The right hemispheres tendency for melancholy may be linked to its heightened capacity for empathy
The right hemisphere is more realistic but also more pessimistic and favors depression. There are links here with the right hemisphere’s tendency to melancholy: the right frontal lobe has a depressive stance, where as the left shows undue cheerfulness. If there is a tendency for the right hemisphere to be more sorrowful and prone to depression, this can, in my view, be seen as related not only to being more in touch with what’s going on (The left hemisphere filters experience into an abstract representation, while the right sees things without preconceptions), but more in touch with, and concerned for, others (the right hemisphere is responsible for our capacity for emotional understanding).
‘No man is an island’: it is the right hemisphere of the human brain that ensures that we feel part of the main. The more we are aware of and empathically connected to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, the more we are likely to suffer. Sadness and empathy are highly correlated: this can be seen in studies of children and adolescents. There is also a direct correlation between sadness and empathy, on the one hand, and feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility, on the other. Psychopaths, who have no sense of guilt, shame or responsibility, have deficits in the right frontal lobe, particularly the right ventromedial cortex and right orbitofrontal cortex.
Perhaps to feel at all is inevitably to suffer. The Greek word pathe, feeling, is related to pathos, an affliction, and to paschein, to suffer: the same roots are in our word ‘passion’ (and a similar development leads to the German word for passions, Leidenschaften, from the root leiden, to suffer). This is just one reason to doubt the easy equation between pleasure and happiness, on the one hand, and ‘the good’, on the other.
Intrinsically caring for another essentially involves a certain disposition, the disposition to experience sorrow at the other’s serious misfortune … To be just is to be disturbed by injustice. Pain, suffering, and the loss of pleasure, then, sometimes constitute who we are and what we value. They are essentially woven into our deepest commitments. As reasons flow from our deepest commitments, we will sometimes have non-instrumental reason to suffer. Once, when Berlioz sobbed at a musical performance a sympathetic onlooker remarked: ‘You seem to be greatly affected, monsieur. Had you not better retire for a while?’ In response, Berlioz snapped: ‘Are you under the impression that I am here to enjoy myself?’
When Lear cries, ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’, we could reply, on one level, yes – a defect in the right prefrontal cortex. But that just illuminates the fact that cruelty does not exist in ‘nature’: only humans with their left prefrontal cortex have the capacity for deliberate malice. But then only humans, with their right prefrontal cortex, are capable of compassion.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 2 What Do the Hemispheres Do (p. 170). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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