Picture the headline - 'Life is Beautiful'
cultivating right brain thinking in a left brain world {PART TWO on the divided brain}
In the early years after the birth of my first child, life felt very much out of my control. Time moved in eddies and spurts rather than in straight lines. Night and day blurred. Not much made logical sense – why was my son awake at 3am one night, and not the night before? Why did my friends baby sleep and mine just howled and howled? Getting dressed, eating, showering were not things I could do without the help of someone else to hold and mind my high-needs son. I had very little autonomy. Life, time, who I thought I was, shattered. In an attempt to manage the sense of spiralling free fall I felt, for lack of much explanation or support, I grasped onto routines and structures and methods and formulas to try and make sense of this brave new world. In the hazy middle-of-the-night gaps and thin places I inhabited I often scrolled on my phone - saying yes, no, that goes there. Buy this, share this, click here. And I was encouraged in these behaviours by the books I was introduced to (No Cry Sleep Solution, 10 Steps to Wean Your Child, Sleep Training manuals), the social media I accessed and the care providers I encountered (‘babies love routine’, ‘plan your meals’, ‘keep lists’).
From the vantage point I have now, twelve years later, I can see that this was my left brain struggling to gain control in a free-fall situation. Trying to categorise and streamline my mothering, my son, my new born self. Trying to fit everything into tidy little boxes. Shoehorn everything in. It was the only way I knew to save myself from drowning. It was the way the world had taught me to survive and to function.
In his seminal book The Master and His Emissary, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Iain Mc Gilchrist proposes that it is not just me, but rather the whole of Western civilisation that has grown to place far too much value and emphasis on the ways of the left hemisphere.
Mc Gilchrist explains that both left and right hemispheres are vital to our functioning in the world but that for good evolutionary reasons the two pay attention to the world in two quite different ways. The left hemisphere helps us to grab things, to manipulate and categorise them (think hunter-gatherer seeking out prey), but not really to understand what it is we are grabbing or manipulating in a wider context. It necessarily reaches for immediate solutions (that’s a rabbit, that’s a stone, that’s a deer), casts aside anything that does not make logical sense, or that does not fit with what it thinks it knows.
It is with the right hemisphere that we find meaning in the world, that we invite depth and profundity and context. It is with the right hemisphere that we understand humour, poetry, fables, narratives, rituals. It allows for the unique case, it permits the and yet.
We have evolved to have both hemispheres functioning well, reading a situation in these two different ways. A hunter needs simultaneously to select and focus on his prey, and an ability to survey where he is, what the environment he is in is like, what is unique about this moment in time.
The issue in our modern day society though, is that we have gradually neglected the more synthetic, contradictory, bigger picture, nebulous ways of the right hemisphere. We have zoomed in and in, we have categorised and compartmentalised and separated out to an almost pathological degree. And it is destroying us.
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