The Science of the Human Brain – Sam Chaltain
THE SCIENCE OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
It is the most complex living system in the known universe, built of hundreds of billions of cells, each as complicated as a city.
It is the primary author of the deeply personal story we tell ourselves about who we are and why we are here.
And it never, ever, shows us the world as it truly is — only as we need it to be.
This is the conundrum of the human brain, which is why understanding its peculiar science is a prerequisite towards our ability to imagine, and then build, a better world.
Consider this: Human beings — or, for that matter, any other life form on earth — see only what has helped them survive in the past. The way we make sense of the present is still being shaped by the innovations, fears and assumptions our ancestors made hundreds, thousands, even millions of years ago. And yet our success as a species has occurred not in spite of our inability to see reality, but because of it.
As neuroscientist Beau Lotto puts it, human beings didn’t evolve to see the world objectively; they evolved to “not die.” And all living things have managed to “not die” thus far by developing different perceptual overlays on the same planetary backdrop. Bats developed echolocation. Cephalopods learned to change colors. Birds got GPS. And we developed a wet computer with a parallel processor — otherwise known as a bi-hemispheric brain.
Why did our brains evolve that way, with a singular blueprint stamped out twice? No one knows for sure, although psychiatrist Iain McGlichrist believes it happened to help us “attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being,” and two different ways of surviving life’s slings and arrows.
“In the one,” he explains, “we experience — the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world in which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based.
“These are not different ways of thinking about the world,” McGilchrist claims. “They are different ways of beingin the world. If the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of ‘what’, the right hemisphere, with its preoccupation with context, the relational aspects of experience, emotion and the nuances of expression, could be said to be the hemisphere of ‘how.’”
Who we perceive ourselves to be is a mashup of these different perceptual overlays — ostensibly equal parts logic and emotion. And yet the reality of the modern world, says McGilchrist, is that our way of seeing has gotten out of balance.
For a number of reasons, we have become left-hemisphere heavy.
