The Battle of the Brain

from WSJ:

The right hemisphere's take on the world is far more complex and nuanced. Instead of distinct mechanisms, the right hemisphere sees interconnected, living, embodied entities. In communication the right hemisphere recognizes all that is nonverbal, metaphorical, ironic or humorous, where the left is literalistic. The right is at ease with ambiguity and the idea that opposites may be compatible.

There is a reason we have two hemispheres: We need both versions of the world.

Without the right hemisphere, we are socially and emotionally insensitive, and have an impaired understanding of beauty, art and religion...Meanwhile, without the left hemisphere, we struggle to bring detail into focus.

Yet in the West there has been such an imbalance. And as a consequence, over the past 2,500 years, there has been a kind of battle going on in our brains...an ever greater reliance on the left hemisphere.

...with the beginnings of the Enlightenment, there again saw a shift in mentality towards what is certain, rigid, fixed and simplified. The left hemisphere was fighting back, pushing for a renewed emphasis on symmetry and stasis. Ambiguity was no longer a sign of richness, but of obscurity. Imagination was mistrusted and metaphor became a lie. Rationalism came to replace the humane balance implied in reason. And with these developments came a rise in the mechanical model as the only framework for understanding ourselves and the world.

This led to our own age, to a world where the right hemisphere, with its broader view, has been systematically discounted.

The two hemispheres also differ in their attitude to their differences. The right hemisphere is inclusive in its attitude to what the left hemisphere might know, but the left hemisphere is exclusive of the right. Where the right hemisphere's world responds to negative feedback, the left hemisphere gets locked ever further into its own point of view. Its capacities are limited to doing the same things it has always done, and no more.

And so our world has become increasingly rule-bound. Loss of the implicit damages our ability to convey, or even to see at all, aspects of ourselves and our world that transcend the mechanistic. Perspective in art has receded along with harmony in music: We tend more and more to see the world as a heap of intrinsically meaningless fragments.