Please pretend you’ve never been exposed to the vacuous pop culture conception of “left brain for logic, right for creativity”. It’s not that this is necessarily wrong, but it’s woefully insufficient. Both brain hemispheres have some part to play in almost every activity we do, but, as I will outline here, the two brain hemispheres execute fundamentally different perceptual strategies, both of which we use all the time in varying proportion.

The split-brain architecture of the human being is not unique to us. A bird needs to manipulate its immediate surroundings to survive: pick up twigs, peck seeds. This requires the sort of precise and targeted attention which the left hemisphere specializes in. But to give the reins entirely over to the left hemisphere would be to become oblivious to all except the next seed to be pecked at, and this is unacceptable. You must, in parallel, maintain an awareness of a different nature: nonspecific vigilance to your general surroundings. The threat of predation may demand an immediate response at any time, and only the vigilant bird with a functioning right hemisphere can act quickly enough to escape the predator.

Quick question: what is a metaphor and why are metaphors so important? Does the metaphor distract from the “real meaning”, or is it the thing that allows for the creation of a meaning in the first place? I would argue that the metaphorical understanding is deeper and more meaningful than the literal meaning, generally speaking.

Albert Einstein once claimed that if you truly understand something, you can explain it to a 6 year old in a way that they can also grasp your meaning. How can you ever get this little inexperienced creature to understand you if not by metaphor? It takes real fluidity and depth of conceptual understanding to conjure an explanatory metaphor out of the elements of a 6 year old’s perceptual experience. Literal meaning is a peripheral and diminished form of the richness of metaphorical understanding.

The left hemisphere of your brain does not deal with things that are fluid and indefinite. The left hemisphere sees a clustering of trees where the right would see a forest. The left hemisphere hears an annoying succession of unrelated point-like musical notes where the right would hear a song (see: amusia). We are constantly doing a little form of perceptual calculus, our left hemisphere is grabbing discrete slices of the world and our right hemisphere is integrating them into a continuous whole.

“For example, if you - and this experiment has been done - if you disable, temporarily, the right temporoparietal junction - which you can do with a painless procedure - and ask people to solve moral problems, they give quite bizarre answers to them based on entirely utilitarian understanding of them. An example is, a woman is having coffee with her friend. She puts what she thinks is sugar in her friend’s coffee but it’s in fact poison, and the friend dies. Scenario two, a woman is having coffee with her friend who she hates. She wants to poison her. And she puts what she thinks is poison in the coffee, but it’s sugar, and the friend lives. Which was the morally worse scenario?

Now, all of us using our intact brains say, well, the one in which she intended to kill her friend. But no. If you disable the right hemisphere, the good old left hemisphere says, well, obviously, the one in which she died. The consequence is what matters. So values are not well-appreciated, I think, by the left hemisphere.” - Iain McGilchrist

If you have an intact corpus callosum, your two hemispheres are constantly teaching one another in their respective styles. This applies to nearly every individual human, so we can imagine a collective manifestation in some form as well.

I will now depict many centuries of human history in a few recklessly broad strokes of my yellow crayon.

The Renaissance (meaning “rebirth”) happened in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. This, I think, was the single most important event in Western culture since the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire almost a thousand years prior.

You could spend the rest of your life reading about the Renaissance, but honestly I would not encourage you to do this. We are here not to stare at a tree but to lose ourselves in a forest.

The major thing that emerged from the Renaissance was the human being’s total and complete re-conceptualization of itself. We will call this self-conceptualization humanism, and we will say that Medieval humanism gave way to Renaissance humanism.

Now I want to explain to you why you’ll probably never again hear anyone utter the oxymoron that is Medieval humanism. Humanism in general is defined as any system of thought or action with merely human interests or with those of the human race in general. Now I know what you may be thinking: “But Fernando, you just described every system! A good definition describes something, a useless definition describes everything.”

AHA! I’ve got you right where I want you. The truth is, that during the time period between the fall of Rome and the Italian Renaissance, we forgot about humanism and it withered and died, hence it needed to be reborn. If you’re currently struggling to imagine a human world which rests on a non-humanist foundation, you’re doing great. You will never manage to do it though, and that is what makes it a dramatic transformation comparable to our original expulsion from the paradise of Eden. The world of medieval western Europe was largely one without the influence of social or political ideology, which sits at the core of every “-ism”.

With the advent of humanism comes a new level of self-awareness. With awareness comes the many-headed “-ism” with which we ensnare ourselves and forget our past. We took the world upon our own shoulders, and we as creatures of dualistic architecture set the ideological pendulum ever swinging, ever a reflection of ourselves.

After the Renaissance comes the Enlightenment, marked by zealous worship of the scientific method and by the naive optimism of a child fresh to the world. To me, it is plain to see which hemisphere we were giving priority at this time. Reason, logic, and empirical evidence reign supreme, rationality will be our salvation where divinity failed. We revel in our newfound ability to manipulate the world around us, to categorize and divide and to justify and argue. Authority judged as arbitrary is systematically rejected and religious tolerance finds a foothold. There is a palpable belief in the infallibility of logic and reason which defines this age.

And yet, nothing lasts. People become disillusioned with reductionism, people widely refuse to accept the notion that they are only biological machines, they cringe with uncertainty when they look back over the shoulder at mother nature’s desecration, the price for…. for what? Advances in technology and medicine improve our material quality of life, but what does this really mean, and how valuable is it? We feel we have abandoned the individuality that makes us human, makes us alive. Romanticism bursts onto the scene, in furious attempts to reclaim something it has trouble identifying with any precision. All we know is that we’re through reducing the world to seconds and inches, we value women and children and nature, because these things make life worth living. I see in this transition a wrenching back of the steering wheel by the collective right hemisphere of humanity.

The spread and advance of the Industrial Revolution has a sobering effect, cold water thrown onto the creasing folds of the right hemisphere. Art takes on a more utilitarian character: we want to depict the struggles around us and we’re done with the idealism and escapism of Romanticism. Such theatrical exaggeration is in bad taste, can’t you hear the dreadful moaning of the Sisyphean laborers? What about the cracking and the breaking of their bodies? Romantic art is a distraction, we need the comfort of feeling understood and not the disrespect of feeling misrepresented. Realism dutifully walks onto the stage, and it already looks tired. Does it realize that we’ve already come full circle? If we’re faithful to our characterization of realism as left-hemisphere dominated, the answer is no. It realizes only that we are in pain and despair and it may be able to provide us with some limited relief. What else is art for, after all?

Next comes spiritual Armageddon, the mechanized slaughter of WW1. Where is your God? Where is morality, where is reason? Where are we?

We feel we need to distance ourselves from our past, from whatever went so horribly wrong. This tug of war between hemispheres cannot be allowed to continue, we must find a way to break out of a duality in which neither alternative can save us from ourselves. We partition off the past by naming the next era Modernism, and the following Post Modernism. Maybe I will talk about those someday, I don’t have the desire today.

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