The left brain emphasizes narrow focus tasks, while the right brain emphasizes broad focus tasks. … Not only are these two different exercises that need to be carried on simultaneously, they are two quite different kinds of exercise, requiring not just that attention should be divided, but that it should be of two distinct types at once. At the same time there is a need for open attention, as wide as possible, to guard against a possible predator. There is a need to focus attention narrowly and with precision, as a bird, for example, needs to focus a grain of corn that it must eat, in order to pick it out from, say, the pieces of grit on which it lies. Here is McGilchrist’s key concept of what distinguishes left from right brain reasoning: So what his book mainly does is help people who agree with his values organize their thinking around a single key idea: right brains are better than left. He doesn’t really argue much for why right versions are better (on the margin) he mostly sees that as obvious. McGilchrist maps this core left-right brain distinction onto many dozens of other distinctions, and in each case he says we need more of the right version and less of the left. In sum: while we need both left and right brain style thinking, civilization today has gone way too far in emphasizing left styles, and that’s the main thing that’s wrong with the world today. What he mainly does in his book is to organize these opinions around a core distinction: the left vs right split in our brains. McGilchrist has many strong opinions on what is good and bad in the world, and on where civilization has gone wrong in history. This video gives an easy to watch book summary: I’m interested in critiques of civilization suggesting that people were better off in less modern worlds. I’ve been wanting to read more literary-based critics of economics, and of sci/tech more generally. I’ve been meaning to learn more about brain structure, and this book talks a lot about that. Its an ambitious big-picture book, by a smart knowledgeable polymath.
I had many reasons to want to read Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary.
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