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ckcosner's review against another edition
4.0
For me this was a delightful, though prolonged, read. It took me over a year to get through, taking it roughly ten pages at a time. It is as important as Thinking Fast and Slow, though less accessible to the average reader.
I'm not convinced by all of the arguments, but one doesn't need to be in order to see the overall picture and draw some conclusions. Even if his thesis—that the division of labor between the brain's hemispheres is directly reflected in human culture and differences between cultures—isn't perfectly true, clearly it's not far from the mark. The truth is likely far more fine-grained and doesn't always draw the boundary at the hemispheres. Somewhat glibly, I could say why not pit the cortex against the lower regions? Or (pick any brain region) against (pick any other)?
Personally, I've used this as a reminder to take the time to step back and let the mind examine/experience any given thing/person/problem in multiple ways, to process both the particular and the gestalt.
I'm not convinced by all of the arguments, but one doesn't need to be in order to see the overall picture and draw some conclusions. Even if his thesis—that the division of labor between the brain's hemispheres is directly reflected in human culture and differences between cultures—isn't perfectly true, clearly it's not far from the mark. The truth is likely far more fine-grained and doesn't always draw the boundary at the hemispheres. Somewhat glibly, I could say why not pit the cortex against the lower regions? Or (pick any brain region) against (pick any other)?
Personally, I've used this as a reminder to take the time to step back and let the mind examine/experience any given thing/person/problem in multiple ways, to process both the particular and the gestalt.
majudd's review against another edition
1.0
This is a brilliant book, but I have to give it 1 star because I just can't finish it. I have tried twice now. For me, the problem is the length and the depth. I am interested in the subject, but not that interested (and I am someone who likes to read books about the brain). I need the abridged version. I believe the true audience for this book is other brain researchers or professors of philosophy. They would probably love it!
At least this time around, I got about a third of the way in. The first time, I only made it a few pages. Every sentence and every paragraph is so dense, one simply cannot casually zip through it. Realizing that, I picked it up again, vowing to stop and think about every sentence. Doing that, I was able to get into a nightly rythm, and appreciate it's brilliance. But in the end, I just found it to be too much work for me.
I give 1 star to books that I cannot finish, and 2 stars to books that I finish but wish I had not. If I ever pick up this book again (it is sitting by my bedside) and finish it, I will change the rating.
At least this time around, I got about a third of the way in. The first time, I only made it a few pages. Every sentence and every paragraph is so dense, one simply cannot casually zip through it. Realizing that, I picked it up again, vowing to stop and think about every sentence. Doing that, I was able to get into a nightly rythm, and appreciate it's brilliance. But in the end, I just found it to be too much work for me.
I give 1 star to books that I cannot finish, and 2 stars to books that I finish but wish I had not. If I ever pick up this book again (it is sitting by my bedside) and finish it, I will change the rating.
glynnn's review against another edition
4.0
I'm not going to add anything significant to the volumes already written in review of this opus. Examining left brain/right brain approaches and tensions, framing this in the contexts of how we live our lives, conduct ourselves and view the world and each other...and considering the impact this might have on the ways that we feel about ourselves and what we perceive and deduce about our own consciousness and life-rationale...is always going to be a big ask.
McGilchrist takes a run at all this from many angles, leaving a somewhat dazed reader grappling with the enormity of it all. His writing is clear and occasionally funny. His canvas is wide, and his brushstrokes are only firm enough for the necessary clarity when such a need arises. Elsewhere, his deftness of touch in articulating concepts and hypotheses takes the reader/listener along with him on a fascinating journey to better understanding what could make us tick.
Not a book for the faint-hearted, but rewarding for the insights and understanding gained when reading/listening to it.
McGilchrist takes a run at all this from many angles, leaving a somewhat dazed reader grappling with the enormity of it all. His writing is clear and occasionally funny. His canvas is wide, and his brushstrokes are only firm enough for the necessary clarity when such a need arises. Elsewhere, his deftness of touch in articulating concepts and hypotheses takes the reader/listener along with him on a fascinating journey to better understanding what could make us tick.
Not a book for the faint-hearted, but rewarding for the insights and understanding gained when reading/listening to it.
brokensandals's review against another edition
3.0
It’s the ultimate conspiracy theory: Society is being reshaped by a sinister force. A force that drives us toward our own destruction yet prevents us from even realizing that anything is wrong. A force that’s inside us all…
…[ominous music]…
The left hemisphere of the human brain.
(OK, so it’s really more of a dextral force than a sinister one.)
McGilchrist is careful to include lots of caveats and hedging, but he’s claiming that something like the following is approximately true:
- The left hemisphere and the right hemisphere think in significantly different ways.
