Introduction to The Master and his Emissary

One of the big books I read over the Sabbatical was Iain McGilChrist’s “The Master and his emissary”, along with an interdisciplinary academic discussion of his work and its implications for religion Religion, Brain & Behavior: Vol 9, No 4 (tandfonline.com)

The subtitle of the book is “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”. And that is a helpful summary of McGilchrist’s thesis. He starts by noting that the human brain has two sides (hemispheres) which have a relatively small connection, with much of the connection acting to inhibit the other side. Studies on patients who had this connection cut, and other brain injuries, are then used to try and understand how each side differs.

McGilchrist argues that the right and left cortical (outer layer of brain) hemispheres are separated in order to enable human beings (and other animals) to pay attention to and process the world in two different ways at the same time. He suggests that a bird needs both to focus on small objects, and distinguish seeds from small stones, while also being aware of the whole surrounding area, and especially alert to any predators. The left hemisphere (in humans associated with language production and tool manipulation) is the focused food hunting side. The right hemisphere (in humans associated with face recognition, emotion recognition and understanding of metaphor) is the more broad focus awareness of the world and our connection to it side.

Here he describes some of the main differences between the hemispheres:

One of the more durable generalisations about the hemispheres has been the finding that the left hemisphere tends to deal more with pieces of information in isolation, and the right hemisphere with the entity as a whole, the so-called gestalt—possibly underlying and helping to explain the apparent verbal/visual dichotomy, since words are processed serially, while pictures are taken in all at once.

And here he describes how they work together:

How the two hemispheres contribute to the richness of experience. Essentially this is that the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on it to clarify, ‘unpack’ and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding to produce a new, now enriched whole. Note that the two ways of attending are both necessary and, strictly speaking, incompatible, at least at the same level and at the same time.

McGilchrist provides a broad range of studies confirming differences in perception and processing between hemispheres. He also engages in historical and cultural analysis to argue that an imbalance towards the left hemisphere in modern society is a major problem. This is the link to the title: the right hemisphere is the master, who entrusts certain tasks to the emissary (left hemisphere) which is in turn meant to report back. But the emissary thinks he knows better, and takes control.

In future posts I aim to briefly look at the scientific evidence for “the divided brain” and McGilchrist’s cultural analysis, before moving to consider some implications for understanding religion and religious practices.