(I posted this first in October 2020 before the election. It seems right to repost it after the events of this week.) Anger is an emotion that arises when our left-brain determines that it has lost control of the situation. Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, offers evidence that anger, somewhat unique among emotions, is associated only with this hemisphere. In his divided-brain model, control and manipulation are the primary functions of this hemisphere. The left-brain is also the seat of power, both in the sense of dominating others and empowering success in consensual acts. Because anger and… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Divided Brain in Action
I have just finished reading My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor in which she describes having and recovering from a serious stroke. I have been aware of the book and the main plot line of her remarkable story, but hadn’t realized its close tie to McGilchrist’s work. She is not mentioned in his tome, but should have been highlighted, as she is a living example of his brain model. This post is quite long, but is worth reading right to the end. Taylor has a serious stroke involving the left-brain hemisphere that impaired her ability to walk, talk,… Read More
Continue ReadingAn Angry President Cannot Be A President
Anger is an emotion that arises when our left-brain determines that it has lost control of the situation. Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, offers evidence that anger, somewhat unique among emotions, is associated only with this hemisphere. In his divided-brain model, control and manipulation are the primary functions of this hemisphere. The left-brain is also the seat of power, both in the sense of dominating others and empowering success in consensual acts. Because anger and control or power-seeking are linked, the way that anger shows up signals what is happening in the brain, or, alternatively, to the… Read More
Continue ReadingLying, the Left-brain, and the President
As many others and I have written, the real world always wins, in the sense that no matter how much we think we are in control, outcomes result from whatever forces are at work out there. Objects will always fall down, not up, when we drop them. People will behave the way their brains tell them to, no matter how we think they should respond to our commands. Even proven scientific theories don’t work when the circumstances depart from those from which the theory was deduced. Newtonian mechanics do predict the path of a cannonball, but not how electrons in… Read More
Continue ReadingJohn Dewey and the Brain
I realize that the divided-brain model is unfamiliar and strange to most of my readers and followers. I included some examples of how it works in explaining a wide variety of social and individual actions in the book, but I will use this blog, from time to time, to point to additional examples. Today, I have an excerpt from John Dewey’s, Liberalism and Social Action. This work was published in 1935, relatively late in his extraordinarily long productive life. He wrote: Let me mention three changes that have taken place in one of the institutions in which immense shifts have… Read More
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