Neuro-Enemies to the Left of Me

I want to try to wrap up our review of emotional & social intelligence before moving on to cognitive intelligence. 

One interesting finding is that the RH is responsible for a sense of flow and temporal interconnectedness, so damage there can result in literally losing the plot: "when it tries to re-tell a narrative," the isolated LH

lacks concreteness and specificity in its relation to the story, and becomes abstract and generic; and it gets time sequences wrong, conflating episodes in the story because they look similar.... In place of narrative, it produces a highly abstract and disjointed meta-narrative. 

Like our gaslighting state run media-academic complex.  

In reading this stuff, it is indeed a temptation to reach for the low-hanging fruitcakes and immediately apply it to our enemies. But just because progressives have lost the plot, it doesn't mean they all have RH brain damage.

Geez, don't take me so literally. Makes you sound like you had an RH stroke this morning.

I'm trying to think back on what was going on in my brain when I was an adultolescent man of the left. Granted, the left wasn't as crazy back then as it is now, but I still believed in some wacky precursors to today's fractured plot lines -- for example, I read the odious Howard Zinn with approval, and you can draw a straight crooked line between him and, say, the 1619 Project, CRT, White Privilege, et al.

It's not as if I suffered an RH stroke in the 1980s from which I've since recovered. But I think I'll hold off on the speculative auto-proctology for the moment. We'll have plenty of time for reflection once we get the neurology out of the way. 

In any event, the LH does have "difficulty in telling fantasy from reality, theory from fact," and when it "doesn't understand, it doesn't seem aware of the fact."

More generally,

the RH becomes involved as complexity of contextual understanding increases; indeed, the harder it is, in general, to interpret a sentence, the more the RH homologues of the LH language areas are recruited.

Lots of stuff in here about how music "is the primordial form of expression in the RH," and once again I can't help thinking about how awful contemporary popular music has become, and whether this has something to do with a mass suppression and underdevelopment of the RH. Do they even teach music in school anymore, or is it all LH indoctrination all the time?

It's the same with poetry, BTW: it's an RH speciality. Which then makes me think of that embarrassingly awful -- but confident -- young poet Brandon trotted out at his inauguration. 

You get the point. On to Cognitive Intelligence, another reality denied by the academic left. Indeed, the first thing that struck me about this chapter is that McGilchrist fearlessly cites intelligence researchers such as Linda Gottfredson and Arthur Jensen that is sufficient to get oneself cancelled. 

Just look at the hysterical SPLC page on Gottfredson (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/linda-gottfredson):

Following a long tradition of scientific racism, Gottfredson argues that racial inequality, especially in employment, is the direct result of genetic racial differences in intelligence. Relying heavily on money obtained from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole.

Since the science is settled that genetic differences exist, it is racist to believe in the science. Perhaps it's not this way over in the UK, where McGilchrist lives, since he cites these Forbidden Names as if he doesn't know they're radioactive.

As usual, I think I'll begin at the end, with the chapter summary: 

Evidence from a number of sources suggests that the RH contributes the majority, not just of emotional and social intelligence, but of what is ordinarily meant by [IQ] -- cognitive power, or g. This appears to be particularly true among children and adults of the highest intelligence.

Now, the more people who attend college, the more the population of the highly intelligent is diluted, which makes me think this isn't a bug but a feature. Heather MacDonald has an excellent new book called When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, and I wonder what the low IQ hysterics at the SPLC say about her?

McGilchrist discusses the vast differences between "crystalized" and "fluid" intelligence, and as you can probably guess by now, the latter is more of an RH specialty, and indeed, has more to do with what we think of as intelligence per se: "Clearly, people with high scores on fluid intelligence will tend to do better, and to work faster..." It is less culture-bound because more adaptive to novelty.

We all know people who are quick on the uptake. And we all know people who radiate stupidity, even if they are in positions of authority. It's not hard to tell the difference. For us at any rate. 

But imagine what it must be like to be unable to instantaneously discern the intellectual difference between, say, Tucker Carlson and Anderson Cooper, or Dennis Prager and Rachel Maddow, or Don Lemon and Ben Shapiro. Most people genuinely can't tell. They are enclosed in Dunning-Kruger.

"Human intelligence is not like machine intelligence," for it "is essentially Gestalt and not digital." Obviously it's always both. For example, my airline pilot friend has a lot of "digital" intelligence about flying, which he would be able to draw on in a novel situation, in an emergency. I might have good fluid intelligence, but with nothing for it to draw on, the plane is going down.

following familiar procedures is something that requires no intelligence and can be done by a machine. It is the novel problem solving, involving a combination of analogic thinking and going beyond learnt procedures, that should be measured.

You get the point. McGilchrist does highight a seeming cultural drift in a direction that rewards decontextualized thinking and a scientistic worldview. A Note to Bobself in the margin says "loss of religious comprehension," but you folks are so quick on the uptake that there's no need for me to spell it out to you. I don't want to insult your fluid RH intelligence. You're not Rachel Maddow.