26 Brain and Mind

Austin on McGilchrist

Right Brain Therapy

Western civilization might benefit from a cultural-scale version of the Right Brain Therapy

The two brain hemispheres uphold distinct ways of attending to the world, and while both are beneficial, they are intrinsically in tension with each other. Hence, successful cognition and living would seem to require the ability to juggle or balance the two modes of perception, but as McGilchrist documents in the second half of his book, the long record of Western cultural history points to an inexorable, accelerating, rise of left-brain thinking and behaviour displacing a right-brain awareness and way of being.

Through the reinforcing dynamic of culture, we have fallen into what might be termed a ‘left-brain runaway’ in which we make the world with left-brain ideas such that culture encourages and rewards yet more left-brain thinking, and so on, now in seemingly unstoppable fashion.

A foundational difference is the left brain’s inclination to divide versus the right brain’s capacity to see things whole. The bihemispheric brain constitutes a ‘unity of the idea of unity and the idea of division.’

McGilchrist’s thesis is both timeless and timely.

It is timeless in that it identifies an innate tension in the cognition required of successful living organisms, and locates that, for us and other mammals, in our bi-hemispheric brain structure.

One of the powerful things McGilchrist accomplishes is to pick up the dualism ropes from where Descartes placed them – between mind and body – and re-lay them down the longitudinal fissure separating the [brain] hemispheres.

This divides the world a new between rival capacities to perceive dualistically or holistically. We do have a Cartesian mind that can formulate a mind-body split, but we also have a non-Cartesian mind that senses this might be a trap. Both seem useful, even though they lead us to different extremes. The left brain divides and divides again to end up chasing the Higgs Boson. The right brain patterns gestalt after gestalt eventually reaching Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis – ‘it is all one thing’ including this mind thinking this thought – and from there, perhaps, out beyond ‘science’ and towards the sacred.

While the idea of a whole civilization in the grip of a runaway cognitive dynamic may seem fanciful, it becomes easier to comprehend when one recognizes the reinforcing nature of culture. Runaway thinking can happen at the level of a whole culture because minds and culture constitute a loop in a complex system.

Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, authorities on cultural evolution, define culture as:

‘…socially learned information stored in individuals’ brains that is capable of affecting behaviour’

While we ‘scaffold’ culture with many cultural artifacts – literature, buildings, laws and more – the main locus of a living human culture is in the plastic brains of its human members. The reflexivity between our plastic brains and the plastic culture in which those brains are fully immersed – the social ‘imaginary’ – constitutes a feedback loop in which mind shapes culture shapes mind, a so-called ‘mind-culture co-evolution’.

Runaway Culture

This mind-culture-mind loop now exhibits runaway dynamics: our left-brain ‘way of being’ has brought forth a left-brain culture that encourages and rewards further left-brain thinking, and so it goes on. Bit by bit, we lose our capacity to ‘be in the world’ in a more meditative, less calculative, way that is the preserve of the right brain and plausibly a greater part of how we used to be.

Reductionism earned its spurs because it proved spectacularly successful at explaining the behaviour of ‘dead’ things that were the dominant objects of enquiry at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. Alas, those early successes profoundly shaped the way we believed all science should be conducted, so that we applied an intrinsically reductionist scientific method to a more complex ‘living’ natural world, including ultimately ourselves.

The problem, as is increasingly understood, is that complex systems exhibit emergent properties, which cannot be anticipated even from complete knowledge of the parts, but only discerned from observation of the whole.

We conceived of Homo Economicus and built a logical model of the world around that conception and have ever since been trying to live up – live down, really – to that self-image. We have been striving to make our behaviour fit a simple model rather than adjusting our models to a new comprehension of our complex behaviour. Effectively, a subplot of our broader mind-culture co-evolution has been a ‘mind-market coevolution’, in which human minds have made markets have shaped minds.

Collective Right Brain Therapy

Also alert to latest developments in neuroscience is American psychologist, Allan Schore, who has crystallized the implications for individual mental wellbeing in his concept of ‘right brain therapy’.

Rooted in new understanding of the role a holistic, emotionally dominant, right brain plays in supporting mental health it emphasizes empathic connection and the significance of non-verbal communication in achieving interpersonal awareness and understanding. It is effectively a program of rehabilitation for a right brain withered by modern culture.

McGilchrist – who cites Schore’s work – does not use his term but leads us towards the idea that civilization’s largest problems might benefit from collective right brain therapy.

Where Einstein said you cannot solve problems with the same sort of thinking that created them, what McGilchrist effectively says is that you cannot solve problems with the same brain hemisphere that created them.

While our sustainability crisis presents as rising sea-levels, shrinking forests and disappearing species, the front line of our struggle is the corpus callosum that divides the human left and right brain. This is where our sustainability crisis will ultimately be resolved, or not.

Schore, too, argues for the primacy of the right brain, which is chronologically foundational in the human lifespan.35 It is firmly in the driving seat during the crucial development period of infancy, before the slower-developing left brain comes ‘online’ and language skills are acquired. Moreover, throughout life, the right brain remains the dominant hemisphere for monitoring one’s own emotions and those of others’, and so for interpersonal connection.

However, and very curious this, the left brain seems entirely unaware of its dependency upon its neighbouring hemisphere. Their different ways of being in the world induce an intriguing asymmetry: a right brain alive to the connection in the world knows that it needs the left brain, while a left brain intent on division seems not to know that it needs the right brain.

The left hemisphere tends to positive [or reinforcing] feedback, and we can become stuck. The right hemisphere…is capable of freeing us through negative [or modulating] feedback.’

Austin (2021) The Matrix of the Emissary - Market Primacy and The Sustainability Crisis