” out of experiences, and apply measures and models very fast.
When we hear music,
dance, spend time in nature, and meditate,
we
find ourselves in a flow of feeling alive
that is immediate and
meaningful.
So, I would like to introduce you to the extraordinary work of Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, and previously Professor of Literature at Oxford University. He has spent the last 10 years writing a 3-volume work illuminating this dilemma. It is based on an earlier book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.1
His research is based on various sources and disciplines, including the observation of patients with injuries to either hemisphere of the brain. It is also founded on very wide scholarship. His book is an inquiry into the asymmetry of the brain, and the differences between left and right hemispheres that occur not only in humans but other species, such as birds. He dismisses the simplistic, outdated, and popular notions of this asymmetry from the 1960s. He observes how birds need to keep part of their attention on finding small seeds in a small area, while at the same time keeping their awareness vigilant and broad to spot possible threats, mates, or other environmental occurrences.
This kind of distinction is also true for us. There is a purpose in having two hemispheres. Both are needed:
“Both attend to the world and bring the world into being for us in two largely opposing ways; the left hemisphere paying narrowly targeted attention to a detail that we need to manipulate; the right hemisphere paying broad, open, sustained, vigilant, uncommitted attention to the rest of the world while we focus on our desired detail. This means that each hemisphere brings into being a world that has different qualities. In the case of the left hemisphere, a world of things that are familiar, certain, fixed, isolated, explicit, abstracted from context, disembodied, general in nature, quantifiable, known by their parts, and inanimate. In the case of the right hemisphere, a world of Gestalten, forms, and processes that are never reducible to the already known or certain, never accounted for by dissolution into parts, but always understood as wholes that both incorporate and are incorporated into other wholes, unique, always changing and flowing, interconnected, implicit, understood only in context, embodied, and animate. The left hemisphere is a world of atomistic elements; the right hemisphere one of relationships. Most importantly the world of the right hemisphere is the world that presences to us, that of the left hemisphere a re-presentation: the left hemisphere a map, the right hemisphere the world of experience that is mapped.”2
McGilchrist has undertaken this project from both historical and current observations, and from a concern that our culture appears to be increasingly imbalanced towards the left hemispheric sphere of bringing reality into being. The left hemisphere is a closed system not functioning in present time. It is valuable in helping us grasp tools, make maps, and find words. It represents elements as fragments and parts, and tends towards a decontextualized and abstract kind of machine model of experience, which facilitates our manipulation of the world and our stress on technical approaches. It tends toward an absolute right or wrong mode of knowing something.
“The left hemisphere is principally concerned with manipulation of the world. The left hemisphere deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground and easily grasped.”3
However, it is the right hemisphere that presents us with the relational, embodied, pre-conceptual, changing, empathic and present-time holistic grasp of reality, which is more fluid.
“The right hemisphere is concerned with the whole picture, including the periphery or background and all that is not immediately graspable. It is essential for understanding the other’s point of view, essential for empathy. The right hemisphere is concerned with understanding the world as a whole, and how to relate to it.”4
He also says:
“I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather a re-presentation of it. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image; an infinitely thin, immobile fragment.”5
Consider here how often people express things as mathematical concepts, with computer analogies, or as algorithms.
Most spiritual traditions and approaches to meditation have techniques to help us suspend or ignore some of the left hemispheric processes of categorizing and applying maps to experience. In different ways, they focus attention on the embodied and present moment elements of experience as it unfolds and flows, such as breathing or a following a specific focus in awareness.
McGilchrist suggests that the right hemispheric mode of knowing is more reliable than the left. He quotes Einstein who said that “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” He raises the question, “What if our society has forgotten this gift?“
Most essentially, McGilchrist proposes:
“It is true we can see the world only partially, but we still each see the world directly. It is not a re-presentation, but a real presence: there isn’t a wall between us and the world.
“The nature of the attention we bring to bear is of critical importance here. A maximally open, patient, and attentive response to whatever-it-is is better at disclosing or discerning reality than a response that is peremptory, insensitive, or – above all – shrouded in dogma.”6
“It [consciousness] is not fixable in space, or quantitative, but qualitative and experienced in the flow of time. And if things turn out to be interconnected, not atomistic – and they are – each consciousness has its impact on the universe that cannot be quantified. Within my experience of the world, very much can be changed by my response to whatever-it-is; in a sense everything can be changed.”7
What do I take from all this? A simple, humble, patient, open attention will help us be more encompassing in our understanding, and in our relating to each other and the world. Everything is more fluid and more interrelated than we can know, though we may feel it. And these perceptions are real and precious in our relation with each other and the world we hope to sustain and help flourish.
References:
1. The story that led to this title is this: Once a wise spiritual Master was a ruler of a country that flourished. As it flourished it grew and he needed to trust emissaries to act on his behalf in far flung regions. Eventually, one of these decided to advance himself instead of representing the Master. He saw his master’s tolerance as weakness not wisdom and became contemptuous of him. In this way the Master was overcome by his emissary. People were tricked, the country became a tyranny, and eventually it fell apart in ruins.
2. McGilchrist, I., 2021. Consciousness as Relational,Science of Consciousness.Essentia Foundation.
3. McGilchrist, I., 2021.The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Vol. 1.Perspectiva Press London
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid
6. McGilchrist, I., 2021. Consciousness as Relational, Science of Consciousness. Essentia Foundation.
7. McGilchrist, I., 2021. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Vol. 1. Perspectiva Press London
Illustrations by JASMEE MUDGAL
Rosalind Pearmain
Ros lives in Abingdon near Oxford, UK, and has worked with groups of all ages during her working life. She has always been interested in how we can change and transform. In recent years she has been teaching psychotherapy and qualitative... Read More
