The right hemisphere is able to integrate individual aspects of things into a coherent whole whereas the left sees only separate entities
The contrast between the differing world views of the two brain hemispheres is brought into focus in a remarkable way by the issue of sameness and difference. For example, an individual could be seen as an infinite number of serial moments, experiences and perceptions (as the left hemisphere would see it), which are of course (at least as far as the right hemisphere is concerned) a single whole. This is because the right hemisphere sees the whole first, and then the left hemisphere separates it into parts.
Your wife or husband who left the house this morning may be in a different mood or have a different haircut by the evening, but this doesn’t present a problem of identification, because these separate slices of experience, these separate frames of the film, as the left hemisphere would see it, are not really separate at all—they are the different aspects of one unique whole.
But with certain right hemisphere deficits, the capacity for seeing the whole is lost, and subjects start to believe they are dealing with different people. They may develop the belief that a person they know very well is actually being ‘re-presented’ by an impostor, a condition known, after its first describer, as Capgras syndrome. Small perceptual changes seem to suggest a wholly different entity, not just a new bit of information that needs to be integrated into the whole: the significance of the part, in this sense, outweighs the pull of the whole.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (108). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:☀️