Based on Iain McGilchrist's work. [[What Matters]] | Left Hemisphere | Right Hemisphere | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Concerned with manipulation of the world | Concerned with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it. | | Deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and easily grasped | Deals with the whole picture, including the periphery or background, and all that is not immediately graspable. | | On the lookout for what is familiar | On the lookout for, better at dealing with, whatever is new. Ramachandran calls it the "devil's advoate", since it acts as an "anomaly detector", on the lookout for what might be erroneously assumed to be familiar. | | Aims to narrow things down to a certainty. | Opens things up into possibility. Able to sustain ambiguity and the holding together of information that appears to have contrary implications, without having to make an "either/or" decision, and to collapse it, as the LH tends to do, in favour of one of them. | | Tends to be less critical. | Tends to be more circumspect. | | Sees things as isolated, discrete, fragmentary. Sees things as put together mechanically from pieces, and sees the parts. | Sees the whole as a complex union. | | Tends towards fixity and stasis. | Tends towards change and flow. | | Tends to see things as explicit and decontextualised. Largely fails to understand metaphor, myth, irony, tone of voice, jokes, humour more generally, and poetry, and tends to take things literally. | Tends to see things as implicit and embedded in a context. | | Tendency to prefer the inanimate. Machines and tools are coded here. | Prefers the animate. | | If offered a story whose episodes are taken out of order, tends to group them so as to classify similar episodes together, rather than reconstruct them in the order that has human meaning. | Understands narrative. | | Tends to categorise using the presence or absence of a particular feature. | Tends to categorise by reference to unique exemplars, using what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance" approach - it sees the Gestalt. | | More general categories are dealt with preferentially by the LH. | Deals with more fine-grained categories that approach uniqueness. Damage to the RH can lead to a loss of the sense of uniqueness or the capacity to recognise individuals altogether. | | | |