Look up Iain McGilchrist. He's saying the same thing as you. He is a neuroscientist and philosopher who delves into how we attend to the world. One manner of attending is to focus, to find food and shelter. But that can't be the only way of attending. The other way must attend to the whole environment, to be aware of danger from pre…
Look up Iain McGilchrist. He's saying the same thing as you. He is a neuroscientist and philosopher who delves into how we attend to the world. One manner of attending is to focus, to find food and shelter. But that can't be the only way of attending. The other way must attend to the whole environment, to be aware of danger from predators, or the need to attend to offspring. It is this fundamental need for these two types of attention that give rise to the two hemispheres of the brain, that are found in all animals.
The left brain attends in a focussed way, to be able to grasp, manipulate, and control. It freezes things, isolates them out of context, breaks things into parts, abstracts and generalizes. The right brain is grounded in reality, a changing, flowing world, where everything connects in some way to everything else. "Part of it consists of being naturally observant: of one's environment, of others, of one's own body." This is essentially the right brain's way of viewing the world.
McGilchrist contends that since the Enlightenment, the worldview of the West has become unbalanced, with the left brain taking over, and shutting out the right brain. It's not that we don't need or want the left brain's input, but that there needs to be a balance. I find that this view explains a lot. There is definitely something fundamentally wrong with the mentality of the modern world, of how moderns see things, how they process things.
Look up Iain McGilchrist. He's saying the same thing as you. He is a neuroscientist and philosopher who delves into how we attend to the world. One manner of attending is to focus, to find food and shelter. But that can't be the only way of attending. The other way must attend to the whole environment, to be aware of danger from predators, or the need to attend to offspring. It is this fundamental need for these two types of attention that give rise to the two hemispheres of the brain, that are found in all animals.
The left brain attends in a focussed way, to be able to grasp, manipulate, and control. It freezes things, isolates them out of context, breaks things into parts, abstracts and generalizes. The right brain is grounded in reality, a changing, flowing world, where everything connects in some way to everything else. "Part of it consists of being naturally observant: of one's environment, of others, of one's own body." This is essentially the right brain's way of viewing the world.
McGilchrist contends that since the Enlightenment, the worldview of the West has become unbalanced, with the left brain taking over, and shutting out the right brain. It's not that we don't need or want the left brain's input, but that there needs to be a balance. I find that this view explains a lot. There is definitely something fundamentally wrong with the mentality of the modern world, of how moderns see things, how they process things.
I can't explain this all in a single comment. Here is a video interview of McGilchrist expaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrlrhuI39K4.
Thanks I actually watched his long interview with another guy I subscribe to on substack David Bentley Hart and was using McGilchrist as a reference for another piece I was writing so I was in fact already inspired by him https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-iain-mcgilchrist
I was considering reading McGilchrist's double volume book though it's a gigantic commitment.
But thanks for the comment