- The left hemisphere’s perspective is being overemphasized in contemporary Western society.
- This overemphasis is self-reinforcing—it causes society to be restructured such that excelling in the left hemisphere’s specialties is rewarded more than excelling in the right’s.
- This is dangerous because one characteristic of the left hemisphere is an inability to recognize information that does not fit its preconceptions.
To make his case, McGilchrist first goes heavy into the neuroscientific evidence for differences in the hemispheres (part 1 of the book) and then does a tour of world history in search of evidence that the relative dominance of each hemisphere has varied across different eras and societies (part 2 of the book).
Do I buy this? No. But I really just don’t have the background knowledge—i.e. an extensive knowledge of history—to evaluate the arguments. McGilchrist presents some interesting examples to support his claim that one hemisphere or the other has been more influential in different periods, e.g.:
But how does one determine whether that really means anything, or if it’s just a shift in fashion, a cherry-picked pseudopattern from the infinite sea of historical data? I don’t know, and I default to skepticism. When the concluding chapter claims to “try to imagine what the world would look like if the left hemisphere became so far dominant that, at the phenomenological level, it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere’s world altogether”,[2] the subsequent description sounds suspiciously like the author just listed a bunch of stuff he doesn’t like about the modern world and then kept whichever ones he could make sound left-hemisphere-ish. But I lack the expertise to have any confidence in that assessment one way or another.
(Also, I have to confess that the amount of art history and longwinded continental philosophy in part 2 just made it very boring for me.)
I like the book for two main reasons:
First, the information in part 1 is really fascinating and much of it was new to me. McGilchrist covers a large number of cases and studies to paint a picture of how the left and right hemispheres differ. Some of those differences include (again, don’t take these as strict or universal):
- handling “pieces of information in isolation” (left) vs “the entity as a whole”[3]
- handling the “familiar” (left) vs “new experience … new information or new skills”[4] (right)
- “focussed attention” (left) vs “breadth and flexibility of attention”[5] (right)
- recognizing “abstract categories and types” (left) vs “uniqueness and individuality”[6] (right)
- “impersonal” (left) vs “personal”[7] (right)
- “linear, sequential argument” (left) vs “some [other] types of reasoning, including deduction, and some types of mathematical reasoning”[8] (right)
- “major key” music (left) vs “minor key”[9] music (right)
- “need[ing] certainty” (left) vs “hold[ing] several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure”[10] (right)
- “unrealistic about its short-comings” (left) vs “more realistic”[11] (right)
Perhaps most importantly for the book’s larger argument: the left hemisphere confabulates.
That brings me to the second thing I like about the book. The tendency to get so attached to a particular model of the world that we are simply unable to recognize any evidence that contradicts that model is, I think, an easy trap for humans to fall into—perhaps especially easy for those who are relatively gifted at constructing good models! (To give a controversial example which McGilchrist also touches on: I think reductionist forms of physicalism about consciousness represent this sort of attachment-to-the-model-at-all-costs.) And even when we know, in the abstract, that we have this vulnerability, it’s often difficult to believe it on a gut level—to truly retain some openness to the possibility that key parts of your worldview may be mistaken. I think the book’s overarching narrative somehow helped me feel that possibility more than I did before, regardless of whether that overarching narrative is true.
I also found the book’s discussion of metaphor interesting. I would be prone to viewing metaphor as a sort of ornament, a mere rhetorical flourish which is not truly necessary to convey any given idea. McGilchrist challenges this:
[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, New expanded edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 258.
[2] Ibid., 428.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] Ibid., 40.
[5] Ibid., 27.
[6] Ibid., 52.
[7] Ibid., 54.
[8] Ibid., 65.
[9] Ibid., 73.
[10] Ibid., 82.
[11] Ibid., 84.
[12] Ibid., 234.
[13] Ibid., 117.
(crosspost)
…[ominous music]…
The left hemisphere of the human brain.
(OK, so it’s really more of a dextral force than a sinister one.)
McGilchrist is careful to include lots of caveats and hedging, but he’s claiming that something like the following is approximately true:
- The left hemisphere and the right hemisphere think in significantly different ways.
- The left hemisphere’s perspective is being overemphasized in contemporary Western society.
- This overemphasis is self-reinforcing—it causes society to be restructured such that excelling in the left hemisphere’s specialties is rewarded more than excelling in the right’s.
- This is dangerous because one characteristic of the left hemisphere is an inability to recognize information that does not fit its preconceptions.
To make his case, McGilchrist first goes heavy into the neuroscientific evidence for differences in the hemispheres (part 1 of the book) and then does a tour of world history in search of evidence that the relative dominance of each hemisphere has varied across different eras and societies (part 2 of the book).
