Divided Mind
In 1840, when he was thirty years old, Louis Victor Leborgne suddenly lost the ability to speak. He was able to understand spoken language and could communicate somewhat through basic hand gestures, but his own verbal expression became limited to a single syllable: tan. His family admitted Leborgne to the psychiatric division of Bicêtre Hospital outside Paris in search of treatment, but the cause of his condition remained a mystery. Eventually his health declined, and he was seen by Pierre Paul Broca, a physician who had recently become interested in new hypotheses about the brain.
At the time, scientists were debating whether different areas of the brain performed separate functions or whether the brain, like the liver, was an undifferentiated lump that did one task. Broca was fascinated by this question and believed Leborgne’s mysterious condition might hold the key. On April 17, 1861, just six days after first being examined by Dr. Broca, Leborgne died. Broca performed an autopsy and discovered a lesion in the left frontal lobe of Leborgne’s brain. This finding was groundbreaking; it provided physical evidence for the localization of brain function, linking a specific region of the brain to specific speech disorders. Broca went on to examine more patients with similar speech loss and found consistent damage in the same location, which would later be known as Broca’s area.
Broca’s research was the first to suggest that different functions are localized in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain, a concept known as cerebral lateralization. But the leap from these early observations to a more nuanced understanding of how the two hemispheres work wouldn’t come for another hundred years. In the 1940s, doctors discovered that for people suffering from severe epilepsy, one of the only effective treatments was a radical surgical procedure that severed the band of neural fibers (the corpus callosum) that connected the brain’s two hemispheres.
In the 1960s, CalTech neuropsychologist Robert Sperry began conducting studies on patients who had undergone this procedure, intrigued by the prospect of testing the cognitive capabilities of each hemisphere independently. Sperry and his colleagues pioneered this “split-brain” research using ingenious experiments to discover that the left hemisphere was predominantly involved in linguistic, analytical, and logical tasks, while the right hemisphere excelled in spatial, intuitive, and holistic processing.
Along with helping Sperry win the Nobel Prize in 1981, this split-brain research also helped birth the popular notion that people can be categorized as either left-brained (logical and analytical) or right-brained (intuitive and creative). But the truth of how the brain works is more subtle and complex than an online self-help test tends to be. Rather than representing a simple dichotomy, the two hemispheres work together as a dynamic, flexible, and interconnected system. And the degree to which one hemisphere is engaged over the other can depend on the task at hand. For example, while language is generally a left-hemisphere function, the right hemisphere may be more engaged in understanding metaphors or emotional tones.
Nevertheless, the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that hemispheric differences (or at least the values that they represent) are real and significant and are even in constant competition, vying for dominance in how we interpret and experience the world. In his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist claims that we tend to view the right hemisphere as our fun, slightly unserious artsy friend who wears outrageously colorful outfits, and the left hemisphere as our three-piece-suit-wearing boss who does the important stuff like logic and problem-solving. But this gets the proper hierarchy all wrong. For McGilchrist, in an optimally functioning mind, the right hemisphere should be the master, holistically, intuitively, and imaginatively perceiving the world in a relational, interconnected manner. It can see the whole. By contrast, the left hemisphere has a more narrow perspective, good at analyzing parts, examining details, and completing specific tasks, but blind to the full picture. It should be the emissary, the servant.
But McGilchrist believes that in modern society, the emissary has usurped the master’s role. In a process that began with the Enlightenment’s passionate pursuit of instrumental reason and presentist preference for knowledge over wisdom, our culture has become imbalanced in favor of left-hemispheric ways of thinking: analytical, abstract, and focused on decontextualized parts rather than wholes. As a result, our perspective has become fragmented, and the values of efficiency, utility, and technical control have triumphed over the pursuit of meaning, connection, beauty, and holiness.
Much of the psychic and spiritual pain we feel is because we know in our hearts we have created an inhospitable home, a culture that doesn’t support our deepest longings. As McGilchrist writes, “we should be appropriately skeptical of the left hemisphere’s vision of a mechanistic world, an atomistic society, a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines—not even very good ones, at that.”1 The truth, as the physicist David Böhm observed, is that the universe is not a collection of objects, but rather a web of relationships.
The consequences of being blind to the relational nature of reality can perhaps most clearly be seen by comparing industrial and traditional farming. Industrial farming approaches land as a resource to be used for maximum short-term profit and is usually marked by monoculture, heavy use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and the pursuit of ever larger scale. Such practices often result in soil degradation, water pollution, reduced biodiversity, and impoverished rural communities.
In contrast, in traditional farming, the farm is cared for as a whole, with each component— water, soil, plants, animals, humans—considered a vital part and deserving of nurture and attention. Under this kind of holistic care, farms can provide perpetual abundance. As the farmer and writer Wendell Berry has written, “the farmer has put plants and animals into a relationship of mutual dependence, and must perforce be concerned for balance or symmetry . . . [for] the whole complex of problems whose proper solutions add up to health: the health of the soil, of plants and animals, of farm and farmer, of farm family and farm community, all involved in the same internested, interlocking pattern.”2
Discerning the pattern that Berry describes is to see with a more expansive perspective. It is to begin to see as God does, with love and concern for the whole of creation, for each sparrow, for each soul. We have been called to bring forth Zion, to become “of one heart and one mind.”3 I don’t believe that means that we think or feel in exactly the same way, but rather we live the truth that the flourishing of one requires the flourishing of all, that we are each beloved members of God’s family, and that we are each wrapped up in the great shared story of Christ’s redemption. When we join our hands together, we can build a new City of Holiness, and in the process, find our “hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another.”
Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare.
Art by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal
BROWSE ALL OF ISSUE 3
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), xxvi.
Wendell Berry, “Solving for Pattern,” in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 137.
Moses 7:18. 4. Mosiah 18:21.
Yes, yes, yes!
Love this topic! I agree that McGilchrist’s work is extremely relevant to the challenges of our time and has profound theological and religious implications. His work on the brain has led him to the following conclusion: “Relationships are prior to ‘relata’ meaning relationships are not only more important than the entities related but are ontologically prior to them so that things arise out of a web of interconnectedness, not a web out of things” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxgLQRlFexU). If relationality is the ultimate ground of reality, it seems to converge with what Orthodox Christianity attempts to explain with the Trinity as well as the LDS concept of ultimate laws upon which God’s existence is predicated (2 Nephi 2:11-13; Alma 42:22-25). Additionally, I believe it necessitates the reality of a personal and corporeal God, such as was revealed through Joseph Smith, who learned to completely participate in this ultimate pattern, which the polarizing figure Jordan Peterson described as the pattern of “…voluntary sacrifice in devotion to atonement.” Further I believe it affords us greater understanding in grappling with the paradox of the one and the many or diversity and unity. I don’t think it can be said any better than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - “In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” As we continue to move into a world increasingly dominated by a left-brained orientation that values certainty, control and being “right” over right-relationship, we will likely experience greater polarization and fragmentation in our society. However, this is exactly the ideal environment to manifest the power of godliness. Both our religious concepts of Zion and eternal life are fundamentally relational in nature and can only be realized to the extent that we are willing to submit to the tension of polarity, but I think that is exactly what Jesus Christ embodies and is the work of love he calls us to.