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608 pages, Hardcover
First published October 30, 2009
"One of my favourites is this list, a slide I sometimes use in lectures with the health warning in the title: ‘Right and…WRONG!’
Although there is nothing unusual here, and it is actually one of the more nuanced such summaries on the web, the nuances don’t help – because they are wrong. There is only one pairing here that is broadly correct. All the others are false, sometimes so badly that they represent the inverse of what is known to be the case..."
Part One: The Divided Brain
In "The Divided Brain", McGilchrist digests study after study, replacing the popular and superficial notion of the hemispheres as respectively logical and creative in nature with the idea that they pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented. These two modes of perception cascade into wildly different hemispheric personalities, and in fact reflect yet a further asymmetry in their status, that of the right's more immediate relationship with physical bodies (our own as well as others) and external reality as represented by the senses, a relationship that makes it the mediator, the first and last stop, of all experience.
Part Two: How the Brain Has Shaped Our World
In the second part, "How the Brain Has Shaped Our World", the author describes the evolution of Western culture, as influenced by hemispheric brain functioning, from the ancient world, through the Renaissance and Reformation; the Enlightenment; Romanticism and Industrial Revolution; to the modern and postmodern worlds which, to our detriment, are becoming increasingly dominated by the left brain.
"What phenomenological investigation reveals is that our primary experience of the world is not of objects in space, but of a complex, interwoven field of presences and absences, a seamless and constantly shifting web of possibilities."