The left hemisphere perceives time as a sequential series of fragmented individual moments
The right hemisphere is responsible for our sense of time as continuous and unified, but what is called temporal sequencing is an ambiguous concept. Being that the right hemisphere is able to integrate individual aspects of things into a coherent whole whereas the left sees only separate entities, then such sequencing, depending on what one means by that, may be right hemisphere dependent, or, at least where the sequence has no âreal worldâ meaning, as it would in a narrative, left hemisphere dependent. But sequencing, in the sense of the ordering of artificially decontextualised, unrelated, momentary events, or momentary interruptions of temporal flowâthe kind of thing that is as well or better performed by the left hemisphereâis not in fact a measure of the sense of time at all. It is precisely what takes over when the sense of time breaks down. Time is essentially an undivided flow: the left hemisphereâs tendency to break it up into units and make machines to measure it may succeed in deceiving us that it is a sequence of static points, but such a sequence never approaches the nature of time, however close it gets.
The right hemisphere is concerned with living things and the left with the non-living, and this is another instance of how something that does not come into being for the left hemisphere is re-presented by it in non-living, mechanical form, the closest approximation as it sees it, but always remaining on the other side of the gulf that separates the two worldsâlike a series of tangents that approaches ever more closely to a circle without ever actually achieving it, a machine that approximates, however well, the human mind yet has no consciousness, a Frankensteinâs monster of body parts that never truly lives.
A condition called palinopsia, in which there is disturbance and fragmentation of the normal flow of visual experience, or abnormal persistence over time of images, causing visual trails, is caused by posterior right hemisphere lesions; and similar phenomenaâloss of fluidity of motion through timeâin other modalities than sight are probably similarly associated with deficits in the right posterior cortex. Under such conditions the right hemisphere ability to perceive flow as a single, unified motion across time is lost. It becomes replaced, in the left hemisphereâs timeless, but mechanical world, by the summing of an infinite series of static moments, rather like the succession of frames in a cinĂŠ film, known as the Zeitraffer phenomenon.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (p. 157). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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Type:đ´ Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:âď¸