The left hemisphere tends to be stubbornly certain, whereas the right acknowledges ambiguity and is always uncertain🧠
The left hemisphere prioritizes things that it already knows and expects, so the left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things that we make are more certain: we know them inside out, because we put them together. They’re not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp. Because the right hemisphere sees things as they are, they’re constantly new for it, so it has nothing like the databank of categories that the left hemisphere has. Also, the left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context, and the right hemisphere is better at dealing with fluidity and motion, whereas the left is better at dealing with things in stasis. The right hemisphere cannot have the certainty of knowledge that comes from being able to fix things and isolate them. In order to remain true to what is, it does not form abstractions, and categories that are based on abstraction, which are the strengths of denotative language.
By contrast, the right hemisphere’s interest in language lies in all the things that help to take it beyond the limiting effects of denotation to connotation: it acknowledges the importance of ambiguity. It therefore is virtually silent, relatively shifting and always uncertain—it is model agnostic—where the left hemisphere, by contrast, may be unreasonably, even stubbornly, convinced of its own correctness—it is idolatrous. As John Cutting puts it, despite ‘an astonishing degree of ignorance on the part of the left (supposed major) hemisphere about what its partner, the right (supposed minor) hemisphere, [is] up to, [it] abrogates decision-making to itself in the absence of any rational evidence as to what is going on’.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (p. 162). London, UK: Yale University Press.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:☀️