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In a recent interview, British psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher Iain Gilchrist explained the differences in the way that the left and right hemispheres of the brain process information.
The right hemisphere is designed to be the master over the left. However, with the prevailing scientism narrative, the left hemisphere has usurped the master.
In the West, left hemisphere-dominant thinking has had a profound impact on all of us. We have become very good at seeing the parts but have completely lost sight of the whole.
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Paul Kingsnorth’s book ‘Against The Machine’ is due to be published in September 2025. The book is an account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. “From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, this book shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game – and how our very soul is now at stake. Against the Machine is the spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age,” a synopsis of the book notes.
In the lead-up to the release of his new book, Kingsnorth has started a new podcast miniseries. “Each Tuesday, from now until publication day, I’ll be releasing a new episode in which I am in conversation with interesting people about the themes of my book. Depending on time, inclination and the state of my health, there may be more episodes after publication too. We’ll see. Each episode will be free to view, both here and on my YouTube channel,” Kingsnorth wrote when introducing his new podcast series, ‘The Machine Sessions’.
In the first of his podcast series, Kingsnorth interviewed Iain McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, literary scholar and the author of ‘The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World‘, and more recently the epic ‘The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.’
During the podcast, the two men discussed the left-right brain distinction and what it means, ask whether the Western world is mentally ill, talk about the importance of the Four Ps (past, people, place and prayer), and look at how we can begin to free ourselves from thinking and seeing like machines.
McGilchrist began by explaining that the brain is structured as two hemispheres, two almost entirely separate masses. Research on brain hemisphere differences has been ongoing for 30 years, but some research has been “fairly crude” and most of the conclusions about the hemisphere differences were “entirely wrong,” he said.
Previous misconceptions about hemisphere differences, such as the left hemisphere being rational and linguistic and the right hemisphere being “airy-fairy” and uninterested in language, have been proven wrong, as both hemispheres are involved in reason, language, emotions, and visual-spatial understanding.
The two brain hemispheres have different attention styles. So, the correct approach to understanding hemisphere differences is to ask how they attend to the world, McGilchrist said.
The left hemisphere pays attention to a tiny part of the environment to grasp and manipulate it. The left hemisphere’s attention style is focused on particularising and detailed attention on a minute detail, allowing it to grab and get what it wants.
The brain’s asymmetrical structure and hemisphere differences are not unique to humans, as many animals have similarly divided and asymmetrical brains, with one hemisphere focused on grabbing and getting.
“All the animals that we’ve looked at have this strange arrangement that their brains, however primitive, are divided, asymmetrical, and that one of the hemispheres is interested in grabbing and getting. And this has generally been the left, and it certainly is in human beings. So, the left hemisphere pays attention to a tiny part of the environment, something that it wants to pick up and eat, something it wants to pick up to build a nest, something it wants to manipulate. So, it’s there to manipulate and exploit the world,” McGilchrist explained.
He continued: “But if that’s the only kind of attention it [the brain] can pay, it won’t last because while it’s getting its lunch, it’ll become somebody else’s. So, there has to be another part, another centre, another locus of consciousness that is capable of seeing quite differently, attending to the world differently.
“Whereas in the right hemisphere, it sees the whole complexity of the lived world. That nothing is ever finally certain, ever finally fixed, but always in motion. That everything is ultimately interconnected, that its meaning comes from the context, the other things that it’s connected to, that it is a fully embodied world, not just an abstract one made up of concepts. and that the world is alive and, very importantly, it has meaning from the things that lose their meaning when they’re made explicit. And these are just about everything that matters to us. Among them is love, sex, poetry, music, architecture, art, religion, ritual, narrative, myth, faith.”
To sum up: The brain has two different ways of attending to the world, one for manipulating and exploiting the environment, and another for seeing the world in a more holistic and interconnected way, which is necessary for survival, as relying solely on the former would lead to becoming someone else’s prey.
The left hemisphere of the brain sees the world as made up of discrete, detailed and explicit bits, whereas the right hemisphere sees the world as a complex, interconnected and embodied whole, with meaning derived from context and relationships. The brain alternates between these two visions rapidly and below the level of consciousness, allowing for effective action, McGilchrist said. “These two [ways of attending to the world] work together in a fruitful relationship in which the right hemisphere oversees the whole and the left hemisphere does a lot of the donkey work.” The right hemisphere, the one that can see the whole, is designed to be the master and the left hemisphere, the one that’s very good at picking apart the details, is supposed to be the emissary.
