This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article to be published in Society. The final authenticated version is available online here. Iain McGilchrist richly explains the right and left hemispheres of the brain, how each functions and what each tends to do. This paper serves, firstly, as a primer to McGilchrist’s fascinating exposition. Second, it offers a […]
Dr Angela Voss has been involved in devising and teaching Masters programmes for Kent University and CCCU in the UK for the last fifteen years and she is a co-founder of the newly launched Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred. This piece is reproduced from the book, Re-enchanting the Academy, by kind permission of Rubedo Press.
Why do we think of our own brains, our own beings, as machines? As McGilchrist compellingly suggests in his groundbreaking work on the hemispheres, “the whole problem is that we are obsessed, because of what I argue is our affiliation to left-hemisphere modes of thought, with ‘what’ the brain does rather than the ‘how’ – ‘the manner in which’, something no one ever asked a machine.”
The relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain is increasingly seen as central to our well-being and mental health, as a number of leading neuroscientists and psychotherapists have observed.
Central to McGilchrist’s exploration of the difference between the hemispheres is the notion of attention. As he suggests, “attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions”. Rather, the kind of attention we bring to bear on the world actually alters the nature of the world we attend to: “Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world”
Thinking hard about soft skills and how they’re developed. This is a guest post, originally published at the American Enterprise Institute by Brent Orrell.