‘Both Brains Required’ is an allusion to Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009).

McGilchrist, a neuroscientist and humanities scholar, makes a compelling case not only that our left and right brains perceive the world in fundamentally different ways – complementary, but in tension – but also that the long arc of human history reveals left-brain ways of thinking and being inexorably asserting themselves over right-brain ways, in slowly accelerating fashion. The ‘older’, foundational right-brain ‘Master’ has been usurped by the ‘newer’, instrumental left-brain Emissary.

‘My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.’

Iain McGilchrist
Left and right brain hemispheres see the world differently.
(With apologies to the neuroscientists who will know that this image is technically the wrong way around! In fact, the left brain hemisphere sees the right-hand side of the visual field and vice-versa. That is, the left brain does not see with the right eye, but with the right half of both eyes. So, the image should be flipped left-to-right, to be accurate, but is more intuitively left and right for the lay reader, as drawn.)  

Though McGilchrist bases his argument primarily on developments in the humanities – art, poetry, architecture and more – today’s primacy of economic thinking over ecological thinking, even in the face of a deteriorating global ecology, appears to be yet another manifestation of left-brain ascendancy.

Our left, ‘economic’, brains are ‘crowding out’ our right ‘ecological’, brains, creating overshoot problems our left brains cannot remedy because they uphold the sort of cognition that created the problems in the first place. As such, led by the Western mind, which has been most susceptible, humankind has collectively fallen into something of a left-brain runaway loop. As I’ve tried to express it, we have unwittingly trapped ourselves in the Matrix of the Emissary.

In a similar vein, another brain hemisphere specialist, Allen Schore has developed psychiatric models and treatments based around the need to honour and strengthen right brain processes – his ‘right brain to right brain’ therapy. What McGilchrist effectively encourages us to see is that Western culture might now benefit from a culture-scale version of ‘right brain’ therapy – a sort of right-brain renaissance.

The point is not that we need only right-brain or only left-brain thinking, but that both brains are required, not just the (left) one we keep using.

I cannot yet vouch for it, but McGilchrist has just published a new book to further develop his thesis: The Matter with Things (2021). At 1,500 pages over 2 volumes, I doubt it will make the bestseller list, but I suspect it will long outlast the books that do make such lists.

(Though it was not the original intention, I have subsequently realized that the combination of my prose and Matt’s illustrations is a small nod to practicing what my website title preaches. The sheer structure of text – necessarily one word after another – engages linear, sequential, left-brain thinking to build up an argument step by step, while pictures can often convey Gestalt, ‘all at once’, ‘aha!’ comprehension, which the right brain excels at.)