Insights from ‘The Matter With Things’ by Tom Morgan (Direc…

Insights from ‘The Matter With Things’
by Tom Morgan
(Director of Communications and Content at the KCP Group)
The LH treats the world like a predator would; it locks onto something to chase it down and kill it. The primary tool we now use to manipulate the world is language, so that’s where it dominates.
The left hemisphere has a much more extensive vocabulary than the right, and more subtle and complex syntax. It extends vastly our power to map the world and to explore the complexities of the causal relationships between things. This is surely its raison d’être, and it is valuable to a predator, at least in simple circumstances, where there are not many factors, as there almost always are once one starts taking the broader view.
Like a child pulling the wings off a butterfly, the LH reduces things down to ingredients, so as to understand them and manipulate them, but it often kills what it touches. A joke isn’t funny when it’s explained. The world loses its magic when reduced to atoms. But most critically, mechanistic analysis of lines on spreadsheets fails to account for the way the whole system flows together. As I’ve written ad nauseam, this is a massive failing of reductionism and our analytical approach to inherently complex systems.
In a formulation which is staggeringly consistent throughout the book, the ideal is a Right => Left => Right transition. McGilchrist talks about the need for real world experience to originate in the right hemisphere, to be moved to the left for processing, but then returned to the right for synthesis into its global context. The musician hears a piece of beautiful music, deconstructs it into notes and learns it painstakingly, then eventually performs it intuitively. Problems emerge when we fail to do the essential final stage of putting the pieces back together.
The critical imbalance: The central idea of McGilchrist’s work is that of an imbalance between the hemispheres: the left should be the servant of the right, but it is now too often the master. McGilchrist illustrates why this is radically problematic. The LH has access to infinitely less information, yet tends to lie when faced with its own limitations.
Some LH stroke victims get the right side of their body knocked offline, and they are aware of the paralysis in their right arm. But if their RH gets knocked out, the remaining left hemisphere will categorically deny anything is wrong with their right side:
They will deny completely that they have a paralyzed arm and if forced to move it, they will say “there, I just moved it,” while nothing moved. And if you bring the hand round in front of them and say “no, move that” they say, “Oh, that’s not my arm that belongs to that man in the next bed” …. the left hemisphere has a very high opinion of itself, and the right hemisphere has a much more modest opinion of itself, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that the right hemisphere is more intelligent, not just emotionally and socially more intelligent, but more cognitively intelligent than the left hemisphere.
The left hemisphere is more competitive, but also less able to admit when it’s wrong.
“It should be stressed that the right-hemisphere [deficit] patients virtually never respond ‘I don’t know’ to an open-ended question. Instead, they generally contrive an answer – confabulating if necessary – in seeming indifference to the inappropriateness of the response.” – Penelope Myers.
“In my opinion, it is the most stunning result from split-brain research … The right hemisphere does not do this. It is totally truthful.” – Michael Gazzaniga
A central problem is that the RH is comparatively mute. The LH, as its goal is power and control over the world, has greater usage of language, linearity, and logic. It is great at “grasping” things, breaking them down and working out how to use them, but it consistently misses the importance of the whole. Just because something is logical, consistent. and articulately expressed doesn’t make it true.
What does the hemisphere hypothesis tell us about thinking better? It’s pretty nuanced, but McGilchrist’s general take is easily anticipated: we have overemphasized reductive reasoning at the significant cost of intuition. I have read many, many books on how to use the LH to be more rational, use mental models, reduce cognitive biases, etc., but have seen relatively few on how to use the RH. The idea is to better see what lies beyond reason.
Pascal, one of the greatest philosopher-mathematicians that ever lived, nonetheless said that ‘the ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can’t get as far as understanding that.’
In The Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist talks about using reason to achieve a still higher “suprarationality” where it transcends its own limitations. Music is one such example:
One might make a distinction between what is irrational (against reason) and what is ‘suprarational’ (be…