The divided brain, and the shortcomings of the left hemisphere.

‘Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole’ Iain McGilchrist

If someone can't see the wood for the trees in British English, or can't see the forest for the trees in American English, they are very involved in the details of something and so they do not notice what is important about the thing as a whole.

Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGichrist asserts that we construct our view of the world in two different ways, and that the reason for this is that we need to eat in order to stay alive, while not being eaten ourselves. For this purpose, nature has equipped us with a divided brain, where each of the hemispheres constucts our view of the world.

The world is re-presented to us in the left hemisphere of the brain which prioritizes the system, regardless of experience: It stays within the systems of signs. Truth for it is coherence, because for it there is no world beyond, no Other, nothing outside the mind, to correspond with. “That´s what it says here.” So it corresponds with itself: in other words, it coheres. The left hemisphere is concerned with narrow focus. In case of the bird, it is preoccupied with finding seeds on the ground, utilizing the right eye. The narrow focus of the left hemisphere, if left unchecked by the right hemisphere, can lead to wrong conclusions, because it is distracted by the familiarity of what it already thinks that it knows, and gets the answer wrong. It is the left hemispheres task to bring things into focus, to render the implicit explicit, in order that what is seen may become the object of our will. This is achieved by a certain kind of vision, since only vision, of all the human senses, can give truly detailed information, and give clear pinpointing in space, to guide our grasp. This clarity and fixity of the object is highly amenable to the world view of the left hemisphere: in fact it is only in the case of the left hemisphere, not of the right, that one can speak appropriately of a world “view” at all. The resulting illusion is of “clarity”, the ability to know something “just as it is”, as though everything about it were revealed through clear vision.

The right hemisphere of the brain on the other hand, has an open and wide-ranging attention.

In case of the bird, it would be concerned with observing the world beyond. While the right eye is focusing the left hemispheres attention on the seed, the left eye (in connection with the right hemisphere) is on the lookout for predators. The right hemisphere prioritizes what it learns from experience: the real state of things “out there”. For the right hemisphere, truth is not mere coherence, but correspondence with something other than itself. Truth, for it, is understood in the sense of something being “true” to something, faithfulness to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves. The right hemisphere is our “bullshit detector”. Detecting bullshit involves resisting the obvious, the usual train of thought. The right brain is the home of common sense; it is the devil´s advocate. The right hemisphere gives depth, as a sense of something lying “beyond”. Another way of thinking of this would be more generally in terms of the ultimate importance of context. Context is that “something” (in reality nothing less than a world) in whatever is seen inheres, and in which its being lies, and in reference to which alone it can be understood, lying both beyond and around it.

The problem with the “attentional spotlight”, as conventional psychological literature calls it, is that it isolates the object of attention froim its context – not just its surroundings, but the depth in which it lives. It opacifies it. Our vision stops at “the thing itself”. In a fasmous passage in the Meditations, Descartes speaks of looking from a window and seing men pass in the street. “Yet”, he reflects, “do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.” It is not surprising that, shorn by the philosophic stare of all context that might give them meaning, the coats and hats that Descartes sees from his window walking about in the street coulod be animated by a machine. They have become fully opaque; the observer no longer passes through them to see the living person beneath. He no longer sees what is implied. However, the attention of the right hemisphere, concerned as it is with the being in context, permits us to see through them to the reality that lies around them and beyond them. It could not make the mistake of seing the clothes and hats in isolation.

I highly recommend reading McGilchrists The Master and his Emissary from which I have selected some text passages above. https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-dp-0300245920/dp/0300245920/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

Or watch one of McGilchrists presentations on YouTube. I found this one to be particularly enlightening: