Introduction
Page 10
...we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes.
Page 11
...the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.
Page 11
...while we have succeeded in coercing the world to our will to an extent unimaginable even a few generations ago, we have at the same time wrought havoc on that world precisely because we have not understood it.
Page 12
...the status quo: the scientists telling the philosophers that they find only machinery, and the philosophers reflecting back to the scientists that a mechanistic view is the best option on offer. Since what you find is a product of how you attend, this is a more or less pointless exercise in making sure that both parties sink to the bottom in the shortest possible time.
Page 13
...At the core of the contemporary world is the reductionist view that we are–nature is–the earth is–‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility.
Page 16
...Reductionism envisages a universe of things–and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with.
Page 16
...what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions. I
Page 18
...order is not a special case of randomness, but randomness merely the limit case of order, which is the universal norm. Indeed, true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist.
Page 18
...complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling as simple
Page 18
...Potential is not simply all the things that never happened, a ghostly penumbra around the actual. The actual is the limit case of the potential, which is equally real; the one into which it collapses out of the many, as the particle is the collapse of a quantum field.
Page 19
...Linearity is the limit case of nonlinearity, and can be approximated only by taking ever narrower views of an infinitely complex picture.
Page 21
...There is an infinitely vast, complex, multifaceted, whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves. The only world that any of us can know, then, is what comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us and this whatever-it-is.
Page 22
...our world is what comes into being in the encounter between us and this whatever-it-is.
Page 22
...what we experience is not just an image of a world 'outside', some sort of projection on the walls of a Cartesian theatre inside our heads, and watched by an intracerebral homunculus on an intracerebral sofa. As I will explain, such a viewpoint could be predicted to arise from the left hemisphere’s attempt to deal with a reality it does not understand, and for which everything is a representation.
Page 25
...The experience of understanding involves a shift from what seems initially chaotic or formless, to a coherent stable form or picture, a Gestalt–or from an existing Gestalt to a new and better one, that seems richer than the one it replaces.
Page 25
...What if the music is not Mozart, but something more like some sublime jazz, or an Indian raga or Portuguese fado? Something we improvise—within bounds. Whatever it is will emerge from a balance of freedom and constraint. It won't exist until it is being performed: no-one can know exactly what it will be like. But it will not be random: it will emerge from the players’ continuous interaction, and from the music's own 'history': imagination, skill and training we bring, our past experience of playing (together and apart), the conventions of certain traditions, and shared expectations, quite apart from the fundamental laws of acoustics. Our co-creation of the music does not occur ex nihilo, and is not just a projection of ourselves. Yet we, and you, partake of its making, even if we are only listeners.
Page 26
...Music happens to be a very clear case of how what we take to be a thing emerges from a complex of relationships, both those between notes and those between individual consciousnesses. But all our experience, not just in music but in life, both mental and physical, is of such a complex flow, a constantly unfolding, responsive dance of reciprocal gestures.
Page 28
...An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere.
Page 28
...apophatic [involving the practice of describing something by stating which characteristics it does not have]
Page 30
...What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it–if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not.
Page 31
...To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.
Page 31
...The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is.
Page 32
...there is a world of difference between the two hemispheres: literally, since they give rise to two different experiential worlds.
Page 32
...he nature of the difference between the hemispheres is far from anything hitherto imagined, and that it fulfils an evolutionary purpose of the utmost importance. It is not a separation of reason from emotion, or language from visuo-spatial skills, or any of the other things that used to be said, since, indeed, each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything–just in a reliably different way.
Page 34
...there is one very important aspect of experience, right at its centre, that we are not aware of as experience unfolds, because awareness of it would bring life to a standstill. That is the fact that our experience is constantly synthesised from the divergent 'takes' on the world offered to us by each of our brain hemispheres.
Page 34
...the tension between phenomenologically different experiential worlds.
Page 37
...an organ that exists only to make connexions, and whose power lies, precisely, in the number of connexions it can make.
Page 37
...In birds and other animals studied, there is a highly significant separation of attention, with the left hemisphere being used largely for paying narrow-beam, sharply focussed attention to the world, for the purpose of manipulation, and the right hemisphere for paying open, sustained, vigilant attention to the world, in order to understand and relate to the bigger picture. The right is also the hemisphere with which creatures approach, appraise and ultimately bond with their mates.
Page 38
...Attention is not just another 'cognitive function': it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one's consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something—or don't attend to it—matters a very great deal.
Page 41
...The right hemisphere is not just vigilant in a somewhat passive way. It is constantly engaged in both sustaining coherence in the world and actively scanning the world. What may in some cases later become a target for the left hemisphere’s narrow focus will most probably have been first detected by the right hemisphere’s broad search. Though, as the seconds pass, there is a tendency to shift towards more focal investigation of details initially revealed by the right hemisphere's overview
Page 44
...According to our left hemisphere, reality should be independent of our observation. It is seen as a collection of things 'out there'—things that are effectively inert, unless moved mechanically, since they have no inner life of their own, and they are not involved with ours. Our life merely enables us to observe them in a detached way (the more detached the better, because then our observations are not contaminated by any input from us). Reality should certainly not be to any degree a product of the imagination, since imagination means—surely?—that we are deceived. But what if, as our right hemisphere can more readily detect, it were not an essentially lifeless assemblage of things, but a constantly self-creating process? What if imagination was essential to the process of understanding—including, importantly, scientific understanding?
Page 44
...The hemispheres differ in size, weight, shape, 43 sulcal-gyral pattern (the convolutions on the cortical surface), neuronal number, cytoarchitecture (the structure at the cellular level), neuronal cell size, dendritic tree features, grey to white matter ratio, response to neuroendocrine hormones and degree of reliance on different neurotransmitters.
Page 48
...The LH is principally concerned with manipulation of the world; the RH with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it. The LH deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and easily grasped; the RH with the whole picture, including the periphery or background, and all that is not immediately graspable. The importance of the global (RH)/ local (LH) distinction cannot be overstated. It is also extremely robust. 'Perhaps the most compelling distinction between local and global visual processing is the differential lateralisation in the brain'; 'evidence to support this hypothesis comes from a wealth of data'. The RH is on the lookout for, better at detecting and dealing with, whatever is new, the LH with what is familiar. VS Ramachandran calls the RH the 'devil’s advocate', since it acts as an 'anomaly detector', on the lookout for what might be erroneously assumed by the LH to be familiar. The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility. The RH is able to sustain ambiguity and the holding together of information that appears to have contrary implications, without having to make an 'either/ or' decision, and to collapse it, as the LH tends to do, in favour of one of them. In line with this, the style of the RH is altogether more circumspect than that of the LH, which tends to be less self-critical. The LH tends to see things as isolated, discrete, fragmentary, where the RH tends to see the whole. The LH tends to see things as put together mechanically from pieces, and sees the parts, rather than the complex union that the RH sees. The LH's world tends towards fixity and stasis, that of the RH towards change and flow. The LH tends to see things as explicit and decontextualised, whereas the RH tends to see them as implicit and embedded in a context. As a result, the LH largely fails to understand metaphor, myth, irony, tone of voice, jokes, humour more generally, and poetry, and tends to take things literally. There is a tendency for the LH to prefer the inanimate, the RH the animate. Machines and tools are alone coded in the LH, too, while the animate is coded by both hemispheres, though preferentially by the RH. The RH understands narrative. The LH, if offered a story whose episodes are taken out of order, tends to regroup them so as to classify similar episodes together, rather than reconstruct them in the order that has human meaning. Both hemispheres need to categorise, but do so according to different strategies. The LH tends to categorise using the presence or absence of a particular feature; the RH tends to do so by reference to unique exemplars, using what Wittgenstein called a 'family resemblance' approach—it sees the Gestalt. More general categories are dealt with preferentially by the LH, more fine-grained ones, as one approaches more closely uniqueness, by the RH. Damage to the RH can lead to a loss of the sense of uniqueness or the capacity to recognise individuals altogether. The RH contains the 'body image' (this is a slightly misleading neuropsychological term which refers not just to a visual image, but to a multimodal schema of the body as a whole). The LH tends to focus on parts—arms, legs and so on—out of which the body must then be constructed. The RH tends to process in a more embodied, less abstract fashion than the LH. The RH is also superior at reading body language and emotion expressed in the face or voice. The LH is superior for fine analytic sequencing and has a larger linguistic vocabulary and more complex syntax than the RH. Pragmatics, the ability to understand the overall import of an utterance in context, is, however, a RH function. Understanding prosody, the musical aspect of language, its tone, inflection, etc, depends to a very large extent on the RH. For most of us, music is very largely the province of the RH, the LH dealing only with simple rhythms. The RH is essential for 'theory of mind': that is to say that it is better able to understand another's point of view. The RH is essential for empathy. In very general terms, both emotional receptivity and expressivity are greater in the RH. The RH is better at seeing things as they are pre-conceptually—fresh, unique, embodied, and as they 'presence' to us, or first come into being for us. The LH, then, sees things as they are 're-presented', literally 'present again' after the fact, as already familiar abstractions or signs. One could say that the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience; the LH that of the map, the RH that of the terrain. The LH is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The RH is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic.
