Of Two Minds

Clouds and chill do not dampen a dog's view of the world.

The grass is bright green, almost an unnatural-appearing green, so lush after recent heavy rain, but trees in the orchard, prematurely (from my perspective) shedding their leaves, had an almost wintry look recently against lowering grey skies. Not quite a contradiction, it was a scene to illustrate lack of demarcation between what we humans think of as one season and another – in this case, summer and fall. Seasons, like human emotions and states of mind, blend and interpenetrate more than they conform to any kind of calendar.

 

Which leads me – or, at least, I want to use it to try to lead you to think about fact and imagination, reasons and dreams, and the different ways our brains go at the work of knowing ourselves and the world. For Henri Bergson, my "main man" in philosophy (as the Artist liked to refer to him), two different ways of knowing came out as intellect/intuition. Gaston Bachelard's distinction was reason/imagination. It was psychobiologist Roger Sperry at Cal Tech whose experiments in the 1960s led to the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain specialized in different tasks, the left devoted to language, the naming of objects, and the right to visual construction of what we receive as “the world.” 

The left brain/right brain idea was grabbed up in simplistic dress by the general public, only to be rejected by science as myth and now resurrected in more nuanced form. There is more than one book on this fascinating subject, but the one I’ve been reading is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist.

Reading is a good activity on a chilly day.

McGilchrist’s is as far as possible from a simplistic view. He stresses, for example, that mathematics (and by that we don’t mean simple bookkeeping) is creative as well as logical and that the “indirect, connotative language of poetry,” dependent on the brain’s right hemisphere, 

 

...underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art.

-      McGilchrist (p. 71)

 

It is the working together of the two hemispheres, he underlines, that allows us to put a world together at all. 

The sun returned!

Most brain scientists these days would have no quarrel with McGilchrist thus far. Where some dig in their heels and think he goes off the deep end is with his thesis that Western culture (going back to the 5^th century BCE and Socrates/Plato) has lost left/right balance (except for a few brief periods) and become overly dependent on – and dominated by – the left hemisphere’s narrowly focused rationality, its impatience and inability to deal with ambiguity and to make “big picture” connections. Although both parts of the brain deal both with units and with aggregates, he writes, the right hemisphere sees individuals and unique instances in holistic, always changing context, while the left categorizes and therefore can deal only with generic objects, types, and a fixed, static world.

Doggie nose prints on the inside of the windshield I just cleaned!

McGilchrist asked himself a question previous brain scientists seem not to have asked: why would mammalian brains, even brains of birds, divide their work in the first place? His answer is that life demands of us two different kinds of attention: first, a broad, flexible, sustained vigilance to everything around us; second, a focused attention on a task at hand (e.g., capturing prey). A machine model of animal behavior is a left-brain re-presentation. All left-brain re-presentations are based on what is already known. They are good at routine. They run as if on computer programs. They are, however, bad at revising in the face of the unexpected: what doesn’t fit is rejected. If McGilchrist hadn’t wanted to make as much reference as he does to Nietzsche, he might have called his book The Sorcerer and the Apprentice. (Don't miss Mickey Mouse in that link!)

 

The Master and His Emissary takes its title from Nietzsche, however, McGilchrist identifying the left brain as the “emissary” that has taken over the role of the “master” right brain, and it is a dense read at almost 600 pages, 54 of them notes and a hefty 67 pages of bibliography. The index, I must say, is disappointing and could have included much more than it does. This book is fascinating reading, though, for anyone interested in how we humans perceive and think.

 

That’s my nonfiction reading for sunlight hours. In the dark of the morning or evening dusk, I turn to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie and am amazed and delighted again and again. In fact, even my use of different times of day for these two books conforms to Bachelard’s idea that even words can have different psychic “weight” 

…depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or the language of daylight life (la vie claire) – to rested language or language under surveillance – to the language of poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

I don’t think I am stretching a point at all to seeing Bachelard in this passage agreeing with McGilchrist as to how the different brain hemispheres construct a world. And when he, Bachelard, uses Jung’s animus and anima language, again McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere distinctions, rather than any gendered differences, make sense of the distinction. Projects and worries, Bachelard says, belong to the animus, while “tranquil images” from the anima … “meld together in an intimate warmth.” And thus there are also two different kinds of reading, one in animus, the other in anima.

…I am not the same man when I am reading a book of ideas where the animus is obliged to be vigilant, quite ready to criticize, quite ready to retort, as when I am reading a poet’s book where images must be received in a sort of transcendental acceptance of gifts. Ah! to return the absolute gift which is a poet’s image, our anima would have to be able to write a hymn of thanksgiving. 

 

The animus reads little; the anima reads a great deal.

 

Sometimes my animus scolds me for having read too much. 

 

Reading, ever reading, the sweet passion of the anima. But when, after having read everything, one sets before himself the task of making a book out of reveries, it is the animus which is in the harness. Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limiting himself to dreaming it. 

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

And yet, I think to myself now, reflecting on these two books, on the work of the different hemispheres of the brain (my brain!), and on the expressions and statements of these two writers, I seem to sense the right and left brains, the anima and animus, in dialogue. Or is that the right brain, synthesizing facts handed to it by the left? At any rate, as I read, I take notes (left brain) and smile happily (right brain).

View without doggie nose prints --

And view without the road --

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Today’s images have nothing to do with today’s text and are only included for relief from what might otherwise seem like overthinking.