Looking closer at this asymmetry of function, McGilchrist explains, with reference to animals and more so to birds, that there is a need for two types of attention to the world – a focussed attention (the world of ‘me’) and a broader more open attention (me as a member of a social group, as part of something bigger). Birds which, unlike humans, have eyes on the sides of their heads, use their right eye (left hemisphere) for focussed attention, e.g. finding a seed in a bed of gravel, whilst at the same time using their left eye for broader vigilant attention to look out for prey, in order to be able to feed, but also survive. The left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context and broken into parts, whereas the right hemisphere sees things whole and in context.
This argument for two types of attention, and the importance of recognising this, is central to the book, because the kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, changes who we are, and is inescapably bound up with value. Attention is a howness, not a thing, not a whatness.
What we aim to understand changes its nature with the context in which it lies. If the hemispheres have different ways of construing the world – that tells us something about the nature of reality. The brain brings two different worlds into being. In one (the right hemisphere) we ‘experience’, in the other (the left hemisphere) we experience our experience – a re-presented version.
These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world. And their difference is not symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical.
McGilchrist describes this as follows (p.31)
| ‘… the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one, we experience – the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power.’ |
McGilchrist concludes that separation of the hemispheres is not accidental, and the degree of separation is carefully controlled by the corpus callosum. This suggests that the mind, and the world of experience that it creates, may have a similar need to keep things apart, so that we experience two fundamentally asymmetric ways of being in the world.
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