The Divided Brain

 

The structure of the human brain is based around two halves (with the exception of the pineal gland, but that's too long a story to tell right now!). The phrases "left brain" and "right brain" are often found in pop psychology. There's the idea that the left cerebral hemisphere is where logic and rational senses are processed and the right side is the home of art, music, poetry, spirituality and emotion. We even talk of "left brained people" who are skeptical, cold and conventional; and their right brain counterparts who are loving, caring and artistic. It's the modern equivalent of the "heart vs head" dichotomy. That is not quite right and is at least an oversimplification, but there is real science behind it. It turns out that the two sides of our brains are very different, each are almost centres of mind in themselves; and when they are separated by illness, accident or surgery all kinds of strange things happen. In the 1960's Dr Michael Gazzaniga started cutting the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that links the two halves and lets them communicate. This was not some evil experiment; it was intended as a last ditch treatment for sufferers of severe epilepsy. The operation had a strange side effect which led to a whole field of neurological research. One of the researchers is Dr Iain McGilchrist. I first came across him in one of my favourite documentaries, David Malone's Soul Searching, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpVY0ntkbtw and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G07xlVthPLI. He has written a book called The Master and his Emissary and this has been adapted into a film The Divided Brain. The film is a documentary that covers this subject very well and with a lot of style. It includes interviews with people who have suffered brain damage from injuries or strokes. One lady has damage to her right hemisphere and no can no longer see anything to the left of her, the visual field controlled by that side. When she writes something she starts at the middle of the paper. Jill Bolte Taylor became very famous for having a haemorrhagic stroke in her left hemisphere and she is interviewed in the film. Despite her disability she is better off than the first patient and has become an artist, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYD7Y9CXeUw.

Dr McGilchrist explains how the left brain is vital for the sense of self and language, but it sees things as disconnected functional fragments that don't cohere. It has no sense of depth and lives in the eternal present. It is the equivalent of a computer's serial processor. He makes it sound a bit like an NPC! The right brain is the opposite. It understands relationships between things, implied meaning and patterns of meaning. It seems that the left brain has a vested interest in keeping the right brain quiet. Maybe it feels relieved by the severing of the corpus callosum so it doesn't have to listen to its brother anymore and can rampage with freedom. Michael Gazzaniga is one of McGilchrist's hardest critics and totally disagrees. He has a lecture entitled "The Left Brain- Don't Leave Home Without It!" because he believes it does all the heavy lifting for our cognition. He credits the right hemisphere with having the intellect of a chimpanzee. There's a segment on children. It appears when we are born we start out with healthy brains and then as we grow we becomes what David Icke and Ian R Crane call "left brain prisoners". Education is all about the absorption and retention of facts without analysis. This is why we have this utilitarian and managerial attitude to life that means we destroy the environment because we don't understand how it connects to our own health and welfare. What the documentary does not say, and it lies way beyond its scope but I really think is true, is that education is not like that by accident; it is not some foolish blunder. It is engineered into that form deliberately so that the political classes can have a society of people they can control. They employ the best psychologists in the world, real malevolent geniuses. I knew one of them very well, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/10/am-i-gate-child.html. The movie has a scene with John Cleese who has become a big McGilchrist fan. I was intrigued to learn that Cleese found out about The Master and His Emissary from his fellow Monty Python Terry Gilliam. I shouldn't be surprised because Gilliam's own films are so wise and open-minded, especially Brazil, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/12/hanged-hangman.html and The Fisher King, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/08/robin-williams-dies.html. The implication of the whole film is that spirituality is a genuine phenomenon. Do watch The Divided Brain. If you like HPANWO then you will enjoy it. At the moment on Amazon UK it is a freebie with ads. See here for the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymkgfz0RTvg.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2023/06/afterlife-portal.html.