In McGilchrist’s new book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, he spends a considerable number of pages discussing the relation of mental illness and other pathologies of the brain to the hemispheric balance. Schizophrenia and autism share a chapter. He provides lots of evidence that the loss of reality and related symptoms in schizophrenic subjects is due to an imbalance of the hemispheres with th left strongly dominating the right. That makes sense as the affected person is operating largely out of the disconnected hemisphere, and had limited connection to the actual… Read More
Continue ReadingApologies
Again, I apologize for the erratic posting schedule, but this time I do have a reason. As I was composing my to-be-my-next post, I realized that I was almost certainly misinterpreting McGilchrist’s work. I had been reading his new book, but only casually because I found it so daunting. But as I started to read it more closely, I realized it offered more clarity for some of the issues I was concerned about. Nothing much new about the general differences in the way the two hemispheres attend to the world and produce subsequent actions, but lots more about how they… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Myth of the Self (4): Caring Connects to the World
For those who haven’t been following closely, I will repost the table containing the several behaviors associated with the right-hemisphere. I have rearranged the rows in the order in which I discuss them in this series of blog posts. * Russell Ackoff’s ways to deal with messes. Right-hemisphere-dominant behavior types Caring is an especially important category because it has existential implications and is also partly constitutive of flourishing. Caring acts incorporate inputs from the contextual world presented to the right hemisphere. Empathy, sensing what is going on with another person and acting in accordance, guides much caring. But not all… Read More
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