MasterAndHisEmissary
The Master and His Emissary (Iain McGilchrist)
Bailed towards the end. Interesting in points. 1st half like a lot of book reports. 2nd half mostly speculation. Sentence structure much too complicated. Way too repetitive.
Did not get to the point soon enough. Could have been 10x smaller
- There are massive hemisphere differences that lie at the core of what it means to be human.
- It is not what each hemisphere does, but how it does it that matters. Each hemisphere is involved in everything, true enough; just in a quite different way.
- I dont want it to be possible, after reading this book, for any intelligent person ever again to see the right hemisphere as the "minor" hemisphere.
- Enthusiasm for finding the key to hemisphere differences has waned, and it is no longer respectable for a neuroscientist to hypothesise on the subject.
- My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.
- The hemispheres coexist, but have fundamentally different set of values, and therefore priorities, which means that over the long term they are likely to come into conflict.
- it seems a reasonable bet that the brain will have left its mark on the world that we have brought about.
- The balance of power has shifted where it cannot afford to go – further and further towards the part-world created by the left hemisphere.
- The left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, parasitic on, the right. Though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-confidence.
- Left Hemisphere brings about an increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualized world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia an da feeling of emptiness.
- The way we experience the world, and even what there is of the world to experience, is dependent on how the brain functions.
- There are are more connections with in the brain than particles in the known universe.
- I hold that the cerebral hemispheres have for some time been in a state of conflict. The subsequent between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterize the history of Western culture.
- Lateralization brings evolutionary advantages, particularly in carrying out dual-attention tasks.
The left hemisphere yields narrow focused attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right yields broad, vigilant attention, for awareness of signals from the surroundings.
The right sees the whole, the left things abstracted from context and broken into parts
Attention is not just another "function" alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to.
Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world.
Attention also changes who we are, we who are doing the attending.
By thinking about certain sorts of people at all – we become objectively, measurably, more like them.
Attention is a moral act: it creates brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes other recede.
- The right hemisphere is bigger and has greater inter-connectivity compared with the left.
- The right hemisphere is responsible for every type of attention except focused attention.
- Music is the natural language of the right hemisphere.
- poetry evolved before prose.
- Chomsky's universal grammar remains remarkably speculative 50 years after he posited it.
- Most of the remarkable things about humans, the things that differentiate us from the animals, depend to a large extent on the right hemisphere. (In particular the right frontal lobe)
- Being and Time (Heidegger) our use of the term "being" makes us feel that we understand what being is, it hides the sense of radical astonishment we would have if we could truly understand it, and subverts our attempts to do so. (Similar to Cantors perception that treating infinity as just another kind of number stopped us understanding its nature and hence the nature of the world) We should not abandon language (like we didnt mathematics) just that we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine languages attempt to undermine our understanding.
The paradox of philosophy is that we need to get beyond what can be grasped or explicitly stated, but the drift of philosophy is always and inevitably back towards the explicit.
Explicitness ties us down to what we already know.
- The most highly evolved part of the brain, the frontal cortex, achieves what it does largely by negating (or not negating) other brain activity. The cortex's job is to prevent the inappropriate response rather than to produce the appropriate one.
The achievement of imitation – the meta-skill that enables all other skills – may explain the otherwise incomprehensibly rapid expansion of the brain in early hominids. From a gene there could arise a skill that would enable further evolution to occur not only more rapidly but in a direction of our own choosing.
Genes could free us from genes. The great human invention made possible by imitation, is that we can choose who we become, in a process that can move surprisingly quickly.
- The French and American revolutions are two of the most important and enduring legacies of the Enlightenment.
- Our modern culture is a collection of extremely merry things, viewed by extremely sad people who do not know what to do with them.