A couple of weeks ago, a long and delightful train journey to Devon gave me the opportunity to re-read some of the writings of Iain McGilchrist. As many know, McGilchrist’s subject is the human brain and the development of the Western world. When I first read his weighty book, The Master and his Emissary, some time ago, it helped me to make sense of how modern society has come to privilege left-brain ways of thinking, such as analytical thinking, bureaucratic processes and measurement.
The reason for my journey to Devon was to hear McGilchrist speaking at the one-day Limbus conference at Dartington Hall.* Since I can’t possibly do justice to his thinking in a short blog post, I’ll just share a few thoughts and phrases that have continued to circulate in my mind since the event:
How we pay attention makes a big difference.
Only living beings can pay attention to the world. (A machine can carry out tasks, but it cannot attend, says McGilchrist.) And the fact that we have a divided brain – as apparently all animals and birds do – means we can pay attention in complementary but very different ways. In essence, the left hemisphere enables us to control and manipulate things, steering our attention to detail, clarity, analysis and a-leads-to-b logic – all very useful for our survival. The right brain, on the other hand, allows us to understand the wider picture and deeper meaning and is at ease with connections, paradox, myth, metaphor implicit meaning and feelings.
The modern world is out of balance.
Symptoms of the dominance of left-brain thinking strike me every day – e.g. public services increasingly ruled by measurement and marketisation; people getting busier and busier, lacking the time for reflection on deeper meaning; and interacting more with their devices than with other humans. And this left brain emphasis can make us blind to many things that matter, such as quality, feelings, context and environment.
The left brain has a close relationship with communication and information technologies (or so it seems to me).
Evidently we invented writing mainly to be better able to control and organise things (the left brain’s preference). But then of course every tool or technology we invent makes new things doable and ends up “acting back on us”. Writing, for instance, made highly-organised societies possible, but it also opened the door to excess bureaucracy. Let’s not forget, though, that technologies are intrinsically neither good nor bad – what matters is how we use them. Nowadays some of us feel overloaded by email and distracted by smart phones, but these newer tools also enable a lot of people to work whenever and wherever they want.
Metaphor is a crucial way of understanding the world...
...and was viewed as such up until the Enlightenment in the 18th century. “A lot depends on what you compare things with,” went on McGilchrist. If you compare them with machines, for instance, it has certain consequences. Today, our language is suffused with the machine metaphor – again and again, I am struck by how unthinkingly people use words like “mechanisms” and “feedback” when talking about human communication. In my view, this sloppy use of language cloaks some deep assumptions. It also makes it harder for us to grasp that human communication involves feelings, is interactive, and is seldom (if ever) unambiguous. McGilchrist used a striking metaphor himself, likening left-brain thinking to clear, translucent water, and right-brain perception to the ocean: deep, dark and mysterious.
That’s enough for now, but I don’t want to finish without mentioning briefly how struck I was by the quality of McGilchrist’s talk. For a whole hour he spoke in a slow and calm manner, barely consulting his notes. I think this allowed him to stay connected with his surroundings and attentive to the human beings in the room. And he projected just one slide: a picture of the majestic mountain he sees from his home on the Isle of Skye. He used it to illustrate the different ways in which we can perceive the world. We might associate the mountain with history, weather, spirituality and the senses, for instance. Or we can simply say “it’s just a rock”. But that would surely not do it or ourselves justice.
___________
* I'd like to thank the organisers, Farhad Dalal and Julia Vaughan Smith, for putting so much time and thought into the day.
** Astonishing when you think that our alphabet has just 26 letters and (if I’ve got it right) computer algorithms consist essentially of the same 26 letters, plus 10 numbers (0-9) and some grammatical and mathematical symbols.
How we pay attention makes a big difference.
Only living beings can pay attention to the world. (A machine can carry out tasks, but it cannot attend, says McGilchrist.) And the fact that we have a divided brain – as apparently all animals and birds do – means we can pay attention in complementary but very different ways. In essence, the left hemisphere enables us to control and manipulate things, steering our attention to detail, clarity, analysis and a-leads-to-b logic – all very useful for our survival. The right brain, on the other hand, allows us to understand the wider picture and deeper meaning and is at ease with connections, paradox, myth, metaphor implicit meaning and feelings.
The modern world is out of balance.
Symptoms of the dominance of left-brain thinking strike me every day – e.g. public services increasingly ruled by measurement and marketisation; people getting busier and busier, lacking the time for reflection on deeper meaning; and interacting more with their devices than with other humans. And this left brain emphasis can make us blind to many things that matter, such as quality, feelings, context and environment.
The left brain has a close relationship with communication and information technologies (or so it seems to me).
Evidently we invented writing mainly to be better able to control and organise things (the left brain’s preference). But then of course every tool or technology we invent makes new things doable and ends up “acting back on us”. Writing, for instance, made highly-organised societies possible, but it also opened the door to excess bureaucracy. Let’s not forget, though, that technologies are intrinsically neither good nor bad – what matters is how we use them. Nowadays some of us feel overloaded by email and distracted by smart phones, but these newer tools also enable a lot of people to work whenever and wherever they want.
Metaphor is a crucial way of understanding the world...
...and was viewed as such up until the Enlightenment in the 18th century. “A lot depends on what you compare things with,” went on McGilchrist. If you compare them with machines, for instance, it has certain consequences. Today, our language is suffused with the machine metaphor – again and again, I am struck by how unthinkingly people use words like “mechanisms” and “feedback” when talking about human communication. In my view, this sloppy use of language cloaks some deep assumptions. It also makes it harder for us to grasp that human communication involves feelings, is interactive, and is seldom (if ever) unambiguous. McGilchrist used a striking metaphor himself, likening left-brain thinking to clear, translucent water, and right-brain perception to the ocean: deep, dark and mysterious.
That’s enough for now, but I don’t want to finish without mentioning briefly how struck I was by the quality of McGilchrist’s talk. For a whole hour he spoke in a slow and calm manner, barely consulting his notes. I think this allowed him to stay connected with his surroundings and attentive to the human beings in the room. And he projected just one slide: a picture of the majestic mountain he sees from his home on the Isle of Skye. He used it to illustrate the different ways in which we can perceive the world. We might associate the mountain with history, weather, spirituality and the senses, for instance. Or we can simply say “it’s just a rock”. But that would surely not do it or ourselves justice.
___________
* I'd like to thank the organisers, Farhad Dalal and Julia Vaughan Smith, for putting so much time and thought into the day.
** Astonishing when you think that our alphabet has just 26 letters and (if I’ve got it right) computer algorithms consist essentially of the same 26 letters, plus 10 numbers (0-9) and some grammatical and mathematical symbols.
Related reading
Alison Donaldson (2005): Writing in organizational life: how a technology simultaneously forms and is formed by human interaction, chapter in book Experiencing emergence in organizations (ed. Ralph Stacey).
Iain McGilchrist (2009): The Master and his Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the western world.
Iain McGilchrist: The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (Kindle Edition).
For more information about the conference at which McGilchrist spoke see: www.limbus.org.uk/soul/
Alison Donaldson (2005): Writing in organizational life: how a technology simultaneously forms and is formed by human interaction, chapter in book Experiencing emergence in organizations (ed. Ralph Stacey).
Iain McGilchrist (2009): The Master and his Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the western world.
Iain McGilchrist: The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (Kindle Edition).
For more information about the conference at which McGilchrist spoke see: www.limbus.org.uk/soul/