In societies, a balance between the two different types of attention of the two hemispheres can lead to flourishing in various fields, including science, art and music. However, as civilisations grow and become more complex (as we are witnessing with the idea of a global society made possible by the internet, for example), the left hemisphere can become emboldened by the idea of control, leading to the development of bureaucratic machines that lack subtlety and prioritise control over holistic understanding.
As Kingsnorth noted, in modern Western society, the emissary has usurped the master, resulting in a focus on seeing the parts rather than the whole, leading to a loss of depth in space, time and emotion. “So, effectively, we’re in a position now where we have become very, very good at seeing the parts and we’ve completely lost sight of the whole. And that’s the kind of cultural tragedy that we’re kind of living in at the moment.”
McGilchrist agreed, adding that he left hemisphere’s inability to see depth is a significant issue, as it only sees two-dimensional representations of what the right hemisphere sees as three-dimensional living entities with depth in space, time and emotion.
McGilchrist suggested that the inability of a society to understand things deeply is a result of society becoming very large and employing the left hemisphere too much, leading to a loss of social richness and individuality. A society that thinks in a left hemisphere way, understands generalities but not unique cases; people who think in this way can only superficially understand things. The left hemisphere’s inability to understand the unique case has significant implications for how society functions and how individuals are treated.
The left hemisphere of the brain values power and control, whereas the right hemisphere is better at understanding truth, beauty and goodness (meaning a disposition of the heart), making it a better guide to truth, McGilchrist said.
An example of the manifestation of a left hemisphere-dominated world can be seen in scientific materialism. Scientific materialism is a philosophical stance that posits the physical world as the only reality, asserting that all phenomena, including consciousness and mental states, are ultimately the result of material interactions. This belief system, which became dominant in science during the late 19th century, holds that matter is unconscious, evolution is purposeless and consciousness is a by-product of brain activity. It is often described as a form of reductive materialism, where complex phenomena are explained by reducing them to the interactions of their physical components.
It’s not clear which happens first, a shift to the left hemisphere or a cultural shift. “The brain adapts to the culture it’s in and the culture adapts to the way the brain is responding. So, there is a constant two-way relationship between the brain and culture. Neither one having primacy overall, being causative of the other,” McGilchrist said.
“Whatever the exact reason, we’ve somehow managed to back ourselves into a culture that is hugely left hemisphere-dominant. And, therefore, has created a technological and a political infrastructure that is almost entirely designed to take the world apart and then, as you say, basically exhibit power over it. Because the way that the scientific mindset in the West seems to proceed now, certainly the scientific materialist mindset, is effectively a manifestation of questing for knowledge so that we can use the knowledge for power; so that we can use the power to further dominate the ecosystem and further effectively chop up the world,” Kingsnorth said.
Kingsnorth continued: The end point of this technological advancement is the kind of fever dreams of Silicon Valley, where people talk about conquering death, uploading minds into the cloud and terraforming Mars. “Which is a kind of, it sounds very often to me, like a form of mental illness disguised as a kind of political aim”, he said.
McGilchrist didn’t go as far as labelling people whose left hemisphere is dominating as having a mental illness, preferring to use the term “mental disturbance.”
“[Mental illness is] a phrase that is neat and apt in the sense that I do think we are not fulfilling our purpose, we’re not thriving. We are, in fact, in the process of destroying ourselves, and people who attack themselves and commit suicide are usually considered to have a mental disturbance,” he said.
McGilchrist has often answered the question of what the world would look like if the right hemisphere of the brain were not functioning. “It would look just like the one, basically, that we’re in – on a whole set of 20 or 30 points,” he said.
The problem with the current state of society is that it prioritises the things that the left hemisphere can apprehend, which are easily measurable and defined, over the things that the right hemisphere can comprehend, such as the bigger picture, art and human love, which are not easily defined or bullet-pointed.
Because the right hemisphere of the brain has capabilities that are not easily defined or measured, making it difficult to quantify and study, its importance is dismissed by scientific materialists who view these aspects as unimportant or “airy-fairy.”
The right hemisphere is still capable of functioning, but its value is not being utilised, much like a radio channel that is still broadcasting but not being picked up, McGilchrist said. Recovering its value could bring about significant changes.
“Death is not the opposite of life. The opposite of life is ‘the machine’,” McGilchrist said. This is an important distinction to bear in mind as it highlights the difference between living beings and mechanical systems.
Further reading: The Cross and the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, First Things, 1 June 2021
McGilchrist’s criticism is not directed at science itself but rather at scientism, the belief that science can answer all questions and that there is only matter which, it says, has nothing to do with consciousness.
You can listen to Kingsnorth and McGilchrist’s discussion below.
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Psychiatry is from the pit of hell.