The problem of left hemisphere capture (LHC)

This is an extract from some of my research, which I’m putting here as I want to talk about LHC in future posts.

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Iain McGilchrist's publisher, Jonathan Rowson, has drawn attention to something that he calls “The McGilchrist manoeuvre”¹. He has in mind a pattern in McGilchrist's thought where, in McGilchrist's words, “there is an important shape here which we will keep encountering: something that arises out of the world of the right hemisphere, is processed at the middle level by the left hemisphere and returns finally to the right hemisphere at the highest level.”² McGilchrist is clear that the right hemisphere is 'the Master' and that the left hemisphere functions properly when it is involved in an iterative partnership with the right hemisphere – where the 'Emissary' is despatched to do work, but then returns to give the results of that work to the right hemisphere, incorporating the new insights into a growing knowledge of, and engagement with, lived reality. However, this process can sometimes get stuck, and the process of integrating insights from left hemisphere modes of attention can be inhibited. This leads to a situation that McGilchrist often describes as 'the hall of mirrors' that has become detached from reality. In a programmatic statement in the Introduction to M&E McGilchrist writes, “I suggest that it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand. In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind; apart from the history incarnated in our culture, and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated, these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion. In our time each of these has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.”³

In a discussion around music and time McGilchrist makes reference to “the left hemisphere 'capture' that results in inauthenticity” in a performance of a musical composition⁴. This term, 'left hemisphere capture' – hereinafter LHC – will serve as a useful label for the complex phenomenon that McGilchrist portrays as driving the alienation referenced in the above quotation. LHC occurs when the mode of attention to the world that is favoured by an individual, a group, a society, or a culture becomes closed off from the insights generated by right hemisphere forms of attention, when the process of reintegrating the fruits of left hemisphere attention with the more global awareness of the right hemisphere is impeded. Where the left hemisphere is excessively dominant then there is a premature certainty and a closing off to contradictions, an insistence on being right, and being right in clearly determined and defined ways. To return to the McGilchrist's image of the bird – it is when a bird is excessively focussed upon the immediate need of discriminating seed from stone and neglects the wider context, and so misses out on the opportunities of a passing mate, or, worse, becomes themselves a lunch for a passing cat. McGilchrist sees Western culture as having twice previously succumbed to LHC, once at the end of the Greek civilisation, one at the end of the Roman, and he sees a major element in the collapse of those civilisations as being due to an over-aggrandising left hemisphere approach to cultural understandings and mores.

To be in a state of LHC has the following characteristics, according to McGilchrist:

- it involves being disconnected from reality, because the right hemisphere conveys a more accurate understanding of the world, as compared to that received from left hemisphere forms of attention. In particular – and of particular relevance given some contemporary controversies – an understanding that is in a state of LHC is one that has a broken understanding of and relationship to the human body, whether of the self or as understood by society. So, for example, someone who suffers from schizophrenia will often experience parts of their body as belonging to someone else⁵;

- with LHC there is a removal of empathy and human understanding. The seat of empathy, including all forms of compassion and 'theory of mind' is in the right hemisphere, and where the right hemisphere has been damaged in some way, eg through a lesion or injury, then there is a shortfall in the capacity to understand and sympathise with other human beings. This is strongly indicated in cases of autism and Asperger's, for example;

- there is a recourse to bureaucracy and instrumental reasoning when the approaches of the right hemisphere are discounted. As described above, the left hemisphere mode of attention is linked to the human capacity to grasp and hence, concomitantly, to the desire and capacity to control the environment. Clearly this is of tremendous evolutionary importance. However, in a situation of LHC, as a result of the disconnection from reality, and the absence of human compassion, systems of power are able to develop that have an increasing detachment from what is humanly important⁶.