Page 51
...just an arbitrary number of attempts to give different sidelights on two distinct, entirely coherent versions of the world.
Page 52
...the left hemisphere view, is of a world composed of static, isolated, fragmentary elements that can be manipulated easily, are decontextualised, abstracted, detached, disembodied, mechanical, relatively uncomplicated by issues of beauty and morality (except in a consequentialist sense) and relatively untroubled by the complexity of empathy, emotion and human significance. They are put together, like brick on brick to build a wall, so as to reach conclusions that are taken to be unimpeachable. It is an inanimate universe—and a bureaucrat's dream. There is an excess of confidence and a lack of insight. This world is useful for purposes of manipulation, but is not a helpful guide to understanding the nature of what it encounters. Its use is local and for the short term.
Page 52
...In the other (the right hemisphere version), as in the world the map represents, and in the world revealed to us by physics, by poetry, and simply by the business of living, things are almost infinitely more complex. Nothing is clearly the same as anything else. All is flowing and changing, provisional, and complexly interconnected with everything else. Nothing is ever static, detached from our awareness of it, or disembodied; and everything needs to be understood in context, where, if it is not to be denatured, it must remain implicit. Here, wholes are different from the sum of the parts, and beauty and morality, along with empathy and emotional depth, help us to intuit meaning that lies beyond the banality of the familiar and everyday. It is an animate universe—and a bureaucrat's nightmare. This is a world from which we cannot detach ourselves, since we are part of it and affect it by our relationship with it. The overall timbre is sober and tentative. This world is truer to what is, but is harder to comprehend and to express in language, and less useful for practical issues that are local and short-term. On the other hand, for a broader or longer-term understanding the right hemisphere is essential.
Page 59
...there are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.
Page 63
...Evolution has taken care to preserve, and even to intensify, the division of the brain, this organ whose whole purpose is to connect. The hemispheres differ in their structure and function at every level.
Page 66
...a strong phenomenological sense of two coexisting streams of consciousness.
Page 66
... the two disconnected hemispheres function independently and in effect have each a separate mind of its own. Each of the separated hemispheres appears to have its own private sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories. Each hemisphere has its own inner visual world, each cut off from the conscious awareness of the other.
Page 71
...The secret of progress is the speculative interest in abstract schemes of morphology. 'Abstract schemes of morphology': all advances in science are made by observing patterns, by using metaphors and formal analogies. And, if we wanted examples, we have them at the highest level: Darwin in biology, Freud in psychology and Bohr in physics spring to mind. Not observing patterns would be like trying to understand the famous picture of the Dalmatian dog by refusing to go 'beyond' the given dots and splashes. Seeing the dog requires a functioning right hemisphere. The left hemisphere thinks locally, one dot at a time, and gets—nowhere.
Page 72
...I believe our own culture is unbalanced in the degree to which the left hemisphere's take predominates. And, unfortunately, the left hemisphere is decidedly imperceptive—and so is unaware there is a problem.
Page 80
...Our dominant value–sometimes I fear our only value–has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. The whole point of its knowing is, simply, the better to control:
THE WAYS TO TRUTH
1. Some preliminaries: how we got here
Page 91
...marsupials (effectively kangaroos, wallabies and opossums) and monotremes (egg-laying mammals, like the echidna and platypus) do not have a corpus callosum,
Page 100
...what is the frontal cortex for? Largely for stopping things happening.
