The laziness of the left hemisphere mindset

If only scientists were more scientific

The following post came to my attention on the substack of Matt Whiteley. His post has much to commend it, above all for conveying the necessary truth that there are limits to what science can tell us. Holding this point of view is not, of course, anti-scientific, but exactly the reverse. It's because I respect science so greatly for what it can tell us that I'm keen to protect it from the ignorant zeal of the scientistic, who claim for it what it can never do.

I have written about this elsewhere, but, in short, science is entitled to exclude from its purview whatever it likes, but it inevitably then forfeits the right to have anything to say about what it has excluded. It is entitled, for instance, to exclude all matters of value and purpose, which since the end of the 17th century it largely has; and this has proved very fruitful in certain (albeit circumscribed) respects. What it is not entitled to say at the end of its searchings is that it found no values or purpose. In an image I owe to CS Lewis, it would be like a policeman stopping all the traffic in a street, and then writing solemnly in his notebook, ‘the silence in this street is very suspicious’.

This mistake is due to a kind of sloppy thinking which permeates much of what passes for the philosophy of science, because many of its practitioners are not really interested in philosophy. Indeed they often dismiss it as irrelevant and a waste of time. Yet the practice of science involves, whether you like it or not, being aware of what it is that you are doing – and equally not doing; and that is part of philosophy.

As you will see Matt Whiteley takes to task, in an admirably gentle way, a man called Tommy Blanchard whose style is the typical swashbuckling of those who have a poor case and cannot be bothered to do their homework. I have never heard of Mr Blanchard, so I have no reason to take against him at the outset, but on the basis of the paragraph quoted, I’d consider him a rhetorician of low to average skill, but a rather poor scientist.

There are other attempts to make a fuss about the asymmetries in the brain, like Iain McGilchrist’s speculations that the left hemisphere being dominant explains all of Western civilization’s ills. Like the older mythology tying creative versus analytic modes of thinking to specific hemispheres, these claims don’t line up with the evidence, rely on speculative psychological models with little evidence, and go far beyond the neurological facts.

A good scientist doesn't dismiss a point of view based on science until he has satisfied himself that the evidence against that point of view outweighs the evidence for it. But this involves some hard work and an open mind. Does Mr Blanchard speak with the authority of either? I somehow doubt it.

As you see, he speaks of my work as one of a number of ‘attempts to make a fuss about the asymmetries in the brain.’ Well, that's helpful, since it tells you all you need to know about his objective approach to an area of indisputable biological fact. To be more of a scientist, he would, like me, have had to spend the odd half-hour – or, in my case, three or four decades – researching, studying and evaluating the scientific literature on the topic; and why would he do that when he just knows it must be wrong before he starts? More to the point, since the science establishment is not, at least at its lower and intermediate levels, noted for its openmindedness, it would mean a career that went nowhere, since everyone else also just knows it must be wrong without bothering to do the work. There is a genuine problem here for anyone wishing to understand any fascinating and important topic that has been wrongly neglected. You have to risk everything exploring it. Fortunately some people are prepared to do so, but it takes stamina, and no-one will allow them to get away with empty rhetoric.

No, the phrase ‘making a fuss’ seems to me more of an expression of an awareness at some level that this is a whole area which modern cognitive psychology has till recently tended to dismiss, but perhaps shouldn’t have - how very irritating of some people to point this out! Not having taken it into account might compromise the validity of my research! I haven't got time now to try and understand it! It’s all a fuss about nothing.

It is true that most of the pop psychology about hemisphere differences that was current 40 years ago was wrong. But that was because, blinkered by the machine model, psychologists had asked of each hemisphere the machine question – ‘what does it do?’ – and in the fullness of time got answers suggesting that each hemisphere was involved in everything. But of course answers are only as good as the questions that are asked. If they had asked instead the question more appropriate to part of a person, ‘how does each hemisphere attend to the world?’, they would have found an immense body of coherent evidence that pointed to something profound. But, alas, psychology is, ironically enough, still probably more at home with machines than people.

