Wow, monumental overview of fascinating research and observation. Loved the book metaphor. This is a dense and comprehensive exploration. I was educated, inspired, and challenged both cognitively and emotionally. Worth a second read.... after some reflection/integration.
"...cruelty does not exist in ‘nature’: only humans with their left prefrontal cortex have the capacity for deliberate malice. But then only humans, with their right prefrontal cortex, are capable of empathy….Empathy is intrinsic to morality."
"We can choose to imitate forms of thinking or behaving; and by doing so both speed up our evolution by many orders of magnitude, and shift it away from the blind forces of chance and necessity, in a direction or directions of our own choosing."
" The point I wish to emphasise here is that the left hemisphere has to ‘blot out’ the right hemisphere in order to its job at all. That is surely the import of the functional and anatomical evidence that left hemisphere superiority is based, not on a leap forward by the left hemisphere, but on a ‘deliberate’ handicapping of the right."