The right hemisphere is better at dealing with fluidity and motion, whereas the left is better at dealing with things in stasis
It has been suggested that, whereas the right hemisphere is required for the sustained ‘monitoring of temporal information’ (the right hemisphere is responsible for our sense of time as continuous and unified), the left hemisphere is more efficient for detection of brief temporal flow interruptions that are decontextualised. I believe this merely confirms the predilection for abstraction (The left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context), as well as the lack of capacity for perception of temporal flow (the left hemisphere perceives time as a sequential series of fragmented individual moments), in the left hemisphere. The critical point here is that the right hemisphere has an advantage where there is fluency of motion, or flow over time, but the left hemisphere an advantage where there is stasis, or focus on a point in time.
There is also an ambiguity in the idea of permanence. The left hemisphere seems to accept the permanence of something only if it is static. But things can change—flow—and yet have permanence: think of a river. The right hemisphere is able to integrate individual aspects of things into a coherent whole whereas the left sees only separate entities, so the right hemisphere perceives that there is permanence even where there is flow. Hence, when it is damaged, living beings have no permanency—the Capgras phenomenon.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (p. 158). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Neuropsychology Status:☀️