I can't see how a scientist could be satisfied with having no explanation for the (apparently) wasteful division of the brain, its obvious asymmetries in structure and function, and the role of the corpus callosum in mutual inhibition. In any case, I wasn't, and I set about finding out answers – well-validated answers that led to further insights into human nature that have made the long journey worthwhile. It is only in addressing observations that are puzzlingly hard to explain that science moves forward.

If Mr Blanchard had studied my work in any depth he would not liken it to what he calls the ‘older mythology’, from which I dissociate myself at the outset. But to be fair he is likening it only for the purpose of establishing, at least to his satisfaction, that any claims I make ‘don’t line up with the evidence, rely on speculative psychological models with little evidence, and go far beyond the neurological facts’.

These are audacious claims. To put them in context, in The Master and his Emissary I cite around 2,000, and in The Matter with Things around a further 6,000, scholarly papers and books in support of the picture that I lay out in painstaking, and possibly for one or two readers even obsessional, detail. I did so precisely because I didn’t want people to be able to say that there was no scientific support for my position. I have given evidential support, usually from more than one source, for almost every individual ‘claim’ in some 1,300 pages, and there are a further 180 pages of bibliography. I don’t know many scientific works that have that degree of evidential support. And I am not sure how Mr Blanchard knows that my claims don’t ‘line up’ with it. Has he really done what would be required to show that his grand dismissal was scientifically valid, rather than an undisprovable, and therefore irresponsible, slur on an entire lifetime’s work, a slur unworthy of a serious scientist?

The next element in his carefully crafted appraisal reports ‘speculative psychological models with little evidence’. I suspect that this is just a way of making the same point, but since it didn’t work the first time round, I suspect it is simply verbal padding to make it sound as though he has more of an argument than he does. Admittedly it now contains the word ‘speculative’, a word with a long history of being used to dismiss new ideas that not infrequently turned out in the long run to become established science. There is, true, the novelty of the word ‘models’ here. But what is he talking about? Which ‘models’ are speculative, and what here is supposed to be ill-evidenced? The ‘models’ themselves? Or the findings that are supposedly based on these ‘models’?

Finally we come to the old chestnut, going ‘far beyond the neurological facts’. Oh dear, oh dear. If this means thinking intelligently about the implications of scientific findings, I plead guilty. Galileo went far beyond the scientific observations he made in order to reconceive the known universe. Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg, to name but a few, went far beyond the observations they made to a new vision of matter, consciousness and the wider cosmos. Darwin did it - every great scientist does this, because it means thinking, not just observing. Imagine them all just closing up their notebooks at the end of the day and saying ‘that's weird, but there we are – I just record the data. I wonder what's for supper tonight?’ Of course they did no such thing. They went ‘far beyond the facts’ to write philosophically interesting and sophisticated lectures and books that have transformed the way we think of reality, both inanimate and animate. Thank goodness they committed the sin of going beyond the facts. I’d dare to say that without it they would not even have been scientists in the true sense of the word, but mere drudges.

But you see – and apologies to Mr Blanchard who won't like this, of course – if I'm right, anyone who has really bought into the mechanistic vision in science will have a certain cast of mind: one that is rigid, convinced that it knows what it is talking about even when it doesn’t, and hostile to anything new. Such a mind won't be changed by anything I or anyone else can say. For this reason, science moves on only when a few remarkable and imaginative scientists see beyond the limitations of such a mindset. Anyway, here endeth …. and please do enjoy Matt Whiteley’s piece.

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Recently Substack’s Tommy Blanchard wrote a thoroughly interesting article on the question of the brain’s two hemispheres and right handedness, and in passing commented on Iain McGilchrist’s popular theory that the problems of the modern world are due to the overemphasis of the left hemisphere:

There are other attempts to make a fuss about the asymmetries in the brain, like Iain McGilchrist’s speculations that the left hemisphere being dominant explains all of Western civilization’s ills. Like the older mythology tying creative versus analytic modes of thinking to specific hemispheres, these claims don’t line up with the evidence, rely on speculative psychological models with little evidence, and go far beyond the neurological facts.

