Shapiro J et al. Medical Humanities and their Discontents: Definitions, Critiques, and Implications. Acad Med 2009; 84(2):192-8.
So why this surprisingly aggressive assault by supposedly bright, well-intentioned medical students on something as civilized & prosocial as the "medical humanities"?
“My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe that they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.”
Iain McGilchrist. “The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Yale University Press, 2019.
McGilchrist devoted 20 years to research and write the above 588-page book, so no summary, even in his own words, can do justice, but here's a taste:
“Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.
Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. Each hemisphere of the brain is involved in everything. Both contribute to language, both contribute to reason, to emotion, to creativity, everything, but they do so in a reliably different way. And this has to do with attention. … solving a survival problem, which is how do you eat and stay alive.
This may not sound difficult but is actually a problem in the wild. Because on the one hand you’ve got to be completely focused on getting your prey or picking out that seed against a background of grit etc, entirely focused on it, and yet at the same time, if you’re not to become someone else’s lunch while you’re getting your own, you’ve got to have the exact opposite kind of attention paid to the world, at the same time, which is vigilance – open, uncommitted as to what it will find.
Attention is the foundation of our experience. How we attend to something, literally changes what we find. And indeed, if you’re the object of somebody’s attention, you’ll feel yourself change, depending on the kind of attention you’re subjected to. It can make us feel warm and accepted, or small and mechanical, or whatever. And our views of the world similarly re-create the world through attention. So on the one hand it is not disputed that there are massive differences between these two hemispheres, because if you have a stroke in the left hemisphere and the same stroke happens in another person in the right hemisphere, they’ll have quite different consequences. And everything you can measure about the two hemispheres is quite different. So it’s not logical to say ‘Oh, they just do the same thing.’
But the secret is in this attention. And that means that what they do is they create two different worlds that we’re having to balance. We’re not aware of this, because we’re doing it all the time below the level of consciousness. Although ideally they do complement one another, and in reality we have to draw from both, effectively, they’re two kinds of reality. So when people start doing theology or philosophy or whatever, they have to commit to one or other of these two kinds of reality.
And if I could sum them up, in the left hemisphere’s world there are a lot of little pieces that get put together to make a big picture, and those pieces are individually certain, fixed, static, circumscribed – they’re a bit like particles, billiard balls or whatever, and they have simple causal relationships with one another.
In the right hemisphere’s world it’s quite different. Nothing is actually separable from anything else. Nothing is fixed and certain. Everything is changing and flowing.
So in one world you have a dynamic, evolving, changing, flowing, interconnected world which we are part of, and which we affect by our observations.
And in the other, a sort of world which is cooly detached from us, in which we can tinker with the little bits and make up a picture of the world.
But they’re not really of equal value. One is like a map of the world, the other is more like a real world. What I think has happened is I think there’s a conflict going on. … These hemispheres are doing two separate things. Their needs and values are separate. The right hemisphere wants to understand and to connect. The left hemisphere has discovered that it’s very good at exploiting, getting, grabbing, manipulating, because that’s what it actually exists to do, to catch food, to catch prey, pick up a seed, get a twig to build a nest, it’s the one that does the manipulation of the world. And that makes us powerful.
So of course the left hemisphere has kind of a superficial attraction. If you latch on to this point of view, you start to be technologically powerful.
But at the same time, if you ignore what the right hemisphere is telling you about how we are connected to everything else in the world, we end up turning the beautiful, amazing, awe-inspiring universe of which we are a part into a heap of rubbish through our efforts.
My thesis is that in the last 150 years, since the Enlightenment, and even more since the Industrial Revolution, we got locked into a very reduced, mechanistic version of the world, which rules out many things. I mean fortunately, most of us know deep down that this can’t be right because we go to an opera or we see a very beautiful scene and we know that it’s not reducible to all the garbage to do with sexual selection – not at all. It’s obvious we have a love for certain things – goodness, beauty and truth in themselves. So we know that’s not right, but unfortunately our present culture has a rhetoric which drives us ever more into this, I would say, very reductionist model of the world.”
Iain McGilchrist, quoted from some excellent videos.
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| Harmony between Hemispheres |
