One of the great joys of this life is that we get to keep learning new information right to the end of our days. I am currently reading Iain McGilchrist’s groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, about the two hemispheres of the brain and how they function in humans. I have already written a bit about it, but I am just beginning to scratch the surface.

To refresh your memory, McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. He writes that the right hemisphere of the brain is the primary hemisphere, with the left serving as its emissary. There are a plethora of differences between functions of the hemispheres. I find it all fascinating, but every now and again one insight pops out that is so obviously true, you have no idea how you’ve never noticed it.

Humans (and primates) most commonly hold infants in the crook of the elbow of their left arm. The reason is that the left side of a face, controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, shows a greater range of emotion than the right side of the face, controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. (By the way, this tends to be true whether you are right-handed or left handed. The reasons for that are a little complicated.) By showing the left side of the face to the infant, you are teaching them how to read facial expressions, critical in developing an emotional quotient.

It is also easier for us to see the left side of the face of the infant when the infant is held in the left arm. That enables us to be able to read the emotions of the child’s face better than if we see the right side of the infant’s face.

Other fascinating tidbits? Sadness comes from the right brain and anger from the left. The right hemisphere has a preference for the color green and the left for the color red. The right prefers vertical lines and the left horizontal lines. The right brain is what identifies the moral of a story or the point of a joke. It is the hemisphere that recognizes sarcasm. If you have a right brain deficit, sarcasm is lost to you.

When a word or thought is on the tip of your tongue, your left brain is trying to retrieve it and can’t quite get there. If you stop trying to remember it, your right brain will bring it forth easily. That is why when you move on and stop consciously trying to remember a thought, it suddenly pops into your brain. The right brain is the location of “Aha” moments. Since it places information in the context of a greater whole, it is the place disparate ideas come together in a unified whole.

Arts and literature are primarily from the right hemisphere. Music is primarily in the right hemisphere, but learned musicians who can read and write music and understand music theory experience music in both the right and left hemispheres. They first become interested in a musical piece because it touches their right hemisphere. Then they began to study and master the piece to be able to play it well. That is a left hemisphere process. If it remains in the left hemisphere, the artist with play the piece technically well, but there will be no soul or vibrancy to it. Once it has been mastered, it must be returned to the right hemisphere for the soul and vibrancy to emerge.

The left brain says I have a body. The right brain says I am a body. It is the right brain that experiences ourselves as embodied. The left brain is necessary to create civilization but complete capitulation to it can destroy civilization.

Okay, so at this point you are probably thinking, “Uh, so if a person has a stroke and loses the left hemisphere of the brain, they’d basically be okay?” Nope. We need both hemispheres. Without the left hemisphere we lose the ability to form words, though the meaning of phrases and sentences is in the right hemisphere. Both hemispheres are necessary for the species, but as McGilchrist says, the right is the primary hemisphere.

The problem is that for the last 500 years we have, as a culture, focused almost exclusively on the left brain. You know, Descartes, Newton, Bacon, Locke, Silicon Valley and all. The left prefers manmade objects, the right living individuals. The right is more personal and the left more impersonal. I could go on, but I’m getting dizzy. Also, I need to finish the book.

Suffice it to say, I like learning new information, particularly when it creates one “Aha” moment after another. Insight is a marvelous thing. I love when the light comes on and you suddenly see a clear picture of what you have only been able to see through a glass darkly. With McGilchrist’s book, so much that has always been elusive about understanding how humans function is starting to become more clear. I find it also explains a lot about the functioning of the current Washington administration. But that is a different article for another day.

And so it goes.