Do I buy this? No. But I really just don’t have the background knowledge—i.e. an extensive knowledge of history—to evaluate the arguments. McGilchrist presents some interesting examples to support his claim that one hemisphere or the other has been more influential in different periods, e.g.:
…Brener cites the work of Hans-Joachim Hufschmidt, a German scholar who has studied the direction of gaze in 50,000 portrayals of the human face over time. This work, published in 1980, yields a remarkable finding. It seems that early two-dimensional representations tend to show the face either looking straight ahead or looking towards the viewer’s right. However, during the period between the sixth century BC and the Hellenistic period, there is a clear shift of orientation, so that the majority of portraits come to face in the opposite direction, towards the viewer’s left. … This reveals a distinct shift towards favouring the right hemisphere in the appreciation of representations of the human face from the sixth century BC onwards. According to Brener and Hufschmidt, the tendency was lost again in the Dark Ages, but re-emerged at the Renaissance.[1]
But how does one determine whether that really means anything, or if it’s just a shift in fashion, a cherry-picked pseudopattern from the infinite sea of historical data? I don’t know, and I default to skepticism. When the concluding chapter claims to “try to imagine what the world would look like if the left hemisphere became so far dominant that, at the phenomenological level, it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere’s world altogether”,[2] the subsequent description sounds suspiciously like the author just listed a bunch of stuff he doesn’t like about the modern world and then kept whichever ones he could make sound left-hemisphere-ish. But I lack the expertise to have any confidence in that assessment one way or another.
(Also, I have to confess that the amount of art history and longwinded continental philosophy in part 2 just made it very boring for me.)
I like the book for two main reasons:
First, the information in part 1 is really fascinating and much of it was new to me. McGilchrist covers a large number of cases and studies to paint a picture of how the left and right hemispheres differ. Some of those differences include (again, don’t take these as strict or universal):
- handling “pieces of information in isolation” (left) vs “the entity as a whole”[3]
- handling the “familiar” (left) vs “new experience … new information or new skills”[4] (right)
- “focussed attention” (left) vs “breadth and flexibility of attention”[5] (right)
- recognizing “abstract categories and types” (left) vs “uniqueness and individuality”[6] (right)
- “impersonal” (left) vs “personal”[7] (right)
- “linear, sequential argument” (left) vs “some [other] types of reasoning, including deduction, and some types of mathematical reasoning”[8] (right)
- “major key” music (left) vs “minor key”[9] music (right)
- “need[ing] certainty” (left) vs “hold[ing] several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure”[10] (right)
- “unrealistic about its short-comings” (left) vs “more realistic”[11] (right)
Perhaps most importantly for the book’s larger argument: the left hemisphere confabulates.
Although the left hemisphere does not see and cannot understand what the right hemisphere understands, it is expert at pretending that it does, at finding quite plausible, but bogus, explanations for the evidence that does not fit its version of events. It will be remembered from the experiments of Deglin and Kinsbourne that the left hemisphere would rather believe authority, ‘what it says on this piece of paper&rsquo, than the evidence of its own senses. And remember how it is willing to deny a paralysed limb, even when it is confronted with indisputable evidence?[12]
That brings me to the second thing I like about the book. The tendency to get so attached to a particular model of the world that we are simply unable to recognize any evidence that contradicts that model is, I think, an easy trap for humans to fall into—perhaps especially easy for those who are relatively gifted at constructing good models! (To give a controversial example which McGilchrist also touches on: I think reductionist forms of physicalism about consciousness represent this sort of attachment-to-the-model-at-all-costs.) And even when we know, in the abstract, that we have this vulnerability, it’s often difficult to believe it on a gut level—to truly retain some openness to the possibility that key parts of your worldview may be mistaken. I think the book’s overarching narrative somehow helped me feel that possibility more than I did before, regardless of whether that overarching narrative is true.
I also found the book’s discussion of metaphor interesting. I would be prone to viewing metaphor as a sort of ornament, a mere rhetorical flourish which is not truly necessary to convey any given idea. McGilchrist challenges this:
A metaphor asserts a common life that is experienced in the body of the one who makes it, and the separation is only present at the linguistic level. Our sense of the commonality of the two ideas, perceptions or entities does not lie in a post hoc derivation of something abstracted from each of them, which is found on subsequent comparison to be similar, or even one and the same thing; but rather on a single concrete, kinaesthetic experience more fundamental than either, and from which they in turn are derived. Thus a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals are not seen to have something in common only after the disembodied idea of a ‘clash&rsquo is abstracted from the one and from the other, and found - aha! - to be similar; it is rather that these experiences - a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals, or, for that matter, a clash of swords, or a clash of colours - are felt in our embodied selves as sharing a common nature.
