ABSTRACT
In the second part of The Master and his Emissary (“How the Brain Has Shaped Our World”), I look at the evolution of Western culture, beginning in the ancient world with the extraordinary efflorescence of culture in sixth-century-bc Athens, where, it seems to me, the two hemispheres worked in harmony as never before or since; then at the decline associated with the rise of the left hemisphere in the late Roman empire; and then, in turn, at the seismic shifts that we call the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism and Post-modernism. I believe that they represent a power struggle between these two ways of experiencing the world, and that we have ended up prisoners of just one – that of the left hemisphere alone.
