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The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
McGilchrist, Iain

Preface to the New Expanded Edition
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we need to think much more in terms of widely distributed networks, rather than, as we used to do, primarily in terms of ‘modules’.
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The hemispheres are vastly more connected within themselves than they are connected to one another,
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it provides a more or less convincing account of experience, and does not depend on scientific data one way or the other to carry that conviction. You take it or leave it, depending on whether it makes better sense of your experience than any competing model
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An enormous number of observations enormously varied in kind are all consistent with this theory, and many of them are consistent with no other theory that has been proposed. We therefore can and, if we are rational, must have an extremely high degree of confidence in the theory …6
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Even on sustained introspection, we can be only indirectly aware of the fact that reality is constructed from two incompatible world views.
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between a quarter and a third of children aged as old as five to seven are now having to be taught how to read the human face,
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If a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterise most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathise.
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the self-reinforcing, recursive nature of the left hemisphere’s world, a world subject to positive feedback.
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the left-hemisphere view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff. Its purpose is utility and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing ‘things’.
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finding the language to put across the way of being of the right hemisphere is simply harder than doing so for the naturally explicit left hemisphere.
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The left hemisphere relies on concatenations of serial propositions and the literal aspects of language to make meaning explicit; by contrast, metaphor and narrative are often required to convey the implicit meanings available to the right hemisphere, and
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We live in an era where articulating and making explicit are of increasing importance and are treated as a mark of truth, and their inverse treated with increasing suspicion.
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we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. Today all the available sources of intuitive life–the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art–have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us see intuitively beyond the hermetic world that the left hemisphere has set up has been largely drained from them.
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The right hemisphere’s view is inclusive, ‘both/ and’, synthetic, integrative; it realises the need for both. The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, ‘either/ or’, analytic and fragmentary–but, crucially, unaware of what it is missing. It therefore thinks it can go it alone.
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when, as in our society, our thinking is no longer embodied in the practices, traditions and rituals of a community, but is developed in explicit, public, often political debate, where much of its subtlety, and tolerance of necessary ambiguity, gets lost.
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if we are to survive, we need not just a few new measures, but a complete change of heart and mind.
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the left hemisphere’s vision of a mechanistic world, an atomistic society, a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines
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as Henry Thoreau put it, ‘The question is not what you look at, but what you see.’ 8
Part One   The Divided Brain
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The right hemisphere, with its greater integrative power, is constantly searching for patterns in things. In fact its understanding is based on complex pattern recognition.