The distance from immediate experience offered by the frontal lobes can allow us to either exploit and use or to be empathetic
There is an optimal degree to which the frontal lobes create separation between our selves and the world we perceive, if we are to understand it, much as there is between the reader’s eye and the page: too much and we cannot make out what is written, but, equally, too little and we cannot read the letters at all. This ‘necessary distance’ is not the same as detachment. Distance can yield detachment, as when we coldly calculate how to outwit our opponent, by imagining what he believes will be our next move. It enables us to exploit and use. But what is less often remarked is that, in total contrast, it also has the opposite effect. By standing back from the animal immediacy of our experience we are able to be more empathic with others, who we come to see, for the first time, as beings like ourselves. The frontal lobes not only teach us to betray, but to trust. Through them we learn to take another’s perspective and to control our own immediate needs and desires. The evolution of the frontal lobes prepares us at the same time to be exploiters of the world and of one another, and to be citizens one with another and guardians of the world. If it has made us the most powerful and destructive of animals, it has also turned us, famously, into the ‘social animal’, and into an animal with a spiritual dimension.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 1 Asymmetry and the Brain (p. 49). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:☀️