Retrospective 2024-39

This is a retrospective of week 39, 2024 (2024-09-23–2024-09-29).

I’ve continued immersing myself in Iain McGilchrist’s work this week. I was also reminded by Christopher Alexander’s work in two articles by Bonnitta Roy and Or Ettinger, respectively. I will come back to that.

I’ve reviewed what McGilchrist writes about lateralization during the week, but came, as it were, to a dead end. Right- and left- handedness, for example, is only indirectly related to McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis. McGilchrist writes:

…I have little to say about handedness, fascinating as it is, in this book –except where it seems legitimately to reflect evidence of hemisphere preference. …there are degrees of handedness in different individuals for different activities…
—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

…hemisphere differences are never absolute. … For example, left- or right- handedness, an issue I do not deal with in this book, and which is only indirectly related to hemisphere differences, is a commonly observed, highly significant phenomenon.
—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

So, what’s the difference then between the hemispheres? Not much! McGilchrist writes (my emphasis in italics):

Well, I will argue, nothing much: it is quite true that almost everything we once thought went on in one or other hemisphere alone is now known to go on in both. … The difference, I shall argue is not in the ‘what’, but in the ‘how’… I am not interested purely in ‘functions’ but in ways of being, something only living can things have.
—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

I’d suggest that the ‘how‘ actually is closely related to the ‘what‘. We direct our attention, the ‘how‘, according to what we do, the ‘what‘. A directed and focused attention is, for example, needed when feeding. And, a broader attention is, for example, needed to watch out for predators.

It might also be the case that the brain, through its plasticity, can overcome any differences in both the ‘what‘ and the ‘how‘? The remaining hemisphere seems, for example, to be able to compensate for much of what is lost in cases of hemispherectomy (at least in children)?

I’ve also listended to a conversation between Bonnitta Roy and Iain McGilchrist this week. Bonnitta Roy said:

…there’s many places where people are using their imaginations to thread a different story through the scientific facts. So, Ian [McGilchrist] uses scientific facts and he threads a beautiful story [in the hemisphere hypothesis], and other people can use the same facts and they’ll thread a different story.
—Bonnitta Roy https://youtu.be/yH7f7ZchGsU?t=4958

All science is based on what are called interaction metaphors. They are deep metaphorical assumptions about the way things are… What we need are people who understand the science and using it to thread a different story. And so that actually separates I think imagination from fantasy.
—Bonnitta Roy https://youtu.be/yH7f7ZchGsU?t=4985

So what are the deep metaphorical assumptions in the hemisphere hypothesis? And can the same facts be used to thread a different story than the hemisphere hypothesis? McGilchrist describes his metaphysical assumptions as follows in a conversation with Jonathan Rowson:

I’ve really always been philosophically minded. There were a number of things that occurred to me and seemed terribly important that were different from what everyone taught me, or what everyone seemed to imply at any rate. And these were things like that [1] the whole is never the same as the sum of the parts. When I used to say this to people, they’d say, well what is this magical something extra that goes in there? And at the time I felt, well, that’s all very well, but it’s not quite right. But I couldn’t articulate it at the time. I can now, I think. I thought that [2] the world was not a sort of unresponsive lump of mache. It was it was a deeply responsive, vibrant, living, reverberative, experience, in that…it was a two-way process between the world around me, particularly the natural world, and me. [3] I thought that opposites were not necessarily as far apart as people seem to think. In fact, I started to think that opposites often seem to coincide, and the further you push that thing, the more you approach the very thing you’re fleeing from. [4] I thought that history generally seemed to move in spirals, not in a sort of linear trajectory. And [5] I thought that the general tendency of the analytic mind, that was very much praised in in my education, it was to take things, abstract them, decontextualize them, and render them no longer unique and alive…
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/YHUGuUhB1c4?t=561

I might just say that I find much of what McGilchrist says wonderfully resonant. I am not quite sure about the hemisphere hypothesis. It may or may not be quite right to map it onto what it is being mapped onto in neuroscience. McGilchrist said “there’s a deafening silence from neuroscience” at the Realisation Festival 2023.

I was also reminded by Christopher Alexander’s work this week. One of the articles is Christopher Alexander: Generating a Living World (pt1) by Bonnitta Roy. The other article is The Divided Brain and Ways of Building the World: Parallels in the Thought of Iain McGilchrist and Christopher Alexander by Or Ettlinger.

Or Ettlinger’s article provides an excellent summary of Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis and Christopher Alexander’s quest for wholeness. I noticed that the article has been reviewed by Iain McGilchrist and Maggie Moore Alexander (Christopher Alexander died in 2022).

I encountered Alexander’s work the first time 20 years ago. He has literally changed how I view the world. Both articles are great because they also mention that Alexander’s A Pattern Language didn’t achieve its goal. This led Alexander to a decades-long pursuit to understand unfolding wholeness.

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