ABSTRACT
It is really interesting to consider the complexities that are now emerging about the workings of our two cerebral hemispheres. This is one more context in which we may feel divided, and one that we very much need to understand. As we have seen, in this case the relation between our experience and the neuroscientific facts is rather different from that in most others. Over these hemispheres, neurology does not just give us a new, interesting piece of knowledge, it actually casts light on puzzles that are already making trouble in our lives. The detailed facts here light up the meaning of various oppositions that we already recognize as features of our culture and that we often find hard to deal with: oppositions such as the clash between classical and romantic, between feeling and reason, between science and religion, between body and mind, between the arts and sciences, between amateur and professional, between male and female. This does not, of course, mean that the two brain hemispheres simply represent the two named parties that clash in these debates. What they represent is distinctive attitudes, distinctive ways of viewing and apprehending the world. As McGilchrist says:
128Both hemispheres are involved in almost all mental processes, and certainly in all mental states; ... But, at the level of experience, the world we know is synthesized from the work of the two cerebral hemispheres, each hemisphere having its own way of understanding the world - its own "take" on it ... Though I would resist the idea of a "(left or right) hemisphere personality" overall, there is evidence ... that certainly for some kinds of activities, we consistently prefer one hemisphere over the other in ways that may differ between individuals.
(McGilchrist 2009: 10, original emphasis)