The following table, taken from Iain McGilchrist's book [[The Matter With Things - old|The Matter With Things - old]], summarizes the key differences of the left and right hemispheres of our brain. Whilst both hemispheres can perform the same functions, they do so in very different ways. It is as though they have different personalities. | Left Hemisphere | Right Hemisphere | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Concerned with manipulating the world | Understands the world as a whole and how to relate to it | | Deals 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 | | Deals with what is familiar | On the lookout for, better at detecting and dealing with, whatever is new; acts as an anomaly detector | | Aims to narrow things down to a certainty | Opens up into possibility; able to sustain ambiguity and the holding together of information that appears to have contradictory implications, without having to make an 'either/or' decision | | Less self-critical, unreasonably optimistic, and lacks insight into its limitations | More circumspect and realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic | | Sees things as isolated, discrete, fragmentary, and put together mechanically from pieces | Sees the whole as a complex union, as a Gestalt | | Tends towards fixity and stasis | Tends towards change and flow | | Tends to see things as explicit and decontexualised; 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 | | If offered a story whose episodes are taken out of order, tends to regroup 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 | | Deals with more general categories | Deals with more fine-grained categories that more closely approach uniqueness; damage to the RH can lead to a loss of the sense of uniqueness or the capacity to recognise individuals altogether | | Tends to focus on parts of the body - arms, legs, and so on - out of which the body must then be constructed | Contains the 'body image'; tends to process in a more embodied, less abstract fashion; superior at reading body language and emotion expressed in the face or voice | | Superior at fine analytic sequencing and has a larger linguistic vocabulary and more complex syntax | Superior at pragmatics and the ability to understand the overall import of an utterance in context; understands prosody, the musical aspect of language, its tone, inflection, etc | | Deals with simple rhythms | Deals with the full complexity of music | | Has limited ability to be empathetic | Is better able to understand another's point of view, essential for 'theory of mind'; capable of being empathetic, of emotional receptivity and expressivity | | Sees things as they are 're-presented', as already familiar abstractions or signs, as theories and maps | Better at seeing things as they are pre-conceptually - fresh, unique, embodied, and as they 'presence' to us, or first come into being for us; sees things as experience and terrain |