When the metaphor is paraphrased or replaced, whatever had been extralingual, unconscious, and therefore potentially new and alive in the collision of these two entities gets reconstructed, this time in terms only of what is familiar. The point of metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light.[13]
[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, New expanded edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 258.
[2] Ibid., 428.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] Ibid., 40.
[5] Ibid., 27.
[6] Ibid., 52.
[7] Ibid., 54.
[8] Ibid., 65.
[9] Ibid., 73.
[10] Ibid., 82.
[11] Ibid., 84.
[12] Ibid., 234.
[13] Ibid., 117.
(crosspost)
e_f_p21's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Very academic. Verbose.
elijahdavidson's review against another edition
5.0
Fantastic. Illuminating. Essential for anyone convinced of the power of art and hospitable spirituality to heal our ailing Westernized world. This one goes on the syllabus of books that should have been assigned to me in my undergraduate and masters programs. Granted, it came out half way through my masters program.
benwillie's review against another edition
5.0
The most encompassing book I've read this year. At a surface level, it is a sweeping description of the human brain and its relationship to human culture, especially as concerns the left hemisphere (emissary) and the right hemisphere (master). Iain McGilchrist is uniquely situated to write such a book, as he is one of the greatest living polymaths. He is a fellow of All Souls College, which is a staggering achievement; he taught English, philosophy, and psychiatry, and eventually dove into medicine, doing neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins. The great intersection of that Venn diagram lets him write as an expert about both the anatomical reasoning for his thesis and the cultural ramifications those conclusions historically have—you can read the book for its excellent summary of Western culture alone. He came to Hillsdale to give a lecture this spring (it wasn't recorded, but this podcast is similar), which covered some of what he discusses in this book, and motivated me to tackle his book [b:The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World|58955313|The Matter With Things Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World|Iain McGilchrist|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641262000l/58955313._SX50_.jpg|92917408] next year.
After establishing the distinct difference between our hemispheres, he takes the yoke from books like [b:1984|61439040|1984|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657781256l/61439040._SX50_.jpg|153313], [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SY75_.jpg|3204877], and [b:The Abolition of Man|25825420|The Abolition of Man|C.S. Lewis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435685201l/25825420._SY75_.jpg|14823978]. The criticism of hyper-rationalism in each of those is expounded in McGilchrist's argument that modern culture has upset the balance of the left and right hemispheres. The left views the world as distinct parts, each a problem to be solved; it is very good at this. But the right takes the birds eye view, appreciating beauty; while not great at specifics, intuition is the realm of the right hemisphere. The 21st century West though has more and more embraced the pure reason of the left hemisphere while tending to reject the more human and transcendental aspects of the right.
While this argument probably isn't new to you, his proof for it (at times very empirical, at other times intuitive—like the brain) is likely novel, and he ties together countless aspects of the Western tradition to arrive there. I listened to the audiobook and so have forgotten most of the excellent quotes in here, but I purchased the physical version and intend to read it more carefully in the future, because there are many many insights to be gleaned.
Overall a highly integrated book that touches much that is dear to me; highly recommend this thought provoking read if you're willing to dedicate some time to it!
"Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole"
After establishing the distinct difference between our hemispheres, he takes the yoke from books like [b:1984|61439040|1984|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657781256l/61439040._SX50_.jpg|153313], [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SY75_.jpg|3204877], and [b:The Abolition of Man|25825420|The Abolition of Man|C.S. Lewis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435685201l/25825420._SY75_.jpg|14823978]. The criticism of hyper-rationalism in each of those is expounded in McGilchrist's argument that modern culture has upset the balance of the left and right hemispheres. The left views the world as distinct parts, each a problem to be solved; it is very good at this. But the right takes the birds eye view, appreciating beauty; while not great at specifics, intuition is the realm of the right hemisphere. The 21st century West though has more and more embraced the pure reason of the left hemisphere while tending to reject the more human and transcendental aspects of the right.
While this argument probably isn't new to you, his proof for it (at times very empirical, at other times intuitive—like the brain) is likely novel, and he ties together countless aspects of the Western tradition to arrive there. I listened to the audiobook and so have forgotten most of the excellent quotes in here, but I purchased the physical version and intend to read it more carefully in the future, because there are many many insights to be gleaned.
Overall a highly integrated book that touches much that is dear to me; highly recommend this thought provoking read if you're willing to dedicate some time to it!
"Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole"
gregbengel's review against another edition
challenging
informative
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
5.0