This is a long and very important chapter in the book, because this is the chapter in which McGilchrist tries to provide coherent evidence which will validate his thesis that the two hemispheres do things differently, and that an understanding of these differences will help us to understand the world we live in, a world in which, he suggests, the left hemisphere dominates.
Recently I have been intrigued by the arguments put forward to suggest that McGilchrist is biased towards the right hemisphere. It seems to me that in this chapter McGilchrist has gone out of his way to provide as much evidence as possible that he is not biased. He has extensively referenced research studies, reputable authors, patient histories, brain structure and phenomenology, and a wide range of hitherto, for me, unknown medical conditions. He has acknowledged that even after 20 years of research, he has not been able to reference everything, or indeed, I suspect, to actually find everything, but there is no doubt that the evidence is extensive. In response to the criticism of bias McGilchrist has said (somewhere? – at the beginning of the book?) that he has included a lot of this information in the notes. There are more than 50 pages of notes, in very small, dense type, at the end of the book. The explanation for this is that the publishers thought (and McGilchrist agreed) that these would be better as numbered points in a section at the end of the book, than as footnotes. References are treated in this way too. I agree that the book would have become very unwieldy if these points had been included in the main text, but I do wonder how many people bother to read the notes. When you do, you realise that the range of McGilchrist’s references is even more extensive than it appears from the main text.
Personally, I do not think that McGilchrist is biased. My understanding is that he raises valid concerns about the lack of recognition of the important role of the right hemisphere in the way in which we attend to the world, in the face of left hemisphere dominance. Also, given the view expressed by some renowned scientists, such as Gazzaniga, that the right hemisphere is the ‘minor hemisphere’ with cognitive skills inferior to those of a chimpanzee – the brain is nothing more or less than a machine – McGilchrist has had to pull out all the stops to make the case for the right hemisphere, strongly and forcefully. He has never denied the importance of the left hemisphere, but his book focusses on making the case for the right hemisphere.
It is also worth saying at this point, that if what he writes about the right hemisphere is true, then the task of writing about it is made doubly difficult by the fact that he needs to use the left hemisphere to do this. ‘In general, abstract concepts and words, along with complex syntax, are left-hemisphere-dependent’ (p.51)
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