Unlike Tommy I am ill-qualified to comment on the neuroscience of McGilchrist’s hugely ambitious theory of everything, nor on what the general neuroscience community thinks of McGilchrist. However unlike Tommy (I’m presuming) I happen to have read both volumes of McGilchrist’s immense book The Matter with Things, both of which are the size of a substantial textbook, and if I may say, I think Tommy sells him a little short. The book is vastly researched and draws on a huge amount of neuroscience literature and studies of conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, not to mention engaging with an absurdly vast realm of philosophy, and even if McGilchrist is ultimately over-egging the relationship of the hemispheres, which my impression is that he may well be, he is certainly not doing so lazily.

Yet there is something strange you might observe about McGilchrist’s work. Let’s say that tomorrow everything he claimed about hemisphere specialisation was shown to be completely false. It’s interesting to consider that everything else that he argues would, if you accept it, still be true. In other words, as far as his argument goes, his claims are at the very least ‘metaphorically’ true either way. If there are ways of thinking or attending to the world that can blind us, and if narrow focus should be subordinated to an integrated picture, then his idea works either way as an analogy.

This raises a strange question about what neuroscience can actually help us know about ourselves. Since McGilchrist offers no claim about how the apparent change of hemispheric control comes about, and since it seems his belief about the cause seems to exist in the things he bemoans rather than in some pathology of the brain itself, you could argue the neuroscience is strangely, well, irrelevant. He doesn’t even need it to make any of the arguments he makes in order to make his points about what he believes we have lost or the ways we have blinded ourselves.

But The Matter with Things, or it’s previous shorter incarnation The Master and His Emissary, are books that when you have read them stay with you. One of the reasons his works seem to have gained so much popularity is that it enables people to have some compass for what it means to think about yourself as ‘a brain,’ not because of some reductionist ontology but because of a realising that we take for granted something about the way we think and absorb the world, that we can think and pay attention to the world in ways that seem to entirely change the way the world is, and that our brain is the means by which we apprehend it.

By exhaustingly reviewing various forms of pathology that can occur within the brain, McGilchrist’s project is essentially to show or to argue that certain ways of thinking about the world which we may deem to be entirely superior are in fact pathological unless yoked to a more implicit set of assumptions that we take for granted, and that even within a healthy brain we can elevate those ways of thinking to the obscuring of what once may have seemed obvious. Thus he is making a kind of double argument, one philosophical, one neuroscientific.

Whether on the neuroscience side this distinction actually boils down to a clear separation between the hemispheres strikes me as much more uncertain, at the very least an open question, although as I said, I am not qualified to say. What McGilchrist is doing though is far nearer to the employment of neuroscience as a kind of analogy, a way of thinking about how we think and attend to the world. To say the science is wrong is to slightly miss the point, some of the overall claims may be open to revision, but the basic research of various forms of brain pathology on which he draws simply is what it is, and his employment of them to make examples of problems with contemporary thinking is more profound than his critics, and sometimes even his fans, give him credit. In some sense, he is comparing patterns of thought or ways of thinking, showing that in the wrong context ways we assume to be superior can be characteristic of states of delusion without that part of us that holds things in a more implicit context.

It’s interesting then to apply McGilchrist’s theory to his theory itself. Critics have pointed out that one of the things he bemoans is materialism and reductionism, yet a theory based entirely on the functioning of the brain to explain all of the modern ills is oddly, well, reductionist. Yet I don’t think this is so. From McGilchrist’s perspective it seems that there is a distinction between what you might call the map and the territory. Brain science can help us think about thinking not because it’s what is ‘really’ going on in a way that robs the brain of the mind but because it offers us way of better understanding our own phenomenological position, here, where it isreally going on. To deny reductionism doesn’t mean to deny the obvious fact that you are your brain, after all, McGilchrist bases large amounts of his argument on evidence drawn from things that can go very wrong with a person’s thinking as a result of something going wrong with the brain. But it is based on a claim that the opposite is also true, that belief, love, beauty and all the things he argues we have demoted can also change us from the top down. He writes in The Matter with Things about the placebo effect as an example of the mind-body relationship not simply being a one way causal relationship reducible to the brain:

The belief that a substance will produce a cure (placebo) -or harm (nocebo)- is a potent predictor that it will do so even if the substance is inert. Although it is one of the most familiar and best attested phenomena in medicine (and one of the most reliable and effective), the mechanism by which the placebo operates has been little researched, for, I suspect, three main reasons: there is no money in it for drug companies — perhaps the reverse; it is an embarrassment to the reductionist materialist mainstream in biological research; and there is little chance of a mechanism being found soon. Recent reviews of the phenomenon demonstrate the chasm open between the silence of neuroscientists when when contemplating the interaction between mind and brain, and their fluency when on home ground, dealing with the brain and body as a closed system.

The point he is making more widely is that reality discloses itself to us in a realm in which beliefs, intentions, meaning, purpose and value are self evident facts, our attention to which can change what the world becomes to us, and that these facts are rejected by a reductionist view of the brain. The claim that may be harder to truly evidence, is that if we are to choose the aspect of reality that is ‘really real,’ it is not the causal properties of matter or function but the implicit, flowing, interconnected whole of conscious experience.

And as McGilchrist passionately argues, there are some reasons why this matters, and I think if you look around there are clear examples that vindicate something of the claims he makes. Let us take as perhaps an archetypical example a quote by physicist Lawrence Krauss in a lecture for his book A Universe from Nothing, a lecture for which Richard Dawkins gave a personal glowing introduction, expressing a view that could not be further from the view McGilchrist is arguing for:

“We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a one percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.”

It’s worth taking some time to dwell on this statement. Krauss claims science objectively tells us something that affirms an evaluation of value, because of apparent discoveries in physics, we now know that we are a bit of rubbish, we are insignificant.

How do we know that, though? How does one evaluate significance? If there were trillions of other conscious beings on every other planet all of which were cleverer than us, would that make us more or less significant than now, when we seem to be an island on the ocean of the cosmos? Does our apparent uniqueness make us special or insignificant? The problem is that science doesn’t answer these questions, we do. To most people, the fact that there are trillions of galaxies is actually the fact that is really irrelevant since it’s bearing on their phenomenal world is precisely zero. The reality is it is people like Krauss who want to see us as insignificant because it ironically boosts their own sense of self-importance in being the ones who get to say so, and what they claim science tells us it simply doesn’t. If we are being absolutely objective science must be silent about claims of value or significance.

Not only that, what are the moral implications meant to be of calling us insignificant pollution? What is its pragmatic cash value? No doubt to you the people you love have near infinite value precisely because you love them not because of some relation to the physics of the cosmos, because you believe that they matter.

If we employ McGilchrist’s analogy here, the arguments of people like Krauss can clearly be seen as a kind of pathological demoting of certain implicit forms of value in favour of those argued for by detached, meaning deprived sequences of argument that, by claiming to be better revealing the world, oddly obscure it. Krauss’ error is not only a mistaking of the map for the territory, but of holding up the map and saying “look, you don’t matter!” If McGilchrist’s entire project does nothing than attempt to rehabilitate the idea that you matter profoundly, I would argue that even if his overall theory is mixed, as Krauss’ theory of the ‘nothing’ that produced the universe may be, McGilchrist is employing that science in a way that is far more pragmatically useful. At the very least, he seems to have a basic understanding that the science is always an abstraction, a metaphor, a tool. It is we who go seeking its knowledge, and we who decide what to do with it. Unless, that is, we have forgotten ourselves along the way. I don’t think McGilchrist’s theory of the two brains has to be neuroscientifically vindicated in its every detail for it to be true that in many ways, we have.

None of that means that McGilchrist’s claims about the brain shouldn’t be open to criticism, nor that there aren’t areas where the science shouldn’t be taken beyond its bounds. But contrary to the projections of philosophers such as Paul and Patricia Churchland who believe that the future lies in replacing our “folk philosophy” of terms like belief or love or will with the language of brain states, science will always need to be taken from its domain into the wider domain in which we apply it where such symbolic and abstract meaning will and should always be the currency of what matters. This is where other ways of thinking are important, and where they will remain important, in the realm in which you and I are and always were.

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