THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS
The Conflict Between Word and Image
by Leonard Shlain

Synopsis Preface Chapter 1 - Image/Word Chapter 3 - Right Brain/Left Brain Chapter 35 - Page/Screen Epilogue Timeline

CHAPTER 3 - RIGHT BRAIN/LEFT BRAIN

In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female, and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the women, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man...

If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman must also have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties.

- Virginia Wolf

To place this event in context, a brief review of the brain is in order. All vertebrates, beginning with fish, have a bilobed brain. And each of these anatomically mirror-image hemispheric lobes perform the same type of tasks. The human brain lobes, while appearing symmetrical, are functionally different. This specialization is called hemispheric lateralization. There is evidence of this feature in some other vertebrates, but its manifestation in behavior (speech and handedness) are far more striking in humans than in any other species. A bridge of neuronal fibers called the corpus callosum connects and integrates the two cortical lobes so that each side knows what the other is thinking.

The popular press has widely disseminated the essential features of right/left brain asymmetry. Most well-informed people know that each hemisphere of the brain controls the muscles of the body's opposite side. Most people also understand that the hemisphere work closely in concert with one another.

But scientists have only recently discovered the attributes distinctive to each hemisphere. While poets and mystics have long alluded to sharp divisions within our psyche, it was not until the late nineteenth century that clinicians began systematically to take note of these differences. Patients who had traumatic injuries and strokes provided the most dramatic examples. In the last few decades, neuroscientists examining split-brain patients and using sophisticated brain mapping scanners on normal people have been able to study each hemisphere in relative isolation.

The dysfunction that occurs as a result of a left-brain injury in right-handers is so calamitous that neuroscientists traditionally call the left cerebral hemisphere to dominant lobe. While some have objected to oversimplifying the brain's lateralization scheme, certain facts remain beyond dispute. If a right-handed person has a major stroke in the controlling left hemisphere, with few exceptions, a catastrophic deficit of speech, right-sided muscle paralysis and/or dysfunction in abstract thinking will occur. Conversely, damage to the right brain will impair the afflicted person's ability to solve spatial problems, recognize faces, appreciate music, besides paralyzing the left side of the body.

Of the twin human hemispheres, the right side is the elder sibling. In utero, the right lobe of a human fetus's brain is well on its way to maturation before the left side begins to develop. The old, wise, right side, more familiar with the needs and drives stemming from earlier stages of evolution,, can be better relied upon to negotiate with them than the younger left side. The right hemisphere integrates feelings, recognizes images, and appreciates music. It contributes a field-awareness to consciousness, synthesizing multiple converging determinants so that the mind can grasp the senses' input all-at-once.

The right brain is nonverbal, and has more in common with earlier animal modes of communication. It comprehends the language of cries, gestures, grimaces, cuddling, sucking, touching, and body stance. Its emotional sates and under little volitional control and betray true feelings through forgetting, blushing, or smirking.

The right brain, more than the left, expresses being -- that complex meshing of competing emotions that constitute our essential state at any given moment. In English, we ask someone, "How are you?" The answer begins, "I am...". The verb "to be" frames both question and answer.

The right brain more often than the left generates feeling states, such as love, humor, or aesthetic appreciation, which are non-logical. They defy the rules of conventional reasoning. When Blaise Pascal wrote, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of," he was referring to the kind of knowing that goes on in the emotional right brain, and distinguishes it from that which occurs in the cerebral left.

The right brain's feeling-states are authentic. Once a person has experienced love or ecstasy, he or she knows it. An internal voice verifies the experience beyond debate. Feeling-states allows us to have faith in God, to grasp the essence of a joke, to experience patriotic fervor, or to be repulsed by a painting someone else finds beautiful. These states all possess a non-discursive quality. Standing inn the shadows of our ancient beginnings, feeling states overwhelm the brain's more recently evolved glib facility with words. No crisp nomenclature exists to describe them. When pressed to explain their emotional experiences, people, in exasperation, commonly fall back on tautology -- "It is because it is!" The things one loves, lives, and dies for cannot be easily expressed in words.

Feeling-states do not ordinarily progress in a linear fashion, but are experienced all-at-once. "Getting" the punch line of a joke results in an explosion of laughter.An intuitive insight arrives in a flash. Newton and Einstein both reported examples of what the poet Rilke called "conflagrations of clarity." Love at first sight, such as what Dante experienced when he encountered Beatrice, happens in an instant. Religious conversions, such as the one that overwhelmed Paul on the road to Damascus, strike like lightning.

A feature of nonverbal communication is that no symbolization interferes with the direct appreciation of reality. The right brain perceives the world concretely. For example, a facial expression is "read" without any attempt to translate it into words.

The right hemisphere is also the portal leading to the world of the invisible. It is the real of altered states of consciousness where faith and mystery rule over logic. There is compelling evidence that dreaming occurs primarily in the right brain.

When people find it necessary to express in words an inner experience such as a dream, an emotion, or a complex feeling-state, they resort to a special form of speech called metaphor that is the right brain's unique contribution to the left brain's language capability. The word metaphor combines two Greek words -- meta, which means "over and above", and pherein, "to bear across." Metaphors allow one to leap across a chasm from one thought to the next. Metaphors have multiple levels of meaning that are perceived simultaneously. They supply a plasticity to language without which communication would often be less interesting, sometimes difficult, and occasionally impossible. The objective world can be described, measured, and cataloged with remarkable precision, but to communicate an emotion or feeling-state we employ metaphors. To tell another than one's heart is "soaring like an eagle" or "as cold as ice" reveals the synergy between the right brain's concrete images and the left brain's abstract words. Metaphors begat poetry and myth, and are essential to the parables of religion and the wisdom of folktales.