- As 'what gets measured gets done' this approach fosters the development of bureaucracies that become self-sustaining, that generate work for internal purposes without any regard to external effectiveness⁷, and that are dependent upon models at the expense of empirical data. In addition, it sees any criticism of its internally complete system (the 'model') as a sign of moral failure, to which it responds with anger (the only emotion that is mainly located in the left hemisphere). McGilchrist argues that in a situation of LHC the resources of the brain become determined to defend the reality of the map at all costs, no matter how Procrustean the consequences turn out to be;

- lastly, and more broadly, in a situation of LHC the phenomenon of 'depth' in human experience is removed. By 'depth' is understood all those aspects of human life and civilisation that provide meaning to life, that cannot be captured with particular metrics, such as with the appreciation of music, art or religious patterns of life.

LHC is possible due to the particular way in which the hemispheres have divided responsibility for language. McGilchrist describes the left hemisphere as the 'Berlusconi of the brain', because the left hemisphere controls 'the media' and has powerful tools enabling it to resist the insights of the right hemisphere. In a talk to the Royal College of Psychiatry in 2011 McGilchrist identifies three of those tools: the left hemisphere “has three great advantages. First, it has control of the voice, and the means of argument – the three Ls, language, logic and linearity – are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control. It is like being the Berlusconi of the brain, a political heavyweight who has control of the media. Of course we tend to listen more to what it has to say. Second, the self-consistent world of pure theory and ideas is like a hall of mirrors: all attempts to escape are deflected back within. The main paths that might have led us to something beyond – the intuitive wisdom embodied in tradition, the experience of the natural world, arts, the body and religion – are all emptied of force by the abstracting, rationalising, ironising impact of the world of self-consistent re-presentations that is yielded by the left hemisphere. The living presence becomes no longer accessible. And, third, there is a tendency for positive feedback to come into play – instead of redressing the balance, we just get more of the same.”⁸

In short, for McGilchrist, left hemisphere capture arises when there is a framework of thought that can be expressed in language and which disallows any conversation that isn't expressed in that same language. “For the left hemisphere,” he writes, “consequently, language can come to seem cut off from the world, to be itself the reality; and reality, for its part, comes to seem made up of bits strung together, as the words are strung together by syntax. The left hemisphere is bound to see language like this because it understands things by starting from the observation of ‘pieces’ and builds them up to make something, and this is the only route it has to understanding both the world and language itself, the medium with which it does its understanding, including its understanding of language.”⁹ This is then coupled with the tendency of the left hemisphere to insist on the correctness of its understanding, even in the face of directly contradictory evidence: “The problem here, as subsequent research has illuminated, is that the left hemisphere develops a rule – a rule that is, however, wrong. In a similar, earlier experiment in normal subjects, researchers found that, not only does (what we now know to be) the left hemisphere tend to insist on its theory at the expense of getting things wrong, but it will later cheerfully insist that it got it right.”¹⁰ McGilchrist emphasises further, “So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome. The right prefrontal cortex is essential for dealing with incomplete information and has a critical role to play in reasoning about incompletely specified situations. The right hemisphere is able to maintain ambiguous mental representations in the face of a tendency to premature over-interpretation by the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere’s tolerance of uncertainty is implied everywhere in its subtle ability to use metaphor, irony and humour, all of which depend on not prematurely resolving ambiguities.”¹¹

At this point, when the insights of the Master right hemisphere have been systematically excluded then the framework of thought has become trapped within the hall of mirrors, and has become an ideology. To which one might ask the question: how can we get out?

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Notes

1 In his substack:

Introducing The McGilchrist Manoeuvre

accessed 11.2.24

2M&E p126

3M&E p6

4M&E p75

5M&E p67

6This is treated at length in Scott, J. C. (2020) Seeing like a state : how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Veritas paperbacks edn. New Haven: Yale University Press.

7 The managerial state develops its own understanding of what is virtuous, see MacIntyre, A. C. (2013) After virtue : a study in moral theory. London: Bloomsbury (Bloomsbury Revelations).

8 https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/iain-mcgilchrist-can-the-divided-brain-tell-us-anything-about-the-ultimate-nature-of-reality.pdf?sfvrsn%3Da1e381e1_2 accessed 11.2.24

9M&E p119

10M&E p82

11M&E p82