No One Has Actually Read McGilchrist

I can’t really think of another explanation.

Either all of you are lying about having read McGilchrist, or you don’t read very well, or… or I don’t know, maybe I’m going insane. Maybe I’m the crazy one. You know what, maybe I’m the crazy one, yeah.

But let’s assume I’m not for a minute, and I’ll just keep writing.

There are a couple things that trigger me here, that make me fling up my hands and ugh to the sky. I think I’ll only cover two of them today, the most common two things that people say when it comes to left and right hemisphere topics that make me want to wreak all manner of violence upon all manner of matter.

Disclaimer before I start: I have to say this every time I discuss this topic — I don’t actually care if the things described by McGilchrist map to the neurons on one side or the other of the corpus calossum. It seems like they do, to some degree, but that doesn’t matter to me — the neurobiology is just one potent lens on a dynamic that is clearly real. “Left Hemisphere” and “Right Hemisphere” aren’t my favorite names for the two poles of this dynamic, but they are the ones that the culture seems to have agreed on for discussing this, so I’ll use them. With that said, let’s get to it.

1. The 50/50 thing is dumb, please stop

I cannot count how many versions of this clever reply I have seen floating around out there:

If going all the way towards the left hemisphere is a world-breaking mistake, then it feels irresponsible to be shilling a turn all the way towards the right hemisphere. It’s just the same mistake on the other side of the pendulum — we need to find a balance, not a reversal. I am very wise.

Which, if you’ve read even the title of McGilchrist’s biggest book, it should be obvious to you that this is a dumb thing to say. And yet.

It’s kind of like saying

You think that a horse riding a man is a terrible situation — yet you advocate a man riding a horse? We have to find a balance, not just the opposite side of the pendulum. Perhaps the man and horse should jog side by side.

I’m not even going to bother to pull McGilchrist quotes for this, because again, he says it so often and it’s literally in the title of his most famous book. I shouldn’t have to do your work for you on this, if you say you’ve read him. But I will repeat the point as succinctly as I can for myself:

One of the most critical differences between the left and right hemisphere is that the right wants to include everything (including the left hemisphere and the body), while the left wants to manage everything itself, and exclude anything it deems unimportant (which is everything that doesn’t fit it’s pre-decided model).

So if you think that both the left and right hemisphere need to be in play and have their say: congratulations, you’re on team Right Hemisphere. That’s the one that knows how to do that and wants to do it. We can only really do it when the Right Hemisphere is in charge. This idea of setting up some 50/50 timeshare is a left hemisphere defense.

There’s not a 50/50 middling split here — the difference between operating from spacious inclusive awareness versus narrow blinkered focus isn’t just some slight difference you can bounce between. It’s a phase shift in ways of perceiving the world.

I guess you could try to have the human and the horse jog next to each other, but honestly it seems like a really poor use of energy for both of them. And you typing this idea in your twitter post or substack article gives away that you either didn’t read McGilchrist, or somehow missed the core point he repeats over and over again.

2. Most of those things your left hemisphere cares about — your right hemisphere is better at them

Book 1 of The Matter with Things is basically just an encyclopedia built to make this point. I’m not going to repeat the whole thing here, but I’ll give you the chapter names: Attention, Perception, Judgement, Apprehension, Emotional and Social Intelligence, Cognitive Intelligence, Creativity.

Each of those things — this endless encyclopedic litany of a book convincingly argues — is done better by a brain with a strong right hemisphere than one dominated by the left.

And yet, I still get versions of this question pretty often:

How far can I go towards right hemisphere functioning before I become useless and can’t feed my family?

Idk man, as the great philosopher Lindsay Lohan once said, the limit does not exist. I’d tell you to read the book, but that apparently doesn’t do anything, so I’ll try to say it here:

Have you ever known someone who both: a) is a control freak and will not let anyone else touch their project, for fear they’d mess it up; and b) is not very good at the project and is exactly the person most likely to mess it up?

That’s the left hemisphere. That’s the part of you that thinks that in order to be successful and effective, you have to narrow your view, cut out all distractions, repress any wider view of the surrounding context, and generally take total control of managing the process step by step.

The part of you that can actually step into an effective process is a part of you that many people almost never encounter — a part that can take the focused view without losing the surrounding context, that can allow a flow of impressions and inputs without getting distracted, that can stay open to relevant pieces that might be unexpected, and that can surrender control when needed to let what wants to happen happen (rather than forcing what it thinks should happen to happen).

If you can cultivate that part of yourself, you might not get work done in the way people expect it to normally look, but you’ll be effective enough that it mostly won’t matter. Your results will speak for themselves.

So stop letting your left hemisphere convince you that being in open flow and wholeness is dangerous to your wellbeing.

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I don’t really have a concluding paragraph here. Um. If you’re going to talk about these topics, do some basic reading? Or wait, no, actually don’t do the reading unless you really really need to do it to hypnotize yourself into doing the practice.

Otherwise, just jump into the practices that actually help you develop the needed capacities, rather than doing more left hemisphere-y reading on it.

I don’t have a page for it yet, but I’m running a 5-week workshop on exactly this, probably next month, called Right Here, Right Now: Living the Right Hemisphere Beyond Concepts. If you’re into it, sign up for the e-mail list at the bottom of this page. That page is for a different offering, but the e-mail list will be the same.