The right brain is also distinguished by its ability to cognate images. It can simultaneously integrate the component parts in the field of vision, synthesizing incongruous elements all-at-once. The human face is the most compound images the right brain must decipher. Fluctuating facial expressions and the infinite variety of human faces adds to the complexity of the task, as does the possibility that the person behind the face is engaging in an act of deception. The right brain takes all these factors into account and usually turns in a virtuoso performance instantly.

One demonstration of the right-brain skill is the ease with which people can recognize the faces of others. An old friend's countenance may have been altered dramatically by wrinkles and baldness, yet we are still able to pick out that childhood pal in a crowd decades after we last saw him. But some unfortunate individuals, having suffered damage to the right hemispheres, cannot recognize even their own family and friends; a few are even unable to recognize their own faces in a mirror.

The right brain does not speak, yet it actively participates in the comprehension of the spoken word. By listening carefully to the forms of speech while the left brain is deciphering the content, the right brain is expert at ferreting out out hidden messages by interpreting inflection and nuance. It is aware of the speaker's posture, facial expression, and gesture. Jut below conscious awareness, it registers pupil size and hand tremors. This skill is not particularly useful when the information being transmitted is factual, such as legal, scientific, economic, or academic topics. But, when the conversation is personal, facial gestalts and vocal inflection can give the listener substantial insight into what is really going on, sometimes even more than whatever words are being said. Since it is virtually impossible to describe how the right side deciphers nonverbal language, most people refer to this skill as "intuition".

Another major right-brain feature is its ability to appreciate music; the perception of sounds which the right lobe integrates into an harmonious feeling state. Though extremely difficult to define scientifically, each of us is quite sure we can distinguish music from noise. During World War I, doctors observed many soldiers who had sustained traumatic injuries to their dominant left hemispheres and as a result could not speak a word. This select group could, however, sing many songs they knew before they were injured. Alexander Luria, the Russian neurologist, reported the case of a composer who created his best work after he was rendered speechless by a massive stroke in his left hemisphere. These case histories lend credence to the tale that Mozart asked his wife to read stories to him while he composed. By distracting his brain with spoken language, the stories may have freed his music-oriented right brain to compose.

The right brain is better than the left is at perceiving space and making judgments as to balance, harmony, and the composition of gestalts, from which we make aesthetic distinctions between ugly and beautiful. Since the right hemisphere processes input instantaneously, it is the better side for appreciating dimensions and judging distances. Driving, skiing, and dancing are its province. The right brain's principal attributes concern being, images, holism, and music.

The left brain's primary functions are opposite and complementary to the right's. The right side is concerned with being, the left with doing. The left lobe controls the vital act of willing Its agent, the right hand, picks berries, throws spears, and fashions tools. The left lobe knows the world through its unique forms of symbolization -- speech. In right-handed people, 90 percent of language skills reside in the left hemisphere. Speech gave the left brain the edge to usurp the sovereignty of the mind from its elder twin.

Speech and action are closely related. Words are tools; the very essence of action. We use them to abstract, discriminate, analyze, and dissect the world into pieces, objects, and categories. But speech is not only outer-directed; within the self, words are the implements of thought.

Analysis - reducing the components of sentences into their separate parts -- is essential to speech, especially if the content of the message concerns objective facts. This key left brain task depends upon linear progression, in contrast to the holistic perceptions of the right brain.

Speech itself is also abstract and depends upon the left brain's unique ability to process information without the use of images. The mind arranges words, as children arrange Legos, as images substitutes, building concepts that allow us to thinking about freedom, economics, and destiny without needing to conjure images for these words. The ability to conceptualize that the abstract words crime, virtue, punishment and justice are all related is supremely human. To be able to leap from the particular and concrete has allowed us to to create art, logic, science, and philosophy. But this skill tore us out of the rich matrix of nature. The part torn away became the ego. The left brain cleaved the right brain's integrated sense of wholeness into a duality that resulted in humans creating a distinction between me-in-here and world-out-there. The ego requires duality to gain perspective. Dualism also enhanced the human penchant for objective thinking, which in turn increased our reasoning skills and eventually led to logic.

Logic is not holistic, nor is it conceived as a gestalt. It click-clacks along the left brain's linear railway of sequence. If-then syllogisms, the basis of logic, have become the most reliable method of foretelling the future. They have all but replaced omens, visions, and intuition. The rules of logic form the foundation of science, education, business, and military strategy.

Along with doing, speech, and abstraction, the fourth characteristic unique to the left hemisphere is numeracy. Although the ability to count began in the visio-spatial right brain, the ability to permutate larger numbers allows the left brain to build towering computations. While other animals are capable of distinguishing among one, two and many, we alone can conceive of algebra and Boolean logic. The close association between abstract speech and abstract numeracy is closely evident among small children who learn the alphabet and learn to count at the same stage of development.

All the innovative features of the left hemisphere -- doing, speech, abstraction, and numbers -- are linear. To develop craft, logic, strategy and arithmetic, the must must range back and forth along the lines of past, present, and future. The survival and then success of humans required that evolution set aside an area in the newly enlarging brain in which the concept of time could be contemplated free of the holistic and gestalt spatial perceptions of the earlier mammalian and primate brains. An appreciation of linear time was the crucial precondition for linear speech.

A conversation can be understood only when one person speaks at a time. In contrast, one's right brain can listen to the sounds of a seventy-piece orchestra and hear them holistically. Time and sequence are the very crux of the language of numbers; it is impossible to think of arithmetic outside its framework. I propose that the left hemisphere is actually a new sense organ designed by evolution to perceive time.