Page 104
...As the brain grew larger, physical constraints on size required interhemispheric communication to be more selective, and hence impelled intrahemispheric specialisation in higher cognitive functions.
2. Attention
Page 106
...right hemisphere stroke patients were asked, it was loss of empathy. Almost half of carers for those with right hemisphere stroke reported as among the most important problems a whole range of cognitive and emotional impairments, as well as alterations to personality.
Page 107
...For those with left hemisphere damage, they and their world were recognisably the same: it was their ability to handle it, to make use of it, that had altered.
Page 122
...the right hemisphere integrates, while the left hemisphere fragments.
19. Intuition, imagination and the unveiling of the world
Page 1171 REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the type of sleep which occurs several times a night, typically in 90-minute bursts, during which one dreams. 'Aha' moments commonly follow REM sleep. It has been suggested by Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard who specialises in the study of sleep and dreaming, that sleep has many functions. Sleep, just like waking, she says, is not just for one thing, but for everything. And she proposes that one function of REM sleep is problem-solving. Dreams help us see things anew, so as to see solutions that aren’t apparent to our conscious minds. During this phase of sleep, the logical mind retires—in particular, the control normally exerted by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is relinquished; the posterior visual cortex is hyperactive; the body and its emotions are engaged. Ideal conditions for trying out intuitive solutions to a problem, as she suggests. And one reason for believing she is likely to be right is something that has puzzled me since medical school: paralysis while dreaming. For this abdication of control by the frontal cortex, which is effectively what happens in dreaming, is all very well, provided the body—its own feelings, memory and intuition engaged—is not going to act on what it intuits immediately, while conscious inhibition is switched off. And, guess what? Nature has thought of that. During REM sleep you are paralysed (as are other mammals, and birds, the only other classes we know from EEG traces to have REM sleep—birds and mammals also happen to be nature's principal problem-solvers). There is also some evidence that the right hemisphere is dominant throughout sleep. From the onset of sleep, 'a clear reversal' of left hemisphere dominance can be observed, followed by 'a steady right hemisphere superiority' during both REM and non-REM sleep, as well as at the morning sleep-wake transition. Which may explain why so many good ideas come to us on waking.
IMAGINATION
Just as the process by which insight comes about seems something of a mystery (as we saw, it seems to be drawn by a sense of beauty), so also there is a degree of mystery about where the imaginative capacity comes from.
Page 1179
...From the left hemisphere’s point of view, imagination, like metaphor and myth, is a species of lying: from the right hemisphere’s point of view, it is, like metaphor and myth, necessary for access to truth. True human creativity is inseparable from the use of the imagination;
Page 1179
...imagination is inextricably bound up with reality, in a way that its bedfellow, fantasy, is not. Fantasy is projected, full-blown, from the workings of our mind. In imagination, rather, we experience intimations of matters that are glimpsed, but only partly seen; our conscious minds obscure them. They resist explicit formulation, because thereby they become something else. This tentative, but rapt, attraction toward something that is not cognised, but at some deep level re-cognised, is not the work of fantasy, but of imagination. Imagination is far from certain, of course; but the biggest mistake we could make would be never to trust it—never to believe in it—for fear of being mistaken. For truth requires imagination. It alone can put us in touch with aspects of reality to which our habits of thought have rendered us blind. It leads not to an escape from reality, but a sudden seeing into its depths, so that reality is for the first time truly present, with all its import, whether that occur in the context of what we call science or what we call art.
Page 1185
...the distinction between Fancy and Imagination which Coleridge intuited to be so fundamental to the human condition. Fancy is passive; it sees objects, which are fixed, definite, known and ‘dead’. Imagination, by contrast, is active, vital, and is already part of what it sees (there is no subject-object divide here). Fancy puts together things already known in a novel way; imagination recreates the known and familiar as something unique and new, by a process of inhabiting, or permeating from the inside—not by combination or addition from the outside. Fancy is subject to conscious choice. Primary Imagination (the mode whereby the world comes into being for us) is not