Next up is Emotional and Social Intelligence in the left and right hemispheres, another fascinating subject. In fact, the whole book is a page-turner so far, which you probably can't say of too many 1,500 page books.
Like the previous chapter on Judgment, this one will be difficult to summarize, so maybe I'll just start with the summary at the end of the chapter, and then toss in some intriguing examples:
Social and emotional understanding are central to understanding all human situations. The evidence is that the RH is of critical importance for this, including the sense of reality itself.... The RH is superior at emotional expression and receptivity. It is important for understanding implicit meaning in all forms, including metaphor, and for reading faces and body language. It understands how context changes meaning.
Conversely, not only is the LH not very good at these things, it doesn't seem to know or care much about them. After all, if you don't notice something, it might as well not exist for you.
Remember, the LH gives us a representation of reality, not reality itself. It is reality once removed, which is not unimportant: just because a map isn't the territory, it doesn't mean maps are worthless. But just as you can't live in a map, you can't eat the menu or substitute a college diploma for a brain.
The whole point of the Wizard of Oz is that the scarecrow actually possessed the thing itself which the diploma only signified. Nowadays we confer the symbol as if it signifies the thing itself, with the result that there are millions upon millions of credentialed idiots in charge of our lives.
Every day I meditate for half an hour. What am I actually doing during this verticalisthenic? Among other things, it looks like I'm suppressing the LH so the RH can come to the fore. I can't give myself a stroke in the LH, but McGilchrist describes cases in which excitation of the RH resulted in "illusions of greater awareness" or a "heightened sense of reality."
In any event, "damage to the LH is markedly less likely to cause distortions of reality than damage to the RH." Conversely, a sense of unreality is more likely to follow RH lesions.
But importantly, "it is absolutely not the case that the RH is 'emotional' and the LH 'cool' and rational," which is what I might have assumed before reading this book. Anger and irritability in particular strongly lateralise to the left. Sadness and melancholy are more associated with the RH, but these can be wholly appropriate:
A capacity for sadness is highly correlated with a capacity for empathy; and those who lack empathy, such as psychopaths, have difficulty recognizing expressions of sadness in face or voice.... a capacity for sadness and empathy together is necessary in order to experience the socially vital feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility.
Makes you wonder about politicians, who are so conspicuously lacking in guilt, shame, and responsibility.
McGilchrist saddles up on one of my favorite bobbyhorses, intersubjectivity, citing research that it is "largely dependent" on "RH resources."
As I've written before, it doesn't matter how big our brains are if we aren't intersubjective, which is to say, members of one another, so to speak. Absent this there is no way for culture to exist, or anything beyond the atomistic individual. Intersubjectivity is the interior-to-interior linking and interpenetration of subjects. Without it we'd all be politicians.
What else... As somewhat of an aside, it is noteworthy that a photograph of a Rachel Levine or a Lia Thomas fools no one, in that the right brain knows instantaneously that
Also conspicuously absent is a sense of humor, even though what's funnier than some dude pretending to be a woman dressed up as an admiral? Why hasn't Corporal Klinger been cancelled? In my day, we used to laugh at female East German Olympic athletes with hairy backs and fists the size of mature hams.
It is the RH that understands the emotional or the humorous aspect of a narrative; it is also better able to understand irony and sarcasm.... There is a large literature showing that the RH is crucial for appreciation of cartoons, jokes and humour of every kind, and that damage to the RH impairs all forms of humour comprehension and generation.
Reminds me of how the left cannot tell when Trump is joking, and then freaks out over its own misunderstandings. Indeed, "RH-damaged patients find it hard to tell the difference between jokes and lies."
And they have no idea how to deal with an Admiral Levine, who is both a joke and a lie.
There’s a lot more to this chapter, so we may need a part 2 tomorrow.
30 comments:
I remember Victor Davis Hanson said something about how the left does not take Trump seriously, but they do take him literally; while the right does take him seriously, but don't take him literally.
That summed it up well for me, as I found him a hoot most of time. But I also knew there was something good mostly coming out in that veneer - whether intentional or not.
That's exactly what I was thinking. There's a section on the literalism of the LH, which I suppose we'll get to tomorrow.
I was just thinking that the book set me back about 80 bucks, but it's going to provide me with weeks of entertainment, so I guess it's a bargain looked at that way.
I see the Kindle is only $39.95, but that format doesn't work for me, since it's too hard to flip around back & forth as with a book.
The recent posts bring to mind a key insight from Chesterton: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
Spending that kind of money on a good book is always going to be bargain since it's enduring. You can just as easily spend that on a good meal that lasts a couple hours at best.
Randy: McGilchrist actually references that quote in the chapter on judgment, on how the LH can reason but doesn't understand the limits of reason.
Godel's theorems are obvious to the RH but not to the LH.
a photograph of a Rachel Levine or a Lia Thomas fools no one
There's a Twitter feed that was linked at Ace's earlier this week, Males in Disguise. I don't recommend it unless you have a strong stomach or a desire to look at trainwrecks, but the entire point is to demonstrate how nobody is fooled - including the men themselves, since if they were actually women they wouldn't have to draw any attention to that fact whatsoever.
Re. the literalism and lack of humor, it also reminds of how both atheists and fundamentalists tend to read the Bible as completely literal. As a result, they only see the surface and miss out on all the depth and life contained therein. There's a lot of humor in there, but it is rare for people to notice - partly because it gets lost in translation, and partly because they would miss it anyway. Heaven forbid there be any levity in salvation!
I'm getting into the chapter on creativity, and the book just keeps getting better. As you might have guessed by now, the RH is heavily involved. But for you painters out there, there's also this nugget:
"Many elements to be found in modern art are, in fact, strikingly similar to distortions experienced in right hemisphere damage."
I think I mentioned that RH damage can cause the LH to perceive faces as cubist paintings. But the LH blames the person for looking like a cubist painting, like "wow, you've really let yourself go!"
Makes sense about the modern art. Does he mention pareidolia in that section? I find whenever I have a few moments in a place with certain kinds of patterns or marbled textures that it's fun to pick out faces and figures, which of course aren't actually there. We had a marble-patterned wallpaper in the bathroom in the house where I grew up; the walls practically contained a whole cast of characters.
If it's a neurological quirk, I'm sure he'll get to it.
I did once have a PTSD patient from the Iraq war who would start seeing malevolent patterns when in bed staring at the ceiling, but drawing them would make it stop.
We used to have cottage cheese ceilings, and I'd see all sorts of stuff in them.
That's interesting. Sometimes when I'm getting tired but not actually falling asleep and my mind wanders, there'll be all kinds of weird dream-like imagery and trains of thought, most of which I have no idea where it came from. Not malevolent, but certainly curious.
We still have the popcorn/ cottage cheese ceiling in our room. If you relax your eyes, it's almost like one of those 3-d illusion patterns, where there appears to be more depth than there is.
At the other end, I remember a patient who was having a severe panic attack, and who tried to hold on to reality by sitting on the curb and staring intently at the ants wandering by. She felt that if she let go of the ants, she'd fall into the abyss.
I love trying to hold on to that liminal state between consciousness and sleep, when the hypnogogic images start to appear.
Some people have speculated that the paleolithic cave paintings were drawn on the alternatively convex or concave surface because the flickering candlelight makes them look like they're alive and moving.
Early movies.
He cites not only numerous painters whose work improved after LH damage, but people who suddenly developed artistic ability with no prior training or aptitude. Weird.
Re: limits of reason, this is why I am curious how the RH/LH dichotomy dovetails with the analytic/continental divide. Eve Keneinan has observed that Kant tried to save reason from Hume's skepticism but at enormous cost, rather than having the good sense (sanity?) to issue a call back to classical thought. To me it should be obvious that analytic philosophy is severely limited and that continental philosophy has degenerated into postmodernism/Wokeism. Never too late to turn back the clock, folks!
I think volume 2 gets more into the philosophical implications, while this volume focuses more on the neurology.
Randy: classical philosophy was mostly rejected by people who had no intimate familiarity with it, so it was never controverted, much less understood. One wonders how many volumes of the Summa were circulating around Europe to begin with before the revival of Thomism in the late 19th century.
Ugh - speaking of humorlessness and art, this evening's Quick Hits post features a bunch of feminist comics. To the surprise of nobody who hasn't slept through the past couple of decades, the comics are almost always about periods. Nobody even has to look past the cover to know that it is profoundly ugly and unfunny. Also all about "starting a conversation."
I can't think of a single time in my life where I have wanted to "start a conversation" with an unwilling participant about a subject people don't normally want to discuss with unsuspecting strangers.
We need to have a conversation about the left constantly wanting to start oneway conversations.
One of the ways the LH had gotten the upper hand on us today, had been through the Very LH minded flow-charty concoction of 'Critical Thinking' in the 1940s (by one of John Dewey's supporters, Edward Glaser), to replace the full minded approach of Reasoning. Doesn't it seem odd that as 'Critical Thinking' has increased in popularity, the quality of our thinking has plummeted? Anyone...? Buehler...?
Critical thinking today only critiques thinking but not thinking about thinking. Or other words, the deeper assumptions that allows thinking to cohere or not.
If say that 'Critical Thinking', both today and as it was first designed and introduced in the 1940s, is not concerned with thinking (reasoning) at all, it was and is concerned with calculating - and with excluding those variables that might lead to answers that CT is unconcerned with. As it was put in a fellow pioneer, in Bloom's 'Taxonomy of Educational Objectives', which has been teaching teachers since the 1950s that students will only be able to engage in the higher order thinking of 'Critical Thinking', once: "...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong".
That's how the LH goes about getting the upper hand on the RH